David Hewson - The Fallen Angel

‘Was he violent towards her?’ Peroni wanted to know.

‘I’ve no idea. Nor do I wish to know. Ask her. I will send you this paper of mine provided you agree to keep it private. It’s not yet ready for publication. Malise never finished the task I gave him. Now, is there anything else I can do for you?’

Falcone put away his notebook.

‘You can direct us to the office Gabriel used when he worked here. We’d like to look around.’

‘The ground floor,’ Santacroce said. ‘Where you came in. They were the servants’ quarters originally. It was the only place I could put him.’

Peroni stood up and eyed the large canvas next to the grandfather clock.

‘It’s Galileo, isn’t it?’ he asked. ‘When they called him to the Inquisition?’

Santacroce nodded.

‘What cultured policemen we have these days. It’s a little over-dramatic for my taste but there you go. Galileo Galilei was a greatly misunderstood man. He was much more than a scientist. A philosopher too. Without him mathematics, astronomy, physics. . none would have been the same, perhaps for centuries.’

‘He still found himself arguing for his life,’ Peroni replied.

‘He did. Which was wrong. This brotherhood was founded to defend him, to let him know he wasn’t alone. We do not forget what our cousin from Pisa did for us. Every work that appears under the name of the Confraternita delle Civette must, by order of our constitution, make some reference to him also, however slight. It’s one of the few rules we have. My own paper, the one that Malise found somewhat obnoxious, is entitled “ E pur si muove ”, a phrase that. .’

Santacroce stopped in mid-sentence, smiled awkwardly. The attention this comment had raised in the two police officers had brought the slightest rush of colour in his face.

‘It’s a technical term,’ he added quickly. ‘You wouldn’t know what it means.’

‘No,’ Peroni agreed. ‘But my friend might. Please.’ He pulled out his notebook and pen and handed it over. ‘Write it down for me. I’d like to look it up. I’d like to learn.’

Bernard Santacroce passed the notebook back, the page blank.

‘As I have already indicated, I will ask Cecilia to give you a copy,’ he said, then gestured towards the door.

Costa followed Mina’s instructions as they wound down the hill from Montorio, back into the centro storico . After a while he began to understand where they were going, and the knowledge left a cold feeling in his stomach.

The Museo Criminologico was an outpost of the Ministry of Justice in the Via del Gonfalone, a cul-de-sac between the Via Giulia and the Lungotevere. This was the Italian state’s official black museum, a place he had visited as a cadet, one that had filled him with horror, with nausea. He could still recall dashing out into the street, taking deep breaths, staring at a chilly winter sky, the first time he’d been forced to visit. The next, a kind of punishment for his perceived weakness, went more easily. He’d been a police officer for a few months by then, and had become. . desensitized was the word the college instructor had uttered. It still amazed Costa that the term had been used as if it were praise. As if that was the point of the process of becoming a police officer. To feel less yet somehow see more. If anyone else noticed the contradiction they never mentioned it.

‘Are you all right?’ Mina asked as he leaned on the parked scooter for a moment.

‘Just remembering something,’ he said, and walked up to the door, flashed his ID and walked in.

‘You don’t have to pay for much, do you?’ she said as she joined him.

Costa tried to smile when he told her, ‘I wouldn’t pay for this.’ It was late afternoon, a little early, but right then a beer would have been wonderful. ‘Afterwards I’ll buy us some ice cream.’

The tears were gone. The pretty, somewhat overactive yet cerebral teenager was back.

‘Or even a lollipop,’ she replied, her head cocked to one side. Then she stepped inside, ahead of him.

Silvio Di Capua frowned at the corpse on the table. The day had not gone the way it was supposed to. When he finally started on the preliminary autopsy he had begun under the impression he possessed two firm findings. Now their certainty seemed to be drowned in a sea of doubts, with insufficient time to dispel or clarify even a handful. He needed additional advice before he could proceed with the full autopsy. An expert. Nor was it proving easy to extract information from the dead man’s medical records.

The young pathologist muttered a quiet curse, swallowed his pride and called her. Teresa was still in the apartment in the Via Beatrice Cenci. She’d been there for the best part of six hours and now sounded harassed and a little cross.

‘Find anything?’ Di Capua asked.

‘Ever tried looking for evidence on a building site? The muck and dust these people leave behind them. .’

‘I have, actually. Several times. You just need to be patient and a little creative. It can be quite rewarding.’

‘Thank you for that comforting advice. I’ll bear it in mind. We’re not having any luck tracking down the stuff that got cleared out of here either. It sounds as if a lot went to some dump out in the hills.’

‘That was quick,’ he said. ‘I never realized the construction industry’s waste-disposal people were so efficient.’

‘Well, since you’re so expert in these things, Silvio, I’ll let you go down there to see if we can extract something out of it.’

He liked that idea and said so.

‘But you did find something?’ he asked.

‘We’ve found very little really. About half an hour ago, underneath a thick layer of dust, we picked up a blood stain on the side of a radiator in the girl’s room. Near the windows. I’ve sent someone back with a sample.’

‘You won’t get an answer till the morning. August, remember. It’s like. . like a morgue here!’

‘If you crack that joke one more time I will, I swear, eviscerate you. With a teaspoon.’

It was an old one, he realized.

‘Boring blood or promising blood?’ he asked.

‘It’s just possible it’s evidence of a struggle,’ she said with an audible sigh. ‘I don’t know. There’s no hair. No tissue. What about you? What about the photograph?’

Falcone had called from the Casina delle Civette asking them to examine urgently the picture of the unidentified naked girl and work out how old the initial photo might have been. The print the two cops took with them wasn’t the original. Before they left that morning Di Capua had scanned the photograph found in the apartment and run off a two-sided copy, one side picture, the other the handwritten message. Being the showman he was, Falcone wanted something that looked genuine to push into people’s faces should the mood take him. The original itself had been scanned into the lab system, at very high resolution. Di Capua managed to peer at it briefly that morning, trying to interpret the mass of pixels before turning to Malise Gabriel. The first task had taken rather longer than planned.

‘On the surface it looks like an image taken from silver halide film,’ he told her. ‘From an old-fashioned camera. A digital copy of a conventional print.’

‘So it could be twenty years old, then?’

‘A lot more than that for all I know. It’s just a partial image of the torso of some young nude girl lying on crumpled sheets next to what appears to be a semen stain. Nothing to date it at all. There’s visible film grain in the image. The photo came from a Japanese dye sub printer, really common. You can buy them down the shops for a hundred euros or less. Slip in your memory card or an image from a scanner, press a button, the picture pops out in a minute or less. I’ve got something similar in the lab. That’s what I used to give Falcone his prop. Don’t get excited. It isn’t like a typewriter. Even if you find me a printer to look at I’ve no idea how we could say with any great certainty the picture came from that. You’d need the print material — the disposable paper it uses, which usually gets thrown away pretty quickly. I can give you the brand though and a range of models. Since we’re going down the dump, we can look.’