David Hewson - The Fallen Angel

He stopped. They weren’t taking any notice. Their eyes were on the memory stick, and they were listening to Di Capua wonder whether it would be protected by a password or not.

‘Most people aren’t sad geeks like you,’ Teresa told her deputy, taking the thing in her gloved fingers over to a laptop on a nearby desk. ‘They wouldn’t even understand how to encrypt something. They’d think hiding it down a mattress would be enough.’

‘A mattress!’ Maria said gleefully. ‘What kind of thing would you want to hide down there? Bad things. Dirty things. I wonder. .’

Peroni gave her a filthy, judgemental look. She shut up. Teresa plugged the stick into the side of the computer. It wasn’t encrypted at all. Not even protected by a password. A flood of images began to fill the screen automatically. Costa stared at a couple, understood what he was seeing, and turned away.

This part of the forensic department was at the front of the Questura, in a modern annexe tacked onto the original building in the seventies. It faced the cobbled Renaissance square of the Piazza San Michele. Before being turned over to the police in the late nineteenth century, the Questura had been a palace belonging to the Vatican, home to a famous Cardinal, one known for gambling and sexual licentiousness. The spiritual and the sensual were never far apart in Rome.

From his viewpoint he could see the gang of demonstrators milling around in the street. The protest had reached a lull. The figures outside were swigging bottles of water, wandering around in the heat, their faces sullen with boredom. Banners stood at half-mast. The mainly female crowd chatted mostly, barely remembering to hand out leaflets to those passing through the square on the way to the Pantheon.

He wondered what these same women would say if they could see the photographs being revealed on the nearby computer screen, stored secretly on a tiny digital device hidden in the crevices of Mina Gabriel’s mattress. One more convenient clue, it seemed, pointing to the obvious conclusion.

‘ Sovrintendente ,’ Falcone barked. ‘Would you care to give us your opinion?’

Costa took a deep breath and went back to the screen. There must have been thirty photos there or more. All of them, he felt sure, were of Mina Gabriel. Her face was visible in many. The shapes, the poses, the contortions. . his eyes told him this was from the same photographer who took the pictures they’d found in the basement. In many she could have been interchangeable with Joanne Van Doren. Except these were more explicit, more visceral. More amateurish too, somehow.

Mina looked scared, tired, reluctant, even drugged in some, as if taking part in a performance she was unable to refuse. There was only one part of the man that was visible, the predictable part, though in a single shot it was possible to make out the barest outline of a hand reaching out to the back of her head, pulling her face towards him.

‘Well?’ Falcone persisted.

‘What do you want me to say?’

The inspector scowled.

‘Malise Gabriel was committing incest with his own daughter while simultaneously conducting an affair with Joanne Van Doren,’ Falcone said. He sounded more than a little disheartened and disgusted by what they’d found, but there was relief in his voice too, and determination. ‘He kept his secret with the American woman in the cellar. He hid his abuse of his daughter in her own bed.’ Falcone glared at the computer screen. ‘Turn that off. I’ve seen enough.’

‘Bastard,’ Di Capua spat. ‘No wonder they wanted him dead.’

There were no words left, Costa realized. No possible objections he could raise.

After a long pause Peroni asked Falcone, ‘What do you want to do next?’

‘I’m going to get an arrest warrant out of Grimaldi,’ the inspector said. ‘The girl and the mother. Mina Gabriel has to admit to what went on here. She’s not leaving the Questura until I get that. We’ll show them this. .’ His hand swept towards the screen. ‘If we have to.’

‘Do you think you have enough to justify a warrant?’ Costa asked.

‘Scaffolding tampered with on the roof?’ Falcone asked. ‘Cecilia Gabriel round there the very morning her husband died, clearing the place so quickly we don’t get to look at what was there? Some kind of a struggle in the girl’s room? And she never noticed a thing? Please.’

‘And Joanne Van Doren?’ Costa asked.

‘Perhaps she found out. She must have known what kind of man Gabriel was.’ Falcone looked at him. ‘Try and distance yourself from this girl. Look at the facts dispassionately. We may not know the full story, but we surely understand the direction it’s taking. Alone, or in concert with the mother and daughter, Robert killed them.’

Peroni was staring at Costa from across the room. The big old cop was, in some ways, one of the smartest people he knew, a man in touch with his own emotions and those of others, even if his physical appearance belied this fact entirely. At that moment Costa was sure Peroni was trying to share something, to say that he’d his doubts too.

A uniformed officer came through the door. He looked happy.

‘Immigration got the Turk at the airport,’ he announced. ‘The one called Cakici. Riggi’s contact. Picked him up waiting for a flight to Izmir from Ciampino. Trying to leave the country on a false passport.’

There was a contented murmur of approval in the room. Riggi was still a cop. People wanted his killer brought to justice.

‘Fetch him,’ Falcone ordered. ‘This man murdered a serving police officer. I want him here. In the Questura.’

‘They say we have to interview him there first,’ the officer said. ‘False passport. That’s their territory.’

Falcone swore, pulled out his phone, was about to start yelling at someone, then thought better of it. The tall, thin inspector was thinking, finger on his tidy silver goatee, striding round the forensic room, silent.

He turned to Costa and Peroni, aware, perhaps, that they’d exchanged some unspoken misgiving a few seconds before.

‘Go to Ciampino,’ he told them. ‘Get him out of their hands. You can leave Mina and Cecilia Gabriel to me.’

The first Appian Way, the Antica, curved away from the gate of San Sebastiano in the Aurelian walls then ran south-east across Italy, past ruined tombs and temples, gatehouses and the debris of imperial-era barracks. Past Nic Costa’s home too, where it was little more than a narrow cobbled lane surrounded by the detritus of a lost empire. The Via Appia Nuova, its modern equivalent, was very different, a broad, busy highway choked with traffic, its city stretch passing low, grey housing estates, supermarkets and furniture warehouses, the ugly facade of twenty-first-century urban life. It was this that took them to Ciampino.

They were passing a line of cheap stores not far from the airport turnoff, Costa driving, a habit he’d kept from the days he and Peroni were of equal rank. There was something in the older cop’s silent, sullen mood that intrigued him.

Rome’s second airport, originally a military and business installation, was now an unlovely provincial dump preferred by the budget operators unwilling to pay the fees of the flashier Fiumicino. It was a few minutes away. Without being asked, the big man called ahead and made sure immigration knew to expect them, and to expect, too, that the Questura would send an armoured meat wagon to take the Turkish gangster Cakici back into their custody in central Rome before the day was out.

‘Why are we blaming the Turks again?’ Costa asked, fishing to get the big man talking out loud.

Without emotion Peroni repeated Falcone’s reasoning. It lay in the flimsy intelligence they’d received from Rosa Prabakaran’s superiors. Gino Riggi had been in the pay of the gang known as the Vadisi, the Wolves, that held the drugs franchise for the tourist dives around the Campo and Trastevere. The Gabriel kid had been the go-between for Riggi and the Turks. The fierce burst of publicity about the case had persuaded the Vadisi their operations could be jeopardized by the arrest of Robert Gabriel for murder. So they acted to save themselves.