David Hewson - The Fallen Angel

He watched her, fascinated, horrified.

‘Bernard asked me what Mina was short for. Whether I was Wilhelmina, like someone else in the family. I told him I was Minerva. He knew that already. It was all a part of the game.’ Her hand twitched nervously over her lips. This was a difficult memory. ‘He said, did I know that this place was called after me? The Casina delle Civette. The owl is Minerva, you see. The goddess of wisdom.’ Mina’s voice fell a tone, as if talking to someone else. ‘Of warfare too, Bernard. Perhaps you should have remembered that.’

She beckoned to Costa to come closer, then she took his hand and placed it on her thigh.

‘Then he touched me like this and said, “You’re wise like her, Mina. She was a virgin goddess.” I can remember his face. The smell of his breath. The stupid leer when he grinned me at me and whispered. .’ Her voice fell away, but not enough to disguise the sardonic tone. ‘“Are you?”’

Costa took away his hand and sat on the cushion on the window sill, looking up at her.

‘“Are you?”’ she repeated, gazing out at the cloudless blue sky. ‘It wasn’t a lot to give really. Not when I thought about the consequences of saying no. Bernard was a. . frantic little man at times, though he didn’t get bored with me quite so quickly. I imagine the novelty was greater. Coming to my room with his little camera. I managed to get the card out of that. I thought it might come in useful. It was only afterwards that he told me he was my uncle. I think that was meant to seal the secret between us somehow. Make me as guilty as him.’

‘Your family. .’

Clear-eyed and frank again, she gazed into his face.

‘I told you the truth. Bernard boasted about me to Daddy, just a few days before he died.’ The faintest glimmer of pleasure crossed her face. ‘Daddy said he was going to come round here and eviscerate the bastard with a bread knife. We had to hold onto him. Mummy, me, Robert. Weak as he was, it wasn’t easy. He wanted Bernard dead that instant. It was only when we thought about it. .’

She raised her shoulders in a gesture of acceptance.

‘When he thought about it. Daddy was going to die anyway. What he wanted more than anything was a secure future for us. If his death delivered that, and we got rid of Bernard too. .’ She cast an arm around the apartment. ‘Mummy checked Bernard’s papers. He was an arrogant sod. He hadn’t even made a will to cover all this, all his legitimate money. That meant everything would come to us in the end. There was no one else. You have to admit it has a certain delicate symmetry. Besides, we had all the evidence we needed right here. It was simply a matter of placing it, and waiting. Then when the moment arrived. .’

Costa pointed at the passport and asked again, ‘Who is he?’

‘Some stupid riff-raff that Robert got to know on the street,’ she said with a shrug. ‘He was willing to pretend to be Robert for a few hundred euros, not quite knowing what the consequences were. I’m sorry, Nic. That was Robert’s doing. I’d no idea it would happen. I suspect Robert didn’t think things would turn out that way either. I imagine he felt he had no choice.’

‘And all of this was your father’s idea?’

‘Not all of it,’ she said quickly. ‘It was our idea. The family’s. It was our way of surviving. Of making the best of what we had. It seemed simple in the beginning. Daddy killed himself. We pushed you first towards us, and then towards Bernard. And one day Mummy killed him. But. .’

Her eyes strayed outside again.

‘“The best laid plans of mice and men. .”’ she murmured. ‘Things began to change. Joanne helped us at first and then became scared. Robert was frightened she’d go the police.’

‘So he killed her? And the Albanian. And Gino Riggi.’

‘I knew nothing about those things until they happened, I swear,’ she insisted. ‘I’d never have allowed him to hurt Joanne. You’ve got to believe that. But by the time it was done. . We’d become part of the trap we set ourselves.’

Costa remembered seeing her the day after the American woman’s death. She was truly distraught, he believed. That was not an act.

‘The problem,’ she said, ‘is that you take one small step on the path of righteous wickedness, and the next seems to happen of its own free will. One that isn’t righteous at all. I’m sorry. That’s what we did. Why we did it. Do you still not understand?’

‘Not really,’ he said and went to the window.

She joined him there, standing so close he could feel the sweet heat of her breath.

‘I used you, I know,’ she whispered. ‘I had to. We needed someone who’d follow the trail. If they didn’t, what was the point?’

He remembered her pale, frightened face in the night, outside the house in the Via Beatrice Cenci. Costa had known from the start there was something she wanted to tell him. Yet it took all this time.

‘I never realized it would be someone I’d like so much,’ Mina said quietly. She sidled up to him, brushed against his body.

‘The passport, Nic. You haven’t done anything with it, have you? No one else in the Questura has a clue?’

He didn’t want to answer. She knew anyway.

She took his hand and wound her fingers in his.

‘Why is that?’

Costa could see the bend in the Tiber, the miasma rising from the water in the heat, could imagine the dome of St Peter’s just out of view, and ahead of it, near the Castel Sant’Angelo, the bridge with its blind angels, and the patch of road where, centuries ago, a young girl had been brutally executed.

Her lips moved to his cheek, to his ear. Mina kissed him once, biting lightly. Her hands ranged over his chest. She took them away and pulled the half-unbuttoned shirt over her head, the lazy, easy way a child did, then pushed her small breasts against him.

‘I know what you want,’ she murmured. ‘I saw it in Bernard’s eyes. I see it in yours. .’

He tried to push her away.

‘I saw it in Daddy’s face. That last night. When he was sitting on the bed, crying, scared as hell, half-drunk, head bleeding because he’d tried to go outside once and fallen at the window, failed. He was scared. Ready to back out. To go whimpering all the way back to Bernard and offer to put his name on that testament of lies after all. Let Bernard do what he liked to the rest of us so long as he got enough money to live a few more weeks. When we’d worked so hard for this. So hard. .’

He tried to say something. He didn’t want to hear more.

Her voice was hot in his ear. Her lips worked damp and warm against his skin. Her fingers fought to drag his to her small, taut breast.

‘So I sat down on the bed and kissed him. Told him I loved him. I always would. That I’d prove it for him and I did. And he stepped out of the window and I watched him fall.’

Costa wished he’d never come to this lonely hidden tower in the garden by the river. That he’d taken the advice of Falcone and buried this case deep in the ground until it was as lost as the scattered remains of Beatrice Cenci.

‘Was that one of your guesses, Nic? Did you dare go that far? I don’t think so. It wasn’t Joanne Van Doren with Daddy. Not that night.’

Closer, closer.

‘Are you glad you were right in a way? I was Beatrice after all but willingly, lovingly. It was his last moment on earth. He was frightened and lonely and desperate. I owed him all that and he wanted it. Besides.’ She kissed his ear, biting the flesh. ‘There was no going back then, was there?’

She had the stance of some cheap coquettish model. He watched as she pushed the red passport down the front of her slacks then placed his fingers there, on the warm skin of her stomach.