James Becker - The Nosferatu Scroll

And never, in Bianchi’s experience, had any one of these ‘bottom feeders’ carried a firearm. But now, Chief Inspector Carlo Lombardi lay dead in the centre of the screened-off area, three bullet holes in his body, and his dark blood staining the old stones on which he lay.

A plain-clothes officer looked up as Bianchi came to a stop beside the feet of the dead man.

‘A bad business, Filippo,’ the officer said.

Bianchi nodded. ‘What happened, Piero? Any witnesses?’

‘He was executed, that’s what happened,’ Inspector Piero Spadaccino replied angrily. ‘He was shot down in cold blood, right here in the middle of Venice. It looks like the first bullet hit his stomach, because of the position of his hands. And either of the second two in his chest would have been enough to kill him. The doctor thinks both those bullets probably went through his heart. I tell you, Filippo, this looks to me like a gangland killing.’

‘Any witnesses?’ Bianchi asked again.

Spadaccino nodded. ‘Several,’ he replied shortly. ‘None of them saw the first shot, though they all heard it. A medium-calibre pistol, probably nine millimetre. That took Lombardi down, and they all turned to look. Then the killer walked over to him, lying here on the ground, said something to him, and then fired the other two shots. An execution; nothing more, nothing less.

‘All the witnesses describe a man in a dark suit with black hair, dark eyes and a tanned complexion, no distinguishing features. About the only point of interest in the descriptions is that a couple of people said the man was very casual — no hurry, no sign of stress. He just walked over, shot the chief inspector and then walked away. One man told me he actually thought it was part of a film, and he spent a few seconds looking around to see where the cameras were. I’ve got my men taking full written statements from the witnesses now, and obviously we’ll do follow-up questioning as well, but I don’t think any of them will be able to give us a photofit for this guy, or pick him out of a line-up.’

Spadaccino paused, and he and Bianchi both looked down at the crumpled figure lying on the stones between them.

‘You worked with him, Filippo,’ Spadaccino said softly. ‘What the hell could he have got himself involved with that could lead to this? I mean, was he investigating organized crime?’

Bianchi shook his head. ‘Not that I’m aware of.’

In fact, Inspector Bianchi had a very good idea who had ordered the assassination of his superior officer. The trouble was, if he said anything, the plan he was working on would probably come to nothing. And now the end-game was so close, he couldn’t take that chance.

For the moment, all he could do was wait.

Bronson had visited various newspaper morgues in Britain over the years, and he was all too familiar with the unmistakable smell of musty newsprint that seemed to infuse such places, even those that had embraced modern technology to the extent of installing microfiche machines.

The Venice newspaper office had taken a step further into the twenty-first century, and had scanned all their previous copies into a series of hard drives that were accessible through a couple of PC terminals. The newspapers printed more than twenty years earlier had simply been scanned as images, and searching through those would be a laborious process, just like searching microfiche records. To find anything relevant amongst those copies would really require a fairly accurate date, so that the appropriate edition could be inspected.

But the articles and stories in the more recent newspapers had been stored as text files, as well as images, which meant that Bronson was able to search for a specific word or phrase. He really had no clue when any other young women’s disappearances had been reported — or even if there had been any such disappearances — but, because of this facility, he was able to carry out extensive and detailed searches without much difficulty.

The results were generated almost immediately, and he printed out the relevant stories as each one appeared on the screen in front of him. Within a matter of minutes, Bronson realized that there had been a spate of disappearances from Venice and the surrounding area, including a couple of girls who had been reported missing from the mainland. The only common factor, as far as he could tell, was that no trace of most of the young women had been found — in fact, only two bodies had turned up. It was as if the other girls had simply vanished.

The Italian police, of course, had been informed, and had carried out interviews with friends and relatives of the missing girls, but with no clues, and without any bodies to analyse and investigate, there was little they could do. It was even suggested that the girls might have become romantically involved with somebody, or that perhaps they had just run away.

These suggestions irritated and angered the parents involved, who all believed that, even if their daughters had eloped or run off, they would still have written or telephoned to confirm that they were alive. The continued lack of any form of communication from any of the young women was distressing for all concerned, but there was still little that the police could do, simply because they had nothing to go on.

Bronson totted up the total number of disappearances, and realized that at least a dozen girls had vanished over the previous eighteen months, six of them recently. Prior to that, there had been reports of a couple of women who had gone missing, but in both cases there appeared to be good reasons for them to have left their families. And both had later reappeared, alive and well. So unless there was something about these twelve girls that the journalists had failed to report, it looked very much to Bronson as if a serial abductor, who was almost certainly a serial killer as well, was operating in Venice. And operating with impunity.

This was interesting, but that was all, because Bronson knew that if he could deduce this from reading a handful of newspaper articles, the Italian police, who would have had access to those same articles plus all the other reports relating to the disappearances, must have come to exactly the same conclusion. And perhaps, if the body found in the cemetery on the Isola di San Michele was that of a girl who had disappeared — and a very recent edition of the local paper reported another disappearance the previous week — the police would now have plenty of clues to work with. In Bronson’s experience, the dead could speak, and often produced a wealth of information about the manner in which they’d died, and sometimes a lot about their killers as well.

Almost as an afterthought, he did another search of the archives, this time looking for articles on a totally unrelated subject — the vandalizing of graves. He was somewhat surprised to discover that there was plenty of information in the back numbers of the newspaper about this as well. Again, he printed a series of articles so that he could read them at his leisure back to the hotel.

What he’d found surprised him so much that he decided to run a third search, which produced a single result. It had nothing whatsoever to do with Venice, but Bronson took a copy of this as well. You never knew, he thought, what information might prove valuable. Especially when it related to vampires.

‘It’ll be dark in three or four hours,’ Angela objected. ‘Are you sure you want to go back there again today?’

They were back in the hotel room, the newspaper printouts Bronson had obtained spread across the bed.

‘I’m not bothered about the dead girls,’ Bronson said. ‘Investigating those disappearances is a police matter, without question. It’s nothing to do with us. But these other stories I found, about the vandalized graves out on the island, are really interesting. I just thought I’d like to go over there and see what sort of damage had been done, and also find out the age of the tombs that had been targeted.’