James Becker - The Nosferatu Scroll

Nobody, apart from the pathologist and the senior carabinieri officers investigating the murders had been told what had been found in the victims’ stomachs. Now they had a potential witness, or perhaps even a member of the group responsible for the killings, who was prepared to talk to them. This, Lombardi knew, could finally break the case wide open.

By now he was walking towards the end of the street. The last part of his journey — a right turn over one bridge and then an immediate left turn over another — would take him into the southern end of the Campo.

Then somebody grabbed his arm and swung him round, and Lombardi found himself looking into the hostile eyes of a man he was sure he’d never seen before.

‘Who are you?’ Lombardi demanded, casually loosening his jacket so that he could reach his pistol more easily.

The stranger smiled slightly and slid his hands into his jacket pockets. ‘I’m Marco.’

‘But we were supposed-’ Lombardi began.

The other man shook his head. ‘By now, you’ll have plain-clothes officers and uniformed police forming a nice tight circle around the Campo, and probably a surveillance unit or two watching the cafe. If I walk into the square with you, I’ll only leave it with my hands cuffed behind my back. And that’s not a part of my plan at all.’

‘And what is your plan, Marco?’ Lombardi asked, relaxing slightly.

‘You don’t need to know that.’ The man’s voice was almost haughty, his manner arrogant, as if he were talking to an inferior. ‘All I want to do is give you a message to take to your colleagues, because we think you’re getting a little too close to us. And that must stop.’

‘So what’s the message?’

‘This,’ Marco replied. Shifting his right hand slightly, he pulled the trigger of the compact semi-automatic pistol he held concealed in his pocket.

The nine-millimetre bullet, fired at almost point-blank range, ploughed through Lombardi’s stomach, driving him on to the ground, his hands clutching at the wound. The sound of the shot echoed deafeningly around the street, and the few pedestrians in the vicinity stopped dead and stared in horror at the scene being played out in front of them.

Unhurriedly, Marco walked a couple of paces forward to where Lombardi lay writhing and screaming on the ground and looked down at him.

‘You should have stuck to what you’re good at,’ he said, ‘which is catching common criminals, and left us to get on with our important work.’

He pulled the pistol from his pocket, and almost casually fired two further shots into Lombardi’s chest. Then he turned and strode away, tucking the pistol out of sight as he did so.

Behind him, Lombardi’s legs twitched a couple of times in his death throes. And then he lay still.

‘Any luck?’ Bronson asked, opening the door to their hotel bedroom. It was early afternoon, and Angela was sitting near the window in the pale sunshine, frowning at her computer screen.

‘That really depends on your definition of luck,’ she said. ‘Rather than trying to tackle the diary, which I thought might take me a while because my Latin is probably a bit rusty, I decided to do the easy bit first. I thought I’d start by trying to trace the family history of the woman in the grave.’

‘And did you?’

‘Well, you know that I photographed the slab that covered the tomb?’ Bronson nodded: she’d photographed everything in sight the previous evening. ‘When I looked at the pictures, even blown up on the screen of my laptop, almost the entire inscription is illegible. Absolutely the only thing I can make out for certain is the date of the burial, which was eighteen twenty-five, and I actually read that when we were in the cemetery last night.’

‘That slab looked very badly weathered to me,’ Bronson said. ‘In fact, I suggested to one of the carabinieri officers that you might be able to assist with dating the grave by looking at those shards of pottery we saw in the tomb.’

Angela shook her head. ‘No, you misunderstood me. The slab was weathered, I agree. That’s not surprising, bearing in mind it’s been sitting out there, exposed to the elements, for nearly two hundred years. But that wasn’t why I can’t read the name on the gravestone. The letters have actually been chipped off, probably with a hammer and chisel, because I can just about make out the marks of a steel tool on the stone.’

‘You mean it’s been vandalized?’

‘Unless Venetian vandals are better equipped than their British counterparts, probably not. To me, this looks like a determined attempt to obliterate the name of the woman in the grave.’

‘Could you make out any part of the inscription?’ Bronson asked.

‘I thought her surname began with the letter “P”, but I couldn’t even swear to this with what I found on the tomb. There’s a short gap where none of the stone has been chipped away, which I assume was the space between her first name and her family name, and in one of my photographs you can just about see the upper half of the letter carved into the stone. But it could also be the letter “R”, “B” or even a “D” — not much to go on.’

‘Can I see it?’

Angela turned the laptop so that Bronson could see the screen easily.

The display showed a greyish stone, the surface marked with patches of lichen in faded reds and greens. On the right-hand side of the frame was a faint semicircular mark, barely visible, with a straight line on the left-hand side of it. It looked like the upper part of the letter ‘P’. Above and around the marks, several parallel scratches could be seen.

Angela pointed at them. ‘You can’t see it terribly well in this picture,’ she said, ‘but that area is lower than the surrounding stone, and I think those marks were left by the chisel that hacked away that piece of stone.’

‘So why didn’t the person who did this chip off the rest of the letter?’

‘They did,’ Angela said shortly, ‘or they tried to. Most inscriptions on masonry use a V-shaped cut to form the letters, and that was done here. The upper part of the letter was removed, and what we’re seeing in this picture is the deepest cut made by the mason’s chisel, the very bottom of the V-cut that formed the letter. This is the only picture that shows it, and I think that was just luck. The camera angle meant that the flash just managed to pick it out.’

Angela looked away from the screen and up at Bronson. ‘And where did you get to? You’ve been gone for hours.’

‘I know. Oddly enough, I went back to the Isola di San Michele. I followed those two carabinieri to the edge of the lagoon where there was a police launch waiting for them. I watched them head out to the island, then I hopped on a vaporetto and followed them.’

‘They went back to the grave, you mean?’

‘That was my assumption too, but they went to a different part of the cemetery because another body had been found there. A fresh corpse, I mean, not another old burial.’

Bronson explained to Angela what he’d seen, not mentioning the video and still images he’d taken at the scene, because he was, in truth, still a little embarrassed about what he’d done.

‘So that’s an entirely separate crime,’ Angela said.

‘Actually, I don’t even know if it was a crime. All I saw was the body of a girl with long blonde hair being carted off, presumably for forensic examination and an autopsy. She could easily have been the victim of accidental death. All I saw, really, was her hair.’

‘So the fact that her body was on the island, not far from the broken grave, is just a coincidence,’ Angela said, looking sceptical. ‘You think that the two incidents are entirely unconnected.’