practice to leave the timing up to the relatives. It’s not critical in this case. So I’ve never pushed them.’
The two men stared at the pathologist.
‘They’ve got a dead son on a slab in the morgue and they don’t want to see him?’ the lawyer asked.
‘Dead son, dead father,’ she said. ‘You’d be surprised, Toni. Sometimes people are like that.’
‘Then. .’ Grimaldi extended a hand. ‘There you have it, Leo. Tell them it’s important you have an ID, however upsetting that may be. Once you have them here I bow to your improvizational skills. Just don’t expect me to pick up any debris you leave behind. Consider yourself warned.’
FIVE
By the time they were back in the morgue, waiting on the Gabriels to arrive for the formal identification of Robert, Falcone was in an oddly foul mood. The nature of this case, and the way it had propelled him into the usually cherished role of antagonist, had come to haunt the man in some way. Peroni had told Teresa how Cecilia Gabriel had slapped him that day in the Casina delle Civette when he first broached the subject of incest. Falcone was thoughtful, intelligent and, in spite of himself sometimes, deeply sensitive. His personal distaste for the case was obvious. The very fact that its successful prosecution might depend upon his own resolute curiosity into these dark and disturbing secrets unsettled him, she felt. Grimaldi’s comment — that success might lie in breaking Mina Gabriel or her mother — weighed on his mind. He was never happy or predictable in such moods.
‘Can you tidy him up a little?’ Falcone asked as he stared miserably at the body on the silver table, shifting on his shoes, uncomfortable. More from the prospect of questioning the family than any squeamishness, she guessed. ‘I don’t want this to be any worse than it has to be.’
‘We’ve done as much as we can,’ she said. There was a folded sheet covering the gaping wound in the skull. The blood had been washed off his face. He had olive skin, and deep, sunken eyes. Seen like this she began to understand he could only be an adopted child. There was no physical resemblance at all to the young girl she’d seen in the newspapers. ‘Let’s get the ID out of the way and then I’ll finish. It’s not as if I’m looking for any surprises, am I?’
‘I imagine not,’ Falcone answered.
‘I hate this part,’ Teresa murmured, staring at the still, sad corpse. She liked to think of herself as a professional, someone who worked alongside the inevitable, death in all its forms, an officer of the state who brought, on occasion, some justice to the living. But comfort? That was rare, and slow to arrive if it ever did. Grief was the invisible spirit that rose from the dead, swiftly, bringing with it anger and resentment. She and Falcone had enjoyed many long conversations about the popular notion of ‘closure’ for the relatives of those who had died through violence, accident or any one of the everyday diseases that stole breath from the mouths of both young and old, most of whom who never dreamed for a moment that their lives would come to such an end, without warning, often without explanation or any rational need. Both she and Falcone hated the term, thought it a misnomer, an easy lie, like ‘moving on’. The bereaved needed such fantasies, perhaps, as a way to allow them to survive the difficult days. But these were convenient lies that fooled no one, fabrications designed to hide the plain truth: death was a cruel intrusion, an ever-present ghost dogging the footsteps of the living as they trudged through the world.
Leo Falcone loathed this necessary legal ceremony as much as she did, even when he hoped to gain some insight from it. The tall inspector, serious in a darker suit than he normally wore, went out of the room then led Mina and Cecilia Gabriel back into the morgue. They looked like mother and daughter, Teresa thought, both tall and slender, with very English faces, classically beautiful in an old-fashioned way. She rather envied women like this: high cheek-bones, large, sad eyes, pale, perfect skin, a timeless kind of beauty, that of women from the pages of glossy magazines or canvases on the walls of galleries.
The mother’s cheeks were a little hollow, her eyes and mouth surrounded by lines, as if marked with some long-standing pain. This was the first time she’d seen the girl in the flesh and she appreciated immediately how someone as careful and attentive as Nic would find her fascinating. The daughter had none of the detached, incurious disdain of her mother. She wore a simple black T-shirt and jeans. Her pale young face was bright, intelligent, alert, with sharp brown eyes that swept these strange, perhaps frightening surroundings, and avoided nothing. With her fair hair swept back her appearance seemed astonishingly close to that of the famous image of Beatrice Cenci that had appeared to be everywhere, on TV screens, in newspapers, on magazine racks, over the past few days. There was an intelligent, touching grief about her, not the blank, raging anger Teresa felt she saw in the mother.
There was a man behind them. He wore a dark navy suit, a pale pink shirt and a black silk tie, a little overdressed for a lawyer, she thought.
Falcone stepped forward and said, ‘Signor Santacroce. This is a family affair, I think.’
‘If they want me, Inspector,’ the man said in a patrician tone that bordered upon condescension. ‘I’m a family friend after all. But only if I’m needed.’
‘Stay, Bernard,’ Cecilia Gabriel announced without turning her head for a moment as she approached the corpse on the metal table. ‘But don’t look, please. This is distressing enough for us. It’s not for you.’
The man nodded and stayed at the door, out of sight of the corpse on the table.
The two of them, mother and daughter, of similar height and stature, and the same stiff, upright English stance, reached the body and stood there in silence. Then Mina Gabriel reached beneath the white sheet, lifted the fabric and took the still right hand there, holding the fingers in her own. Teresa watched and felt a deep, wordless sadness at this sight. The youth’s cold flesh was, for a few moments, enclosed in her thin white fingers, those of a musician or an artist. Brother and sister, in name if not blood. They grew up together, must once have held hands this way as they walked down the street.
Teresa was conscious of Falcone, glowering at her. She stepped forward and took the girl’s elbow lightly.
‘Mina. I’m sorry. There are rules in these situations. Please. You mustn’t touch.’
‘He’s my brother,’ she said softly, staring at the waxy, frozen face on the table, and the folded sheet that covered the dreadful wound to the skull.
‘He’s a murder victim,’ Falcone replied, quietly, respectfully. ‘I must insist. .’
Slowly, reluctantly, she placed the youth’s hand back beneath the sheet then looked at her own fingers.
She went and stood closer to the mother. Neither said a word.
‘Don’t you want to know anything?’ Falcone asked.
‘About what?’ Cecilia Gabriel said.
‘About how Robert died?’
She seemed cold, unmoved almost, as if this were not quite real. Mina’s arms were wound round herself. The girl was starting to weep in silence.
‘My son was a drug dealer, Inspector,’ Cecilia Gabriel said in very precise, clipped tones. ‘You know that. You know, also, that in a sense we lost Robert a long time ago. He chose the kind of people he wished to be with. I’m sure you have a much better sense of how he came to die than I can ever begin to appreciate. Does it matter? He’s. .’ Then the mask cracked, the real woman, a mother, Teresa thought, was visible, though there were still no tears. ‘He’s gone for good. I imagine you can heap on him all the blame you wish and none of us can object, can we?’
A brief touch of colour rose in Falcone’s cheeks.
‘I’m trying very hard to understand the circumstances of four violent deaths. Your husband. Your son. Joanne Van Doren. A serving police officer.’
‘From what I’ve read in the papers about him. .’ the Englishwoman began.
‘The papers,’ he retorted, ‘are full of material I find deeply questionable. I can’t help but wonder where some of it came from.’
Mina Gabriel as Beatrice Cenci, Teresa thought to herself. He was making a good point. The girl’s hair, her very manner, almost seemed to be modelled on that now infamous portrait. The publicity was inevitable, though the Roman media had picked up the connection very quickly indeed.
Santacroce intervened, in a mild, conciliatory tone.
