David Hewson - The Fallen Angel

She beckoned them to the seat. Falcone was glad to take the weight off his feet after the long walk.

‘I can assure you there’s nothing I’d like more,’ Cecilia Gabriel responded. ‘But how? Whatever I tell you, you seem to reject it immediately.’

Falcone nodded. The two men sat either side of the Englishwoman. It was a beautiful day in this hidden little corner of Rome, a fragrant, private place, the air rich with the scent of orange and oleander.

‘There are facts we cannot ignore,’ he began. ‘What I would like to do is find a way in which we can deal with them, set them to one side, and allow this case to be closed.’

He took her through the primary issues: the clear evidence that Malise Gabriel had abused his own daughter, and the new information he’d received from Silvio Di Capua the previous evening, about the scaffolding plans that Mina Gabriel had sent to her brother’s phone by email.

The latter part was new. It didn’t surprise him she rejected the idea immediately as ridiculous. Still Cecilia Gabriel listened, her eyes a little moist, with no small measure of repressed anger in her taut face.

When he was done she sighed and said, ‘Inspector. The first time we met you brought out a private photograph of me, naked. An old and personal photograph taken when I was eighteen years old. One intended for my husband’s eyes only. One you regarded, quite stupidly I must say, as evidence that my husband was having sex with our daughter. On the second you told me Malise was having an affair with Joanne Van Doren. Now some nonsense about an email. My daughter doesn’t have an email address as far as I know. She’s not like other teenagers. Haven’t you realized that yet?’

The last part threw him. Di Capua was adamant the night before. The message had come from the girl.

‘The evidence,’ he began.

‘What evidence? I’ve slapped you in the face twice now. I’m not proud of that, if I’m honest. But are you surprised?’

‘I have a job to do,’ he insisted.

‘What you resolutely fail to appreciate,’ she went on, ‘is that I still do not believe any of these things. I knew my husband. I knew Joanne Van Doren. They were friends, acquaintances. Nothing more.’ She hesitated, then said, ‘My husband was very ill. He had been for some time. Sex wasn’t easy for him, not without a little help.’

She stared at the tower of the Casina delle Civette rising from the lawn, checking to make sure that her daughter wasn’t at the window, Falcone assumed.

‘There,’ Cecilia Gabriel added. ‘You have an intimate confession. I trust it pleases you. Whatever your photographs say I find it impossible to believe that Malise was engaging in some squalid tryst with Joanne.’

Yet Falcone remembered well the moment he’d suggested this.

‘You turned on your own daughter and asked her if it was true,’ he pointed out.

‘I did. I was being an idiotic mother. Mina’s a secretive girl sometimes. The way she doesn’t look you in the eye. I don’t know. It’s probably me. Probably what any mother feels. Left out.’

She turned and stared at him intensely.

‘I don’t believe for one moment Malise abused Mina in any way. It’s impossible. He could be a difficult man. An argumentative one. He had a terrible temper. But he was incapable of cruelty. The very thought of it appalled him. He loved her. He loved all of us. He adored Robert above all others, I think, because he was the most difficult of all to love. And now you’re telling me he was some kind of a monster, and that Mina and Robert conspired to kill him.’

Grimaldi leaned forward and peered into her eyes.

‘Signora Gabriel,’ he said. ‘You must understand. It will be difficult for me to end this case without some answers to these very real questions.’

‘Answers?’ she interrupted. ‘Very well. Malise printed that first photograph of me from an older picture that was fading. He said he wanted to keep me that way. The way I was when I was eighteen or so.’

Her fingers toyed nervously with a twig of sprawling oleander falling over the back of the bench.

‘The words on it, “ E pur si muove ” — I wrote them. You know where they come from already.’ Her eyes fell briefly on the tower again. ‘Galileo. You know the circumstances. It was Galileo’s way of saying, “This I still believe, in spite of all the violence and pain you may bring to bear.”’

Her eyes were glassy. She wiped them carefully with a tissue from her sleeve.

‘That was the name of the project he was working on for Bernard. It upset him for some reason. He wouldn’t tell me why. These last few months. . I sometimes felt I hardly knew him. I hated seeing him depressed. The night before he died I found him rereading his own book, using that photograph as a bookmark. I wrote those words on the back of that picture. It was my way of saying the same thing as Galileo. In spite of all the pain and heartache, in spite of the fact Malise was very ill, this I still believed. That I loved him and he loved me.’

She took a deep breath and then looked at each man in turn.

‘A few weeks ago Malise told me that he’d given up on the treatment for his cancer. I knew already, I think, in my own heart. It was written in his face. The way he acted. The sadness. What little money we had was gone, which was what troubled him more than anything. The idea he would leave us alone, to fend for ourselves. He had a few months left, perhaps less. At some stage he would have to enter some kind of charity hospice. He wanted to spend his last few weeks rereading his own book, pointing out all the errors, all the statements he wanted to correct, to improve, to expand, and never would. He hoped I could sell it after his death.’ She smiled. ‘A ridiculous idea, of course, not that I told him so. All I wanted to say to him was that he was loved and always would be.’

‘You could have told us that in the beginning,’ Falcone pointed out.

‘I could,’ she said with a smile. ‘But I thought it was none of your bloody business, Inspector. And I was right.’

Grimaldi shrugged and said with a wry smile, ‘Signora, the bookmark is not a piece of evidence that concerns us any more.’

‘Shouldn’t it?’ she asked. ‘Doesn’t it tell you something? What do you want of me? Ask. If it will bring this to an end. .’

‘There were photographs taken in your daughter’s room,’ Falcone went on. ‘Evidence of sexual activity.’

‘Not Malise,’ she insisted. ‘That’s impossible. Mina’s seventeen. I don’t own her. I never did. Besides, when they’re that age these days. .’ She laughed at herself, lightly, briefly. ‘Who am I fooling? I was sleeping with Malise when I wasn’t much older. Everything happens so quickly. One moment you feel this life will never end. The next it’s running through your fingers like dust.’

The two men glanced at one another. This had to be said. Falcone wanted the words to come from Grimaldi.

‘We need your daughter to make some kind of statement,’ the lawyer told her. ‘It will never be made public. But the evidence that exists requires some kind of clarification.’

Cecilia Gabriel shook her head and stared at them.

‘You still believe my son and daughter conspired to murder their own father, don’t you? That this Beatrice Cenci nonsense in all the papers is true?’

‘Your daughter knew all about the Cenci girl,’ Falcone reminded her.

‘That was for Joanne! Nothing else. Some childish fantasy, perhaps. Mina’s a dreamy girl, not quite one thing or the other. It’s impossible.’

‘Signora Gabriel,’ Grimaldi interrupted. ‘We cannot sit here arguing forever. The fact is this. If your daughter is willing to tell us the truth, and it’s a truth I can bury, then I shall do so. If, for instance, she confirms the abuse by her father. .’