David Hewson - The Fallen Angel

‘Is there anything that doesn’t take a while?’

‘ Sovrintendente ,’ Teresa Lupo said firmly. ‘We’re all doing our best.’

‘I know that. But why didn’t we see this till now? Why?’

He knew the answer already: they thought they understood what this case was about. Beatrice Cenci brought back to life. Brute incest leading to murder. Even he’d begun to believe there was something in that story after a while.

The intelligence officer was still hammering the keyboard.

‘What are you looking for now?’ Costa asked.

‘I thought I’d try the Europol database. It’s pretty recent stuff. A bit rough at the edges in places. The best quick way we have of sharing records across the EU. I don’t know.’ Costa watched as she typed in the name ‘Julian Urquhart’. The little icon on the screen span round slowly. Then nothing.

He wondered what Falcone would try in a situation like this. Much the same? Probably. There was little else one could do except carry on thinking about the questions that no one had yet asked or answered. There were so many, and he didn’t feel close to penetrating any of them. Every step of this strange investigation, starting with the death of Malise Gabriel that night in the ghetto, had seemed oddly predictable, as if they were being guided towards the conclusion they sought. A conclusion, he reminded himself, that had been in his own mind almost from the moment he saw Mina Gabriel’s pained, pale face as she bent over her father’s broken body in the Via Beatrice Cenci.

‘Nic,’ Peroni said, interrupting this sudden reverie.

Peroni had a notebook in his huge paw and a pen behind his ear. His face, so human, so familiar, was full of the alert intelligence Costa had come to admire. Peroni didn’t even cast a glance at the woman and her computers. He’d been doing what he did best, working the phones, working people.

‘You’ve got something?’ Costa asked.

The big man took a deep breath and said, ‘I don’t know. This younger brother.’

‘Simon. Banker. Didn’t get on with Malise.’

‘I know,’ Peroni continued. ‘You told me that. You’re wrong. That’s not true. It can’t be.’

‘Mina told me. She said she’d never met him but her mother. .’

‘I don’t care. I got nowhere with that name. In the end I phoned Malise Gabriel’s old college at Cambridge. These university people keep themselves close. I guessed there had to be someone there who knew. Kept in touch.’

Costa laughed. It was so obvious. A phone call. A conversation. A stab in the dark, reaching out for another human being, not some record in a database.

‘And?’

‘They loved Malise Gabriel in Cambridge. In spite of everything. The professor I talked to was an undergraduate with him. Hadn’t been in touch with the man for years. Seems Malise didn’t want the company. I couldn’t get this college guy off the phone. He wants to come to the funeral. That’s how much they adored him.’

Costa tried to imagine what this meant.

‘And Simon? The brother?’

‘The brother disappeared years ago when he was still an undergraduate at Oxford. According to my Cambridge man it wasn’t that Simon didn’t get on with his older brother. He hated him. Malise was the bright one, the clever academic everyone admired. Simon was a wastrel, not so bright. He couldn’t compete. All that trouble Malise got into, the pregnant student, the book, that was nothing compared to the brother. He was into student riots. Trouble. Drugs. You name it.’

Simon Magus. The magician. Flying through the air, taunting the world.

‘We don’t know where he is now?’ Costa asked.

Peroni looked at his notebook and said, ‘In Cambridge they think he changed his identity. Went to Morocco, Afghanistan, South America. Became some kind of dope king with a high-and-mighty English accent. The prof’s emailing me some newspaper cuttings. Apparently the guy was a bit of legend in England ten, twenty years ago. The cops named him as one of their principal suspects for smuggling hard drugs into the country. Never caught up with him though.’

The intelligence officer hammered at her keyboard, waited a second and said, ‘Let me try the narcotics records.’ A flash of fingers. ‘Simon Gabriel. Nothing, sorry.’

‘According to my man in Cambridge he had lots of names,’ Peroni said. ‘These university types are fastidious, you know. He even had a cutting from a crime story in The Times of ten years ago. He read it out to me. Look.’

Peroni held up his pad. Costa scanned down the names, got to the last one and groaned.

‘Have you got the Italian births and deaths database online?’ he asked the intelligence officer.

‘Of course.’

‘Look up the name Wilhelmina Santacroce.’

The answers were starting to fall into place already.

‘Married 1922. Address. .’ She blinked at the screen. ‘It’s that place you’ve been going to, isn’t it? The palazzetto?’

He wondered how much of what Mina had told him was really the truth, how much lies that she’d passed on unwittingly from the stories and excuses she’d been fed.

The Santacroce palace once belonged to one side of her own family. When Malise Gabriel returned to Rome he was, in some small sense, coming home.

‘Sir,’ the intelligence officer said, bringing him back to earth. ‘That third name on the list. Scott Mason Nicholson. I’ve got him. I’ve got data.’ She typed frantically again. ‘There’s a mugshot on the FBI wanted list.’

Costa looked at the screen and knew what he’d see.

‘Peroni,’ he called as he strode out of the room.

The big man couldn’t keep up. When Costa got downstairs the traffic was backed up to the Questura rear gate. Noisy demonstrators were waving placards, yelling at the bored cops in blue uniform, waving banners about Beatrice Cenci and the cruelty of the police.

It didn’t make sense that this case had generated quite so much heat. Someone had stoked it. He was starting to think he knew who and why.

There was no way he’d be able to get a vehicle out of this crowd. He shouted back to Peroni, now lost behind him, and asked for a patrol car with uniform officers to meet him outside the Palazzetto Santacroce.

Then he turned out of the Questura, pushed his way through the crowd and began to run, across the city, down towards the Tiber.

There were just the four of them in the apartment in the tower of the House of Owls. Bernard Santacroce was in his rooms in the palace, Cecilia Gabriel said. They wouldn’t be disturbed.

The girl sat in the centre of the living room on a chair tugged from the dining table. The rest of them formed a semi-circle around her. Falcone watched this happen, realizing, to his dismay, that they had so easily adopted the pose and the characteristics of an interrogation.

It was now nearly midday but Mina Gabriel still appeared to be in her night clothes: loose pink pyjamas, plain cotton, cheap. Her hair was uncombed and a little lank, her eyes listless and unfocused. Like a kid on the edge, unable to contain for much longer the black truth Falcone was convinced she held trapped inside.

The mother talked a little, in a calm, almost friendly voice. She did her best to reassure the girl that this was nothing formal. Not some kind of grilling. Not even a formal interview. There would be no notes, no pressure. And if it came to nothing, then every word would be forgotten afterwards.

Mina listened, eyed each of them in turn then asked, her voice brittle with hatred, ‘Do you think I’m an idiot?’

‘We’re here to help,’ Grimaldi insisted.

‘That’s what they told Beatrice Cenci,’ Mina snapped. ‘The Pope’s inquisitors. The lawyers. The torturers with their chains and pincers.’