James Becker - The Nosferatu Scroll

‘You think there’s a fresh corpse in there, don’t you?’ Angela asked, and Bronson nodded. ‘Right, here’s my camera.’

Bronson took it from her, walked back to the tomb, aimed the lens through the hole, and pressed the shutter release. There was a sudden explosion of light as the flash was triggered. It took the camera a couple of seconds to process the image, and then a picture of the interior of the tomb appeared in full colour on the small LCD screen.

Bronson turned away from the tomb, and handed the camera back to Angela.

‘Oh my God, Chris,’ she whispered, her face turning pale.

Bronson nodded grimly, took his mobile phone from his pocket and dialled 112. They needed the emergency services, fast.

‘Signor Bronson, we meet again.’ The carabinieri sergeant looked at Bronson appraisingly. ‘You seem to be making something of a habit of being at the scene of desecrated tombs.’

‘It’s only happened twice,’ Bronson objected.

‘Apart from some simple vandalism over the past few years, there have only been two cases that I know of where graves in this cemetery have been desecrated. The first one was yesterday, just over there’ — the sergeant pointed — ‘and when two police officers arrived on the scene, the first person they spoke to was you. And now you’ve called us to report this one as well. That’s two in two days, and the only common factor, Signor Bronson, seems to be you. That’s what I call a habit.’

Behind the sergeant, about half a dozen police officers were in attendance, as well as numerous other people wearing civilian clothes — Bronson presumed they were scene-of-crime technicians, the pathologist and staff from the mortuary.

‘In your call,’ the sergeant referred to his notebook, ‘you said there was a dead girl in the tomb.’

Bronson shook his head. ‘No, I didn’t,’ he said. ‘I actually told the operator there were three dead girls.’

‘Three?’

Bronson nodded.

‘So you looked into the grave?’

‘As a matter of fact, I didn’t. I haven’t got a torch and I wouldn’t have been able to see anything inside the tomb without one. Instead, I used a digital camera with an automatic flash.’

Bronson reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out Angela’s camera, switched it on and found the photograph he had taken through the crack in the lid of the tomb.

The sergeant muttered something under his breath. The image was pin-sharp, and the flash had driven away the darkness inside the grave, and recorded for ever the appalling scene inside it.

Clearly visible in the picture were the stone base and sides of the tomb, and the remains of a very old coffin, most of the wood disintegrated and rotten. Mixed in with the wooden fragments were a few tattered scraps of cloth and, at one end of the grave, the leg bones of a human skeleton. But it wasn’t this evidence of an ancient burial that had transfixed the sergeant. It was the three naked female bodies that were lying on top of the disintegrated coffin, one on top of the other, their corpses already bloated and discoloured as the disintegration of their tissues accelerated.

The sergeant looked at the picture on the LCD screen for a few moments longer, then handed the camera back to Bronson. He turned away and addressed the men who’d arrived in response to Bronson’s call, issuing orders and instructions.

Temporarily dismissed, Bronson walked a few paces to where Angela sat on the ground, her back resting against a gravestone. He sat down beside her and took her hand. She looked pale and shaken by what she’d seen.

‘Why did whoever killed those girls dump their bodies here?’ she asked.

‘That’s easy. Where’s the best place to hide a body?’

‘In a graveyard?’

‘Exactly. And that’s what happened here. If the corner of that slab hadn’t cracked and fallen off, they might never have been discovered.’

‘So can we go home? Back to the hotel, I mean?’ Angela asked.

Bronson shook his head. ‘Not yet. We’ll have to make statements, obviously, and my guess is that the investigating officers will want to speak to us before they’ll let us leave.’

He looked across at the tomb, which was now isolated behind a perimeter of tape to prevent anyone approaching it. Several tripod-mounted floodlights had been positioned around the scene, illuminating the grave in the evening darkness. A technician, wearing white coveralls, latex gloves and with slip-on bootees covering his shoes, was standing just outside the tape, carrying a powerful digital camera. As Bronson watched, he shot at least a couple of dozen pictures of the grave from various angles, moving around the perimeter to do so. Then he ducked under the tape, took several close-up shots of the tomb from all sides, then finally stepped closer still and took several more shots of the interior through the gap in the slab.

‘Why don’t they just take the slab off the top?’ Angela asked.

‘They will do, of course, but first they’ll want to gather as much information as they can about the scene. There might be footprints around the grave, though that’s a bit unlikely on this surface. They’ll want to dust the slab for fingerprints, and thoroughly examine the immediate vicinity of the tomb for any possible clues — objects the perpetrators might have dropped, fibres from their clothing, tool marks on the slab, all that kind of thing. They’ll probably just be wasting their time, in my opinion, because they’ve no idea how many other people might have passed this way since the bodies were dumped here, and of course last night was the Festival of the Dead, when the number of living on the island probably outnumbered the dead.’

‘You think those poor girls were left here before the festival yesterday, then?’

‘Judging by the condition of their bodies, I do. And I think if there are any clues to be found they’ll be inside the tomb, and probably on the corpses themselves. But until the officer who’s been appointed to lead this investigation arrives here, they certainly won’t open the grave.’

The carabinieri sergeant walked back to where Bronson and Angela were sitting, a uniformed constable following behind him.

‘This officer will now take a written statement from you, Signor Bronson, and from your companion,’ he said.

About ten minutes after Bronson had read and signed his own statement, and had translated into Italian Angela’s much shorter statement — which basically corroborated what he had said — and she had signed it in her turn, another half-dozen men arrived at the scene, one of whom was immediately approached by the sergeant.

The two men talked together for a few minutes, then the sergeant pointed towards Bronson and Angela. The other man followed his glance, and nodded. Then he walked across to look closely at the tomb, the sergeant following. Even from where Bronson was sitting, perhaps twenty yards away from the tomb, the smell of putrefaction was unpleasantly strong, and he wasn’t surprised at the expression of distaste on the senior officer’s face as he moved forward to the hole in the slab and peered inside, a small but powerful torch in his hand. Then he stepped back and walked briskly away from the grave.

Bronson and Angela seemed to have been temporarily forgotten, and although Angela wanted to get back to the hotel, Bronson was keen to stay, at least for a few minutes more, and watch the recovery of the bodies. And, as he pointed out, they hadn’t yet been told that they could leave.

The Italians were working in much the same way as English police officers would have done in the same circumstances. Once the tomb was opened, the photographer moved forward again to record the scene. He was followed by several of the investigating officers and a man Bronson thought was probably the pathologist. Only then was the first body lifted out of the grave and transferred immediately into a body bag.