Cecilia Gabriel folded her arms and stared at them.
‘Signora,’ Peroni said, remembering how they’d agreed to tackle this subject. ‘Your husband was reading his own book the night he died.’
‘Is there a law against that?’
‘Not at all. But he used a bookmark. It had a strange message written on it.’
Falcone took out the plastic evidence envelope and showed it to her, only the reverse side, with the long, cursive scrawl.
‘Is that his handwriting?’ the inspector asked.
She shook her head.
‘It doesn’t look like it.’
‘And the words?’
‘“
‘We know,’ Peroni said calmly. ‘But the context. .’
She laughed, as if genuinely amused by their ignorance.
‘And you call yourselves Romans? The context? This is the Casina delle Civette. The home of the Confraternity of the Owls. The society my husband worked for was formed by friends of Galileo when he fell under suspicion. It was their way of supporting him. Galileo was one of the inner circle. He used to come here. To this very building. Secretly. He didn’t dare let the Vatican know. The men who built this tower. .’ She looked around them. ‘They paid a price too. Not with their lives. They were too aristocratic for that. But Bernard’s ancestor, Paolo Santacroce, was persecuted for two decades. This is his legacy. Their legacy. A testament to the power of truth over superstition. That was Malise’s life’s work and so they persecuted him too.’
‘Who persecuted him?’ Peroni asked, genuinely puzzled.
‘You wouldn’t understand,’ she muttered.
Falcone said, ‘I need to call the Questura. After that I would like to talk to Mr Santacroce.’
She pointed back to the circular staircase through which they’d entered.
‘One floor up. I’ll ask if he will see you. I work as Bernard’s personal assistant.’
‘Thank you.’ He looked at the back of the picture. ‘Signora. This is a delicate question but I regret it must be asked. We know from the newspapers, from the controversy that your affair engendered twenty years ago, that your husband was — how do I put this easily? — not averse to relationships with girls much younger than him.’
She didn’t blink, didn’t move.
‘I was nineteen when I fell pregnant,’ Cecilia Gabriel said. ‘That didn’t make Malise a paedophile then. Nor does it even in these supposedly enlightened days.’
‘What I have to ask is painfully simple,’ Falcone went on. ‘Did this. . taste stay with him through life?’ He flipped the picture over. ‘This was the bookmark he was using on the night he died. It was more than a message. It was a photograph. See. .’
Falcone thrust the black and white picture in front of her. Peroni found he couldn’t read the expression on her narrow, agonized face as she stared at the nude adolescent torso twisting on the crumpled sheets, face out of view, a single lock of fair hair falling down onto her slim shoulders, neck twisted as if in pain, face and head cut off by the frame. And on the fabric, the ragged damp mark of a stain.
‘One must wonder,’ the inspector went on. ‘Because of the apparent similarity, which seems remarkable. Is this a photograph of your daughter? Is it possible. .’
The woman lunged forward and struck Falcone hard across the right cheek with her open hand. The noise of the blow echoed around the room and the force brought colour to Falcone’s face, from the silver goatee to his cheek-bones. Gingerly he placed his fingers on the area where she’d hit him. He looked hurt.
Peroni walked forward, stood between them, looked her in the eye and said, ‘I could arrest you for assaulting a police officer.’
‘Do it. I can’t wait to be in court and tell people the kind of accusation you scum throw at a grieving widow.’
She was utterly calm and in control of herself.
‘We’re attempting to find out how and why your husband died,’ he reminded her.
‘Malise stepped out onto the balcony for a cigarette and Joanne Van Doren’s lousy scaffolding collapsed. End of story. Why do you have to make everything so complicated?’
Peroni shrugged his big shoulders.
‘Because sometimes it is. The photograph, Mrs Gabriel. It’s unusual. We have a job to do. It’s rarely a pleasant one.’
She snatched the picture from Falcone’s fingers, held it to her face and glared at them, demanding they see.
‘It’s me, you idiot. From twenty years ago. Malise kept it. He reprinted it from time to time. It was ours. A memory of happier days.
‘Privacy doesn’t concern me,’ Falcone said, still stroking the place where she’d slapped him. ‘Death does.’
‘It was an accident!’
He took his hand away from his cheek and retrieved the bookmark from her grip.
‘I would like to see Bernard Santacroce now, if you please.’
FOUR
The scooter climbed the steep, winding road from Trastevere and the noise it made meant Peroni’s song from the previous day — Vespa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa — rarely left Nic Costa’s head all the way. They got off in the forecourt beneath the white marble facade of San Pietro in Montorio. He recalled what Mina had told him about the procession from the Ponte Sant’Angelo to this small and, by Roman standards, humble, church. It must have been a long and arduous journey, one taken by thousands following the bier that contained Beatrice’s broken corpse.
Montorio was part way up the Gianicolo hill, by a bend on the busy road to the summit where Garibaldi had once fought. It was a quiet place, green, with expensive houses and views of Rome that encompassed an entirely new perspective. The dome of St Peter’s was invisible. All one saw was a view back over the river to the centre which, from this height, fell into an unfamiliar panorama of distant steeples and towers.
‘The Tempietto,’ she declared, snatching off her helmet, shaking her long blonde hair then popping another stick of gum into her mouth.
He followed her to the iron gate of the cloister next to the church. It was locked. The opening hours had passed. Inside he could see Bramante’s tiny temple, circular with Doric columns, perfectly proportioned in a way which Palladio would consciously copy.
‘It’s a martyrium,’ Mina told him, clinging to the bars, poking her pale, narrow face through as she tried to see more, winding her leg round the iron uprights, as a child would with a playground ride. ‘That’s what you call a monument that marks the site of a martyr’s death. Peter, supposedly.’ Her hand rose, and with it a didactic finger, as if she were practising to be the tour guide for Joanne Van Doren’s non-existent condominium customers. ‘They used the hill for crucifixions. That much is true but Daddy said there’s not a shred of evidence Peter was executed here. Or even that he came to Rome.’
Costa recalled this argument well. It was a recurrent one when sceptics and believers locked horns.
‘I think some people would challenge that idea.’
She watched him.
‘Would you?’
Costa thought about it for a moment and said, ‘I’m not qualified. We all have the right to believe what we want, for or against. I don’t think private opinions are worth fighting over.’
‘You sound like Bernard, Daddy’s boss. Typical liberal woolly thinking. The truth is the truth. If you could
