David Hewson - The Fallen Angel

‘Your mother?’

‘She’s seeing the lawyer again. Everyone’s so kind in Rome. I’m glad this happened here. Anywhere else. .’

Something he remembered brought a shadow of a smile to Costa’s face.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘A friend of mine from Turin says all Romans are children, really. We spend our days luxuriating in one long daydream, trying to imagine we’re in a world that’s always beautiful, one without pain and grief, cruel reality. That if we were left to our own devices everything, ourselves, Italy even, would fall apart.’

‘It’s a compliment, isn’t it? We’d all stay children if we could.’

He nodded and said, ‘Perhaps. How is she?’

Mina Gabriel frowned.

‘Mummy will survive. We’re good at that. Plenty of practice. The lawyers say she won’t go to jail. She got bail easily enough. I don’t know who put up the money. Why am I telling you all this? You’re a policeman. It can’t be news.’

He was aware of the details. They were insignificant.

‘A million people would have put up the money to keep her out of prison,’ Costa said. ‘If it was left to most Romans she wouldn’t be in court at all. She’d be getting a medal. A heroine. The mother who stood up for her child against the man who violated her. It’s as if the Cenci case happened all over again. Only this time we got it right.’

She put down the book and sat upright on the sofa.

‘I never thought of it that way.’

‘I’m sure you didn’t. Will you stay here? In Rome?’

‘I haven’t decided yet,’ she replied immediately, shaking her head. ‘When Mummy’s free to travel again and they’ve sorted out wills and ownership and things, she thinks we might sell this place and move to New York. I’m supposed to need a college education.’ She grimaced. ‘I keep getting all these offers. Talking. Writing.

Media. Why? Because I’ve something to say? I don’t think so. They just want to stare at me and say: so that’s what she looks like. That’s the one it happened to. Perhaps they want to. .’ She hesitated a moment before continuing. ‘They want to picture it in their own heads. I’m theirs now, aren’t I? I belong to them. They can imagine whatever they like.’

‘It’s not easy being in the public eye,’ he said.

‘I’d be an idiot to turn it down, though, wouldn’t I? I’ve never really been outside my own family before. I ought to see what’s there. And I get paid.’

He looked around the beautiful apartment.

‘Everyone needs money,’ he agreed. ‘Independence. Self-respect. It’s when we deprive people of these things. .’ He thought of the many troubled individuals he’d dealt with over the years. How difficult it was to reconcile the evil they inflicted with their own ordinariness. There were no monsters. Every murderer he’d ever met, however vicious, however cruel, was someone who would never turn a head on the subway. ‘The miracle is how often we treat others badly, how people suffer with poverty and hatred and cruelty and still turn out sane and decent in the end. Not everyone, though.’

‘What makes the difference?’ she asked, suddenly interested.

‘One unkindness too many. Some brutal act that goes beyond the pale. I don’t know. I don’t think those it affects understand either. They feel the pain and the anger and crave some way to release it, to let all that disappear by passing on the hate to someone else. And then they’re a little happier for a while. Not cured. Not quite. But free for a time. Able to pretend that it was all someone else’s fault, another man’s evil.’ He thought about it a little more. ‘In a way it is, I suppose. Mine. Yours. Everyone’s. I think we created the Devil for a reason, a selfish one. He makes it easier for us to accept the imperfect, fallen state we’re in. He allows us to shrug off the blame.’

The sun edged into the line of the window. A shaft of piercing golden light fell on her face. Her hand went to her eyes. She shuffled along the sofa, looking a little uncomfortable.

‘Why did you come?’

He reached into his jacket pocket and took out the deep red document.

‘I brought back the passport I found in Robert’s jacket.’

‘Thank you.’

Costa held it up, open at the photograph: a young man with dark hair and a sullen, dusky face.

‘Who is this?’ he asked. ‘Who is it really?’

Mina Gabriel leaned forward and said, ‘Excuse me. .?’

‘The young man in the photo. The one who died. My guess. .’

He pulled out the photo he’d got from Ciampino two days before. The immigration officer he’d met when he went to see the Turk, Cakici, had let him run through the departure camera records. He only had the old photo of the brother to use, and a tentative link.

‘. . is that he’s an Albanian kid called Arben Dosti. Someone of Robert’s age flew from Ciampino to Tirana using a passport with that name. It’s on a low-level drugs-watch list we have. Not sufficient priority to stop him. He was leaving anyway.’

He showed her the picture taken at the immigration control booth and said, ‘That’s Robert, your brother. Using the passport of the young man we have in the morgue, identified as him.’

Mina Gabriel’s face contorted the way he’d seen in so many teenagers: marred by an angry disdain at the apparent stupidity of the question.

‘What are you talking about? Robert’s dead.’

He relaxed in the comfortable chair and threw the passport across the table, towards her. She didn’t pick it up.

‘No. That passport’s been tampered with. It’s genuine enough. It was Robert’s. I asked a friend in forensic to take a look at it. Someone clever. Discreet. So it’s just between him and me. He said someone had changed the photograph. They did a good job. I imagine that, through Santacroce, Robert had some contacts in the drug trade who could do that kind of thing. Arben was one more dope dealer in the ring. For Santacroce maybe. For Cakici. Does it matter?’

Costa studied her icy, frozen face for some sign of defeat.

‘He’s still out of the country, Mina, isn’t he? I don’t think you’d dare allow him to stay here. Not right now.’

‘Nic! You know it’s Robert. You met him in that bar in the Campo.’

‘I briefly saw him,’ Costa said, stabbing the passport on the table. ‘You made sure of that. One more piece of bait along the trail. Arben got paid to pretend to be Robert. To carry one of his phones. The one you’d set up with the incriminating email. He thought it was all part of some scam. And it was. You’d worked it out in advance, just as you’d worked out everything else.’ He stopped, remembering that night. ‘The kid I saw in the bar never spoke English. I just got a message on my phone. That seemed odd at the time. When I was in the building, with Joanne Van Doren’s body, that really was Robert, which was why he wouldn’t let me see him. He couldn’t. That would have broken the spell.’

Her eyes turned wide and limpid, the way he had come to recognize.

‘You set up this Albanian kid,’ he went on. ‘Just as you set up Bernard Santacroce. It was very clever, very calculating. Why would we check his identity? You’d confirmed it. I’d seen him. We knew it was Robert.’

‘My brother’s dead!’

‘No,’ he insisted. ‘He’s not, Mina. You wanted us to think we were trying to unravel some scheme to kill your father. That way we’d never notice that the real plot had only just begun. That was to give your mother the opportunity and the motive to murder Bernard Santacroce, Simon Gabriel, the uncle who’d really been abusing you, all of you, one way or another. A plot you planned very carefully, minutely, step by step. From the time your father died in the street to the moment your mother stabbed Santacroce in his study here. You brought the suspicion on yourself, you left us the evidence that would first incriminate and then clear you. And when we reached the conclusion you’d concocted for us, your mother murdered him, as you’d planned all along, knowing that public sympathy would keep her out of jail.’