I was thinking, he wanted to say. About Agata and what she’d told him. About fairy-tales and the curious, insubstantial nature of human belief.
‘If we’d been here a couple of minutes earlier. .’ Rosa added.
He took the drink away, put it on the table, took her arms. She fought him a little, but not much.
‘Then we’d be dead too. Don’t you know that?’
She grabbed hold of the booze and took a clumsy drink.
‘He was still a cop, wasn’t he?’
Costa turned round, bent down, lifted the first sheet and saw Riggi’s sour features beneath the fabric.
It was wrong to stop there and he knew it. So he walked round and removed the sheet from the second corpse. A woman in the crowd cried out, a shriek of shock mixed with disgust, and it sounded like a scream of protest, at him, for letting this ugly, bloody fact be seen beneath the fading light of a beautiful Roman evening.
A small red fire lit up in Costa’s head. He turned round, saw the woman, saw the anger and outrage in her face, and said, ‘If you don’t want to see, Signora, I suggest you walk away.’
A few of them started to mutter. None moved. He didn’t care any more.
Costa knelt down by the corpse and looked at the kid’s face. Part of his scalp had been blown away, revealing bone and tissue. His glassy eyes seemed locked on something in the distance. The thin line of his mouth was pulled back in a rictus leer. Washed-out denim jacket, black T-shirt, cheap jeans, curly dark hair. The same clothes Costa had seen in the Lone Star bar the night before, when this same youth had led him to the house in the Via Beatrice Cenci, and the corpse of Joanne Van Doren, a suicide that wasn’t.
Gingerly, he lifted the edge of the jacket, aware that Teresa would screech at him for this. But there was something in the inside pocket, a shape that looked familiar, and Costa knew he had to see.
A stash of notes. Eight euros, just enough for a meal and a drink or two. A small plastic bag with white powder in it. A single condom. A passport with the maroon cover of a European Union document, and the crest of the United Kingdom.
He opened it up and saw the same face he’d seen the previous evening, the same blank, surly expression too on the photograph beneath the clear security film, issued only six months before. And a name: Robert Peter Gabriel.
PART NINE
ONE
The first Thursday of September, a morning so hot it seemed summer would never leave.
A day and a half had passed since the murders in Trastevere. The gunning-down of a police officer and the missing Robert Gabriel had changed everything, brought a feverish anxiety to the headlines, the mood in the Questura, and the minds of the large team of officers now working on the case. It was rare for a member of the police to die on duty, an event that would usually demand some show of visible mourning on the part of the authorities.
The circumstances of Riggi’s murder made this difficult. The media had quickly picked up the rumour that the dead man was under investigation for corruption. They soon learned, too, that Robert Gabriel had been in the pay of the Vadisi. When they coupled this with their existing fascination for the Gabriel case, and its links with the Cenci, they seemed to feel they’d found the perfect story, one that embraced everything that could sell news to a public desperate for both titillation and a source of outrage about the damaged state of the world. Murder, crime, sex — and the young, innocent-seeming face of Mina Gabriel, now grieving for her dead, wicked brother. The tale had it all.
The demonstrations outside the Questura had grown. Judging by their posters, their complaints now extended to police incompetence and inefficiency in allowing the suspect brother to be killed by a group of criminals who should have been arrested years ago, and thrown out of Italy as unwanted foreigners. Costa recognized this shade of public opinion. It was one that surfaced from time to time, when a case of injustice hit the headlines and touched some popular nerve.
The Gabriel case had unleashed a torrent of deep resentment towards the authorities over the state of law and order on the streets. It was a bad-tempered spirit, one that someone other than Leo Falcone might have exorcized the easy way, swiftly laying the blame for the murders of Malise Gabriel and Joanne Van Doren at the door of the dead son, closing that side of the case for good. Then, when the furore had abated a little, quietly working through a list of the known henchmen the Vadisi might have used for the hit.
But easy was never Falcone’s style. The Gabriel case continued to concern him. The dogged inspector would not rest until he got to the very bottom of the strange and opaque event in the apartment in the Via Beatrice Cenci the previous weekend. As he made clear repeatedly in meeting after meeting, it was this that appeared to have triggered the series of tragedies which culminated in the shooting in the street two nights before. Truth never acquiesced to convenience in Falcone’s mind. It was one of his defining characteristics, an awkward, staunch persistence that seemed ingrained in the man’s personality.
Costa admired this, and could see and understand his reasoning. They now knew that Malise Gabriel’s death was not accidental, as it was meant to appear. The loose scaffolding ties. The blood and tissue that had been revealed on Di Lauro’s handkerchief, wiped from the radiator in Mina’s room. The clear evidence that Gabriel was a difficult, argumentative man, one who had been conducting an adulterous affair with Joanne Van Doren in the secret photographic studio in the basement of her building.
All of these factors aroused suspicion. What irked Falcone most was the continued silence on the part of Mina and her mother, their mute response to his many questions, their unwillingness to become involved. This was irrational and odd, and Costa knew it too. He had told Agata that he believed Mina was an innocent party in what had taken place, perhaps an aggrieved one too, not that he had mentioned that. His words were only partly meant to reassure her. Some truth continued to elude them and it went beyond the curious silence on the part of the young English girl and her mother.
Then, as they assembled for one more case conference, Teresa Lupo summoned them suddenly to forensic. Finally, some hard evidence had, it seemed, been unearthed.
TWO
In the Questura’s largest forensic lab office Silvio Di Capua gazed at the grubby object in front of him, grinned and said, ‘You’ve no idea how lucky we are. There are a million illegal dumps around Lazio and most of them would have this stuff in ashes by now. Behold.’
Forensic had tracked down some of the household material taken away by Joanne Van Doren’s builders the previous Sunday. It had been found on a site near Latina, untouched since it arrived. Di Capua’s attention had come to focus on a mattress from a single bed, one that looked depressingly familiar. The sheet was still on it, with the white and green mosaic pattern Costa and Peroni had seen when they walked into Mina’s room the previous Sunday, before the place had been cleared.
‘Why wasn’t it burned?’ Costa said.
Falcone looked at him and sighed. Judging by the expressions on the faces of Teresa and Peroni they found the question baffling too.
Di Capua shook his head.
‘It was some crappy little place that was behind schedule or something. Am I meant to care? Maria?’
The stocky young assistant who now seemed permanently attached to Teresa’s deputy beamed as she showed them the marks left by her aerosol.
‘Semen,’ she said proudly. ‘We’ve sent off a sample for analysis.’
Costa took a closer look at the mattress.
‘Do we know for sure this is Mina Gabriel’s?’
