David Hewson - The Fallen Angel

‘That was years ago but Bernard still loathed him for it. This. .’ She looked around the room. ‘. . was his revenge. Daddy dying. Penniless. Every day becoming more dependent on Bernard’s charity, if you could call it that.’

Costa nodded and asked, ‘And he told your father?’

‘That was Bernard’s final trick. He came straight out with it one day.’ She glanced at the ceiling above them. ‘In here. When Daddy pointed out some ridiculous error in that stupid paper. Bernard thought it was. . funny. One more way of adding to his big brother’s misery. “Listen, Malise. I’m screwing your wife. I’m screwing your daughter. And what can you do about it? Nothing, because you’re a sick old man and soon you’ll be dead. Can you guess what’s going to happen then?”’

She glanced at her mother and said, softly, ‘I’m sorry. Honestly.’

Cecilia Gabriel got up and stood at the window behind, a tall, thin figure staring out at the grounds.

Mina waited for an answer. When it didn’t come she turned back to Costa.

‘The evening before he died Daddy came to me and said he’d had enough. He said he’d told Bernard he would go to the police if it didn’t stop immediately. I thought. . I assumed that’s what would happen. That night, while I was practising, I heard the two of them. Arguing.’ Her eyes wandered. ‘Bernard came to the building during the day. Joanne said he’d been on the roof for some reason. It puzzled her. I thought the two of them were just having a row. And then. .’

Her lips trembled, she began to stutter, to struggle with the words.

‘It all got louder. Shouting. Screaming. Something like bricks falling, I don’t know. Bernard came to me in the music room. He said there’d been an accident. Daddy had fallen out of the window. I had to keep quiet, tell no one what had been going on. Because if I did it would be bad for all of us. We’d be the ones who’d get the blame. It would be like Beatrice Cenci all over again. We’d never escape, never be a family again. Never recover. It could kill us.’

She wiped her eyes with her sleeve.

‘He told the truth there, didn’t he? I think. .’

The girl fell silent, unable to go on.

‘He was determined to make sure the blame would come your way,’ Costa said. ‘The photographs. The way they were carefully doctored. The so-called evidence.’

He found himself looking at Falcone. The man looked horrified, perhaps as much by the gullibility they’d all shown in this case as anything.

Then something came back. The old Falcone perhaps. He got up and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mina. We all owe you an apology. This man, Santacroce. Gabriel. Whatever his name is. I don’t want. .’

‘I’ve got men on the gate,’ Costa cut in. ‘If he’s here, he won’t be leaving.’

Falcone had stopped and was staring at the palm trees outside. Cecilia Gabriel was no longer at the window. She seemed to have slipped out of the room, unseen, unheard, while they were engrossed in the final details of Mina’s story.

Costa walked to the window.

He could see her in the garden, striding back towards the palazzetto where Santacroce kept his private apartment. Something silver glittered in her hand.

The sun seemed too dazzling for September. Costa raced across the grass of the garden. The woman had disappeared beneath the grand courtyard arch, into the elegant building ahead.

The four uniformed officers stood by the gate, bored, a couple of them smoking. Costa barked at the caretaker, demanding directions to Santacroce’s apartment.

It was on the first floor, the side of the courtyard facing back towards the river, overlooking the gardens and the tower. He ordered the men to follow him, found the broad stone staircase that led into the building, running through the double doors, up worn grey steps, past paintings and statues, tapestries and porcelain, the treasures of an old Roman family that had fallen, somehow, into the hands of a rogue.

An old story, Costa thought. A little like the tragedy of the Cenci after all.

He reached the first floor, found himself in a wide corridor with a polished wood floor. There was a door open at the end, light streaming through it, some elegant antique furniture just visible.

Three steps away, no more, he heard the first scream and he’d no idea at that moment whether it was a man or a woman, there was something so violent, so animal in that high, guttural shriek of pain.

‘Sir,’ said one of the uniforms, a fit man, faster than Costa, pushing in front of him, gun out, the way they’d been taught.

‘You don’t need that,’ Costa told him, and elbowed his way back in front then got through the door. He found himself in a long, airy studio filled with light that danced off polished chairs and tables, tall walnut cabinets and gilt-frame paintings. A high rack of books ran one length of the room. At the end Bernard Santacroce sat at an ornate desk, his heavy body twisted round in a captain’s chair, his face bloodied and racked with agony.

Cecilia Gabriel was over him, half on the desk, half on his knees, her right arm arcing backward and forward.

The only sound was that of the man’s racked breathing and the repetitive slash of knife against flesh.

The uniform had his gun out again.

Costa glared at him and snapped out an order to put it away.

By the time he got to the desk it was over. Bernard Santacroce, Simon Gabriel. . There was no saving him. The woman’s fierce torrent of hatred had taken his life just as surely as the cobblestones of the Via Beatrice Cenci stole away that of his elder brother. Now Cecilia Gabriel sat over him, the bloodied blade still in her right hand, gasping, from effort, from emotion, her blue eyes icy with fury.

‘Signora,’ said a voice from behind.

He turned. It was Falcone. Himself again, though his lean face looked a little more bloodless than usual. He was holding out his hand, staring at the woman locked above the dead Santacroce as if she were a partner in some bloody tableau, one disturbed before it had reached its final scene.

She dragged herself off the desk, off the man, walked towards them and placed the long, stained knife in Falcone’s outstretched fingers.

‘There, Inspector,’ Cecilia Gabriel said. ‘You wanted to find yourself a murderer. Now you have.’

Costa’s eyes fell to the expanse of verdant lawn outside. The girl sat near the fountain at its centre, knees drawn up to her chin like a child, face hidden in her skinny arms, a tight, hunched bundle of misery struggling to withdraw herself from the bright, golden day.

Eight days later Costa found himself alone outside the tiny pink-washed church of San Tommaso ai Cenci, in the little square at the summit of the gentle mound behind the bleak old palace where Beatrice had lived. There were so many churches in Rome, and this one was unremarkable except for its connections.

He watched the small crowd of mourners, mostly women, dressed in black, enter through the narrow single door. When they were inside, and he began to hear the tremulous tones of an organ, Costa came out of the shadows and walked up to the facade, trying to remember enough Latin to decipher the inscription on the imperial tombstone set high on the wall, between two tiny circular windows that would surely have allowed in little light. The Cenci, who had built this terraced place of worship, seemed to thrive in darkness. He could read a name on the tombstone: Marcus Cincius Theophilus. Cenci. Cincius. One of their ancestors, or so the family had wished to think.

And four centuries on Romans still gathered here each year to mark the execution of Beatrice. There were flowers on the Ponte Sant’Angelo that morning. Some worshippers would, he knew, visit the spacious interior of Montorio on the Gianicolo hill opposite, wondering as they prayed whether any trace of the Cenci girl still remained in the dun, dry earth beneath its marble stones.