David Hewson - The Fallen Angel

‘Leave it to the Monday people,’ Teresa grumbled. Not that there was anything to indicate the duty junior had done anything wrong. The bruised and bloodied corpse in front of her looked the way she would have expected from seeing the police incident statement. There were no indications of other injuries. No obvious inflicted wounds. No cuts or abrasions that spoke of anything but a fall.

She looked at the face of the man on the table. Features sometimes changed with death, particularly an end such as this. His skull had suffered multiple fractures and there were severe injuries to his forehead and the right side, above and below the ear. Teresa had found a photograph of Malise Gabriel from his brief time in the spotlight. Twenty years before he’d seemed like the aristocrat he was, handsome, a little arrogant perhaps, with the face of a sportsman, the broken nose of a rugby player. A strong, physical man. Not like this.

‘If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking,’ Di Capua cut in, ‘the answer’s no, you can’t.’

She glowered at him.

‘How do you know what I’m thinking?’

‘I’ve seen it before a million times. You’ve got that look.’

‘That look?’

‘The one that means work. And trouble.’

She sighed.

‘This man deserves a full autopsy, and he will get one.’

‘Yes, but he doesn’t need to get it from the head of the department, does he? We’ve got a team going into that house in the ghetto. Half our people are on holiday.’

‘Yes, yes,’ she snapped. ‘I get the point.’ She knew where this was leading. ‘You want to do it, then?’

Di Capua smiled. He’d turn thirty soon. The little that remained of his hair was now close cropped. His clothes were standard white office garb. The failed hippie she’d first employed seemed to have metamorphosed into an impertinent dentist somewhere over the past few years.

‘I suggest I handle this and you go round and see what’s happening in the house.’ He smiled. ‘Let’s face it. This is just one more autopsy. You can do that with your eyes closed. From what Peroni said. .’

She’d listened to the phone call asking for a team to seal off the Gabriels’ apartment. Judging by the tone of Di Capua’s response, Falcone was not in the best of moods.

‘They’re trying to dredge up a speck of evidence in a building site,’ he went on. ‘Now that’s going to be hard.’

‘Thank you,’ she said with false grace, passing him back the file. ‘I was going to do that anyway. He’ll want something by the end of the day, you know.’

‘So what’s new? I’m not promising miracles. I’ll do the best I can.’

‘Good. Here’s a starter for you.’ She leaned down and indicated the bloodied, torn scalp. ‘This man is suffering from some kind of hair loss. I suggest you discover who his doctor is and get what records you can. Also. .’

She picked up Malise Gabriel’s right hand.

‘There are scratches here that don’t look like the kind of thing you’d get from a fall from a building. I could be wrong, but they may be worthy of further investigation.’

He nodded, with an ingratiating pleasantness that told her he’d seen all this already.

‘Anything else?’ he asked.

‘Enough for now. We can talk later.’

She walked out of the room trying to recall those happy days when Silvio Di Capua lived in fear and awe of her. He was up to something. She just knew it.

So Teresa Lupo waited outside for a few seconds then reopened the swinging door to the morgue and poked her head back in.

Di Capua had rolled back the fabric completely. The body of Malise Gabriel lay naked on the table, white and purple and bloody. Her assistant was staring at the lower part of the torso. He jumped visibly as she banged open the door very deliberately. It was worth it just for that.

‘Is there anything you’d like to tell me, Silvio?’ she asked.

His large, wide-set eyes rolled upwards. The young pathologist’s composure returned.

‘When I’m ready,’ he said.

Peroni and Falcone spent three hours with the forensic team in the Via Beatrice Cenci as they pored over the Gabriels’ apartment, picking and prodding patiently in their white bunny suits. The American woman’s mood had grown progressively more downcast and sullen. Falcone had what he wanted: men and women scouring every last inch of the place for physical evidence. After a little while he had Teresa Lupo to stand over them, watching every step, every last precise action too. Not for a moment did it appear to concern him that the formal search warrant for these actions had yet to arrive from the magistrate. It was, Peroni reminded himself, that time of year.

Joanne Van Doren was in the poky kitchen when they left, skinny fingers around another beer. Peroni made a point of going up to her and asking if there was anything he could do.

‘Write a cheque for fifty thousand euros?’ she suggested wearily.

He tried to treat it as a joke, and to ignore Falcone tapping his toes ready to leave by the door.

‘Signora, if there’s something you’d like to tell us. . it would be better now. To hear it voluntarily, rather than discover it for ourselves.’

Her eyes flashed wildly.

‘What do you mean ?’

‘What I said.’

For a moment Peroni thought he was getting somewhere. Then something, some second thought, intervened and she said, ‘It was an accident. I don’t know what else you expect me to say.’

The place they were headed was so close it was pointless taking Falcone’s Lancia saloon. The directions they had received told them to go to the Palazzetto Santacroce and ask for admittance at the door. The building lay in the warren of lanes a few minutes away on foot across the busy Via Arenula, an area much like the ghetto, dark and cramped, though rather grander in nature. The palazzetto was a grand and imposing four-storey mansion in its own cul-de-sac behind the river, close to the footbridge of the Ponte Sisto with its beautiful view of the dome of St Peter’s.

‘There’s money here,’ Peroni muttered as they walked through a brown stone entrance arch into a small courtyard with a fountain at the centre surrounded by lush, well-tended grass.

‘You can say that again,’ Falcone replied, pointing at the first-floor apartment visible beyond the caretaker’s kiosk. Paintings, statues, grand gilt furniture, rich red velvet walls. This was another Rome, barely touched by the pressure and poverty of the street.

‘We want the Casina,’ Peroni told the uniformed man behind the glass, showing his police ID.

It was only when they went through a second set of doors to the rear that he realized the full extent of the property, which ran all the way to the riverside road, making it as large, surely, as the Palazzo Farnese, the palatial mansion close by that was now the French embassy. The hidden back was almost entirely given over to garden, a rare oasis in the city, carefully laid out with shrubs and palm trees, fountains, flower beds, topiary and shady bowers with seats, all beneath high, unbroken walls which rendered the secluded refuge invisible to the city at large.

In the corner was what could only be the Casina. It was a tall, circular tower that stood above the grounds of the palazzetto like a guard post. The ground floor was completely windowless. The second possessed nothing but a few narrow slots through which, Peroni assumed, archers were expected to fire their arrows. The remaining two floors had elegant arched openings, medieval in appearance but now with modern glass windows. The roof was a crenellated battlement with embrasures in the raised portions, as if to provide another vantage point for archers. The rosy weathered building seemed more like the abandoned tower of some lost fairy-tale castle than a Renaissance palace. Peroni had never seen anything quite like it in the heart of Rome and said so. Falcone, clearly astonished, agreed, then narrowed his sharp eyes, stared at it again and said, ‘The Porta Asinaria. The place in the walls near San Giovanni.’