where all that stuff has gone. That may not be easy. If they’ve used some illegal site. .’
Falcone closed his eyes for a moment and muttered, ‘I can’t believe I didn’t come round myself.’
‘Don’t blame yourself, sir,’ Peroni said and didn’t regret the note of acid in his voice. He wasn’t taking the blame. They had all thought this was the accident it appeared.
‘I want to see Cecilia Gabriel,’ Falcone said, barely noticing. ‘And this girl, Mina. I want that brother found too.’
‘Narcotics are looking.’
Peroni thought of the way Nic had talked about the daughter, about how bright and sincere she was, and the pain he’d seen on her pretty young face. He wondered how Nic would feel when he realized it was his insistence on examining events more closely that would bring Mina Gabriel into a police interview room before long.
‘We’ve got a case, haven’t we?’ he asked, knowing the answer.
Falcone moved his foot through the grime and rubble on the floorboards. Joanne Van Doren’s voice was rising to a scream in the big room beyond. Some Roman lawyer was beginning to feel her anger. It sounded as if the man wasn’t giving her the news she wanted.
The inspector’s mournful grey eyes scanned the bare room, and the larger space outside, then came to rest on Peroni.
‘I honestly don’t know. I hate this sort of thing. It’s starting to feel grubby already. I wish Nic were on duty. Perhaps if I-’
‘He needs a break,’ Peroni cut in. ‘He needs to learn there’s more to life than work. There’s Agata too. We agreed on this, Leo. Remember?’
‘I remember,’ Falcone muttered and threw up his hands in a gesture of surrender.
FOUR
The little turquoise scooter wound its way slowly around the hot and humid streets of Rome as Costa listened to Mina unearthing the traces of Beatrice Cenci’s past as if they were ley lines waiting to be rediscovered beneath the dust.
They stopped at the site of the ancient Tordinona prison, northwest of the Piazza Navona, where she was tortured. Then the Vespa worked through the back streets towards the Campo dei Fiori, to the spot in the Via di Monserrato where a plaque on the wall marked the position of another former Vatican hellhole, the jail of Corte Savella. It was in this narrow, ordinary street that she spent her last night on earth before being walked by hooded monks to the block a few minutes away by the Ponte Sant’Angelo. It had taken until 11 September 1999, four hundred years after her execution, for the city’s rulers to make public their shame about her death. The words on the wall marked the site from which she had been taken to the scaffold, ‘
By lunch time they stood outside the Palazzo Cenci. In the bright August sunlight the place still seemed forbidding, a private fortress, built on its own little hill which, like much else around, had taken on the Cenci name. Mina showed him the tiny pink-walled church in the intimate little piazza at the summit of the modest mound, in the shadow of the palace. The tablet on the facade marked its reconstruction in 1575, thanking ‘Franciscus Cincius’, Beatrice’s own tormenting father, for the work. Inside the closed building, Mina said, was an unmarked tomb originally planned for Francesco. It now contained the quartered remains of Giacomo, his son and murderer. The father himself was hurriedly buried in the countryside where he was killed, in the hope that the crime would never be discovered.
‘Every September the eleventh,’ she said, looking back at the palace, ‘there’s a mass here for Beatrice and her family in the chapel. I want to go if I can.’ She looked at him. ‘Some Romans still love her.’
‘It was Romans who killed her,’ Costa pointed out.
‘Not the ordinary people. They approved of what she did. Standing up for herself.’
‘Do you?’ he asked.
She sat down on the bonnet of a Fiat saloon parked lazily in the road and toyed with her long, blonde hair again.
‘Yes, I think she was right. What choice did she have?’ She took a piece of gum out of her pocket, popped it in her mouth and said, ‘You know an awful lot for a policeman.’
FIVE
Next the Vespa went to the bridge where Beatrice died, now little more than another traffic-choked stretch of road by the Tiber. Mina pointed out what she believed to be the place: in the middle of the busy Lungotevere where pedestrians crossed to walk onto the footbridge of the Ponte Sant’Angelo. He parked the scooter outside a cafe in a little lane. They waited for the lights then walked to the cobbled stones that led across the Tiber to the vast, hulking shape which had once been the mausoleum of Hadrian. The Castel Sant’Angelo’s soft brown stone, a vast cylinder towering over the river, seemed to shimmer in the midday heat. The girl dragged him past each of the angels on the bridge, fanciful, heavenly creatures, some bearing musical instruments, some vicious devices from the stations of the cross.
This bend in the river was one of his favourite points in Rome, a place where every aspect of the city’s character, imperial, Renaissance and modern, seemed to converge. It was hard to imagine the streets thronged with crowds, silent, anticipating a hideous act to end a brief and terrible story. Yet here, by the bridge that was now a favourite place for tourists to take pictures, the city had once executed criminals with a shocking regularity.
Mina stopped him as they walked back to the scooter.
‘They say that every September the eleventh Beatrice’s ghost comes back here, carrying her head beneath her arm.’
Costa frowned. He’d heard so many such tales.
‘Romans have a fondness for the supernatural. We’re a credulous race.’
‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ she asked outright.
‘No.’
She seemed to approve of his answer.
‘I remember talking to Daddy about it. He said, if you think of all the millions of people who’ve died there ought to be ghosts everywhere. It doesn’t make sense. We’d be surrounded by ghosts in mourning. For each other. For us. You wouldn’t be able to think for the sound of their crying.’
Mina Gabriel placed a finger on the stone base of the statue of an angel in front of them, a beautiful figure, fluid and full of movement, in its hands a cruel crown of thorns.
He followed the gaze of the statue above them. The creature’s blank eyes were set on the dome of St Peter’s, as if seeking salvation, or some semblance of reason.
A scowl crossed her innocent face as she glanced towards the great basilica too.
‘They’d kill someone just for wanting to be themselves.’
‘Did you talk to your father about Beatrice a lot?’
‘I was talking about Galileo. And all the others. Don’t you know about the Confraternita?’
She was testing him. He was sure of it.
‘No,’ he replied.
‘Another time,’ Mina replied quickly. ‘Daddy didn’t talk to me about Beatrice. What makes you think that?’
‘You said. .’
‘About ghosts. Not Beatrice. Not ever.’
There was a hiatus in the conversation. A stiffness. Something unsaid.
‘They took her body along the Via Giulia,’ she said, returning to the subject, pointing out the direction back to the street that paralleled the river. ‘Then across the Ponte Sisto.’ One more sweep of her arm to the old footbridge
