David Hewson - The Fallen Angel

‘These pictures are different,’ Costa said.

‘Technically, they’re bound to be,’ Di Capua piped up. ‘The ones in the basement are taken using film. That nice old Hasselblad we found. That’s why they look so much better. That and my processing skills. The ones on the USB stick are from some digital camera we still haven’t located. From the EXIF on the jpeg I can tell you. .’

Peroni uttered a long, loud sigh.

‘We know from the data,’ Di Capua went on, ‘it was taken with an inexpensive Fuji pocket camera. It couldn’t possibly look as good. If-’

‘I’m not talking about quality,’ Costa interrupted.

He steeled himself to stare again at both sets of photographs: the ones of Joanne Van Doren, the shots which were, without any doubt, of Mina. It was nothing to do with sharpness or depth of field or anything else photographic. They were entirely different in nature, in the way they’d happened, the story they were trying to tell.

‘These,’ Costa said, indicating the Hasselblad prints, ‘are posed. As if Gabriel was trying to take shots to order. For a pornographic magazine or something. I don’t know. Also. .’

He understood very little about photography. But he remembered the way his own father had struggled to take family portraits using the awkward clockwork timer on their ancient Kodak. It rarely worked. There were always shots that caught the cameraman walking back to the group, back to the lens, arriving too late. It was messy and unpredictable.

‘The ones in the basement. I’m not even sure it’s just him, is it?’

They crowded round and stared hard themselves.

‘Oh God,’ Teresa groaned. ‘Why didn’t we see that?’

‘We weren’t looking,’ Di Capua grumbled.

They had all assumed that it was Malise Gabriel in this set of shots because he appeared, full face, in a single frame early in the sequence. That one picture showed him on the bed with the American woman, poised over her, as if they were about to begin making love. But they weren’t even touching, and the expression between them was one of false lust, theatrical expectation. All the other prints were principally of the woman, and they were different. Real. Visceral. Full of a bleak animal heat, the way pornography often was.

‘How,’ Costa asked, ‘could Malise Gabriel have taken those shots on his own? With a timer? She’s having sex with someone. You can see that. How could you set up an old-fashioned camera, any camera, to take something as carefully shot as this? So that you can easily identify the woman but not the man?’

‘They could have cropped it,’ Maria said. ‘Deleted things.’

‘It’s not digital,’ Di Capua snapped. ‘What’s there is what was on the film.’

‘A second man,’ Teresa suggested. ‘Either it’s Malise having sex or he’s behind the camera. We can look at what we can see of him and compare it with what we’ve got in the morgue. I can tell you definitely once there’s a DNA report I can trust. Sorry, Nic. It just looked like one more white male having his fun. We didn’t have any reason to think otherwise.’

Costa bristled.

‘We had every reason not to make assumptions. Let’s try to remember next time, shall we? And these. .’

He stabbed a finger at the vile shots of Mina.

‘It’s the same, isn’t it?’ the girl said. ‘You can see it’s the daughter. You can’t see who the man is.’

‘It’s not the same at all,’ Costa replied. ‘These are rushed shots taken by hand. Look.’

He held up his arm and pretended he was snapping off shots of himself.

‘He’s doing this while he’s having sex with her. Camera in hand. Arm up here, just firing away. It’s secret and squalid, as if he’s capturing some kind of conquest, not something that’s meant to be erotic. This is just for him. Or them.’

Di Capua was nodding. He could see this.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘And he’s bound to get his own face in there at some stage. Has to happen. So he goes through the shots afterwards, deletes the ones that identify him, copies the rest onto the memory stick then keeps it safe in her mattress.’

‘Why would he do that?’ Maria asked. ‘It seems an unnecessary risk.’

It did too, Costa thought. One more unanswered question.

Teresa told Di Capua to get a team looking at the prints, trying to find some features that would enable them to identify any second individual in the frames.

Costa shook his head.

‘We’ve been racing round Rome, yelling at Mina Gabriel and her mother. We didn’t even look at what was here, right in front of us.’

‘I said I’m sorry,’ Teresa told him.

‘I wasn’t trying to blame anyone. We’re as guilty as you. It’s as if. .’ He wasn’t sure what he was saying himself. ‘As if we were meant to be chasing these ghosts.’

Maria had her hand up, like a schoolgirl with a bright idea.

‘Yes?’ Teresa said.

‘I got a tweet about the Ducati a couple of minutes ago. The company never got back to me. Some geek dealer in Milan’s got the records database.’

‘Tweet?’ Peroni asked, aghast.

‘Don’t ask,’ Teresa told him. ‘And?’

‘It’s not Italian at all.’ They waited.

‘It’s an export model,’ Maria said. ‘Made for the British market. Never sold here or anywhere else.’

By eleven the teams were in place and looking at the details that Costa had ordered them to explore: the red Ducati, the photographs found in the basement of the house in the Via Beatrice Cenci and the ones secreted in Mina Gabriel’s mattress.

Peroni was heading up the police group pressing the UK authorities for more information. Di Capua had brought in a photographic expert he knew to help with the pictures. No one had even mentioned Falcone’s name in a while. There was too much work to do, too much interest in what was beginning to emerge.

The expert turned out to be a gruff and burly individual from the city’s paparazzi pack. After twenty minutes spent poring over the prints through an eyeglass the man stood up, massaged his back, casually inquired whether it was OK to smoke, grunted when this was refused and said, ‘Don’t you people take your clothes off sometimes? These shots. .’ He indicated the prints from the basement. ‘They’re two different men. Isn’t it obvious?’

Peroni walked in, looking busy.

‘Am I interrupting something?’ he asked.

‘Bear with us,’ Costa told him.

‘Yes,’ Teresa said, glaring at the paparazzo and Di Capua in turn. ‘We do know that. Is there nothing else you have to tell us?’

‘He’s hiding his identity. The second man. Not him , obviously.’ He placed a fat thumb on the face of Malise Gabriel, hovering over the naked and rather drowsy-looking Joanne Van Doren. ‘The other one. He doesn’t want to be seen. I’ve done a little porn in my time, who hasn’t?’

Teresa put up her hand and smiled at him.

‘What I meant was, who in the business hasn’t? Sometimes you have to keep people’s faces out of the picture for obvious reasons. Men usually. Women don’t mind too much. Or if they do, they don’t say. It’s not easy either. If they’re pros, maybe. They know how to pose. But when you’ve got amateurs performing, and this woman is an amateur, trust me, it’s difficult to stop them getting carried away.’

He leaned down and looked at the picture again.

‘Though not her. She looks drunk to me. Or stoned or something. Not good. Where’s the joy? Where’s the passion? You could never sell these.’

‘Are we learning anything here?’ Teresa asked.

‘You’re learning what I think, lady,’ the paparazzo said. ‘Two different men, one of them doesn’t want to be seen. Miserable woman. Though quite hot on a good day, I’d say.’