David Hewson - The Fallen Angel

Then Silvio Di Capua and the young work-experience girl, Maria, who seemed permanently attached to him, wandered in complaining loudly, a furious-looking Teresa Lupo behind them.

The pathologist eyed Costa and Peroni. Then she said, ‘My office. Now.’

They followed the three forensic staff into the glass cubicle overlooking the rear of the Questura and the crammed police car park. The demonstration outside seemed to have picked up momentum again. Marked police vehicles were struggling to get out through the crowd. A line of ten or so blue Fiats was backed up against the fortified gates trying to find an opportunity to make their way into the street.

‘Did you know about this last night?’ Teresa demanded, staring at Costa.

‘Know about what?’

She ordered Di Capua to tell them. Costa listened as he explained the discovery of the email on the dead brother’s phone, the document detailing the structure of the scaffolding, and where it had originated. Falcone’s distraction the previous evening, after the odd call he’d taken in the piazza in the ghetto, started to make sense of a kind, and he told her so.

‘So where is he?’ she demanded. ‘His phone’s off. He’s not returning calls. I sent someone round to his apartment. He’s not there. We need to talk to him. Where the hell has he gone? To see the Gabriels?’

‘He wouldn’t go there on his own,’ Costa said.

‘Well, then where?’

‘Leo’s a grown man,’ Peroni retorted. ‘We’re not his keepers.’

‘Women,’ Teresa said. ‘That’s it usually. Who’s the current one?’

‘Search me,’ Costa added. ‘Leo doesn’t talk about his private life unless there’s a reason. I’ve no idea if there’s a girlfriend or not. Anyway, why do you need him so urgently? This can wait, can’t it?’

She scowled at Di Capua.

‘That rather depends on what he’s up to. The information this department. .’ There was an icy stare at her deputy. ‘. . provided last night was not as full or as accurate as I might have liked.’

‘Mail headers,’ Maria chipped in. ‘You have to look at the mail headers. They’re not right.’

Peroni, never a man happy with technology, was squinting at her, mouthing, ‘What?’

‘I’ve got this friend in America,’ she went on. ‘He knows mail headers inside out. I tweeted him and he took a look. Had to repeat tweet of course which is not good twittiquette. You can’t get a whole header over with just a hundred and forty characters. He was in a bar in San Diego.’

‘San Diego? Headers? Twittiquette?’ Peroni asked. ‘What in God’s name are you talking about?’

Teresa told him. A little of the heat drained from his face.

Costa thought about what she’d said. The header was some hidden information in the email that revealed the name of the server from which it had originated, and the path by which it had reached its destination, Robert Gabriel’s phone. Usually this was predictable and tied to whatever mail service was used for the individual email address. But in the case of the email on the phone, the server was part of an anonymous service designed to hide the true origin of the message. It could have come from anywhere and the sender must have deliberately used this route in order to disguise his or her identity.

‘This doesn’t make sense,’ he said. ‘Why would Mina Gabriel use an anonymous service and still put her name on the message?’

Di Capua cleared his throat, glanced at Teresa and said, ‘She probably didn’t.’

Maria took out her phone and ran her fingers across the keys.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘I just sent a message to that address. What happens? Boing. It gets bounced. Either it’s not a real email address. Or the server is down. Unlikely. Or it’s a real email address that’s expired. Or. .’

‘What does it all mean?’ Peroni demanded

‘It means that either Mina Gabriel is a very poor criminal,’ Costa said, ‘or someone is trying to frame her for the murder of her father. Which, if true. .’

His mind was starting to race. Sometimes investigations ran on assumptions, through the process of trying to transform an invented truth developed from hypothesis and plain guesswork into some form of reality that one could touch and turn into an arrest, a conviction. It had been troubling him for some time that the assumptions they had about the Gabriel case had scarcely changed from the outset, even though in the very beginning they were based on the flimsiest of observations. Cases normally developed, shifted, changed shape and character with time and a growing sense of perspective. This had been the same from the start: a case of murder stemming from incest. Just like that of the Cenci family.

‘We need Leo,’ Teresa began.

‘He’s not here,’ Costa said. ‘I’m in charge in his absence. I’ll deal with this.’

Teresa’s eyebrows rose. Her plain, friendly face wore a wry, amused smile.

‘Well, sir,’ she said. ‘What do you want us to do?’

‘Is that it?’ he asked. ‘Is that all you wanted to say to Falcone?’

The forensic team exchanged another set of maddening, silent glances.

‘Not exactly,’ Di Capua replied.

‘Semen,’ Teresa’s assistant said. ‘That’s the problem. We expected-’

‘Don’t tell me what you expected,’ Costa ordered. ‘Tell me what you found.’

The forensic officers glanced at one another.

‘Perhaps we won’t miss Leo after all,’ Teresa mused. ‘The honest truth is we’ve found nothing. Because of the holidays and the stinking budget cuts we’ve got to use an outside lab for DNA sampling. Takes time. Saves money. The latter seems more important than the former, at least to the bean-counters upstairs.’

‘On with it, on with it,’ Peroni urged, waving a hand at her.

She took a deep breath then said, ‘We don’t have a positive ID for any of the semen yet. The reports that came back from the outside lab aren’t usable. I’ve rejected them and said they need to be carried out again. They won’t get round to that until tomorrow.’

‘Wonderful,’ Costa muttered under his breath.

‘The best case you can come up with will still fall in court if the defence can question the DNA,’ Teresa said. ‘It’s happening more and more. I can’t take chances.’

‘We’ve been waiting days!’

‘I know.’ She paused to add a little drama, the way she always liked on such occasions. ‘The problem is the data we’ve got back doesn’t match. It’s close. But it’s not identical, as it should be. I think this is because it’s been handled badly. But there is an alternative explanation.’

She took another deep breath then said, ‘It’s just possible that we have semen specimens from two men, not one.’

The two cops didn’t say anything.

‘We didn’t look at the results until this morning,’ Di Capua said. ‘It’s probably a mistake.’

Costa looked at Teresa Lupo and said, ‘Probably?’

She frowned.

‘Look, I hate this as much as you do. I want certainties. We don’t have them. The most likely answer is that the lab screwed up. If they didn’t. .’ She shrugged. ‘Then we have two men involved in sexual encounters. One of them, I assume, is Malise Gabriel. But I can’t tell you which yet. Or who the other might be.’

‘The son?’ Peroni asked.

‘That was my first thought,’ Teresa replied ‘It seems logical. As logical as anything else in this case. I’ve sent off a sample to check. Tomorrow. .’

‘I don’t want to wait till tomorrow,’ Costa insisted.

‘Well, you’ll have to,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Go shout at the bean-counters. There is a problem with the son, though. These two samples are different but similar, which is why we assume there’s been some mistake and really it’s two samples from the same man, contaminated somehow.’