James Becker - The Nosferatu Scroll

‘I had a bad fall, that’s all,’ he said, deciding not to tell the staff what had happened to Angela.

‘Can I help you with something?’

‘We’d like to explore the canals. Is it possible to hire a speedboat for three or four days?’

‘Of course. It will take me a little while to arrange, because this is a popular time of year in Venice, and I may have to try several hire companies. Will you be taking the boat outside the city — into the lagoon, I mean?’

‘I might do, yes. Does that make a difference?’

‘Only to the type of boat. If you’re going into the Lagoon you’ll need one with a more powerful engine. Please leave it with me, Signor Bronson, and I’ll see what I can find. Will tomorrow morning be soon enough?’

Bronson would have preferred to get his hands on a boat straight away, but he replied, ‘Perfect. Thank you.’

He waited while the girl noted down details of his credit card, gave her a smile that was completely at odds with the inner turmoil he was feeling, then walked back up the stairs to their room. He hadn’t done much, but already he felt better, simply knowing that by the morning he would be able to navigate his way around Venice reasonably quickly.

He lay down on the bed for a few minutes, his eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. What could he achieve? he wondered. Yet again, he replayed the events of the day, trying to remember any clues or indications that might help the carabinieri narrow the search. But he came up with a blank.

Then something struck him. Because the gang of men had grabbed Angela, they would now have the vampire’s diary in their possession. Could there possibly be any information contained within it that might suggest where they were likely to go next? If, for example, the diary mentioned another grave, and if the people who’d snatched Angela were hunting for relics, he could suggest to the police that they could mount a watch on that location.

It was thin enough, but as far as Bronson could see, it was the only useful thing he could do.

He got up from the bed, took Angela’s laptop out of its case, and plugged the power cable into the wall socket. Angela hadn’t switched off the computer, and as soon as he opened the lid, the system resumed operating. A screensaver appeared, and when Bronson touched the space-bar to clear it, a dialogue box popped up requesting the input of a password. He hesitated for a few moments, then typed ‘SealChart’ into the space, and pressed the enter key. Angela always used the same password — the name of the church in Kent where they’d got married — and Bronson felt a sudden lump in his throat as the system accepted the password.

Angela, he thought. I can’t lose you now, not after everything we’ve been through. I’m going to find you if it’s the last thing I do.

Marietta jumped as the dull rumble echoed through the cellar: she knew what that noise meant. She moved to the edge of the bed and sat there, waiting. This time it sounded as though more than one person was descending the stone spiral staircase.

‘What is it?’ Benedetta sounded terrified, and Marietta didn’t feel much better.

‘It’s the door at the top of the stairs. Someone’s coming,’ she replied, not taking her eyes off the opening that marked the base of the staircase.

The sound of footsteps drew closer, and then two men stepped into view. Marietta could have wept with relief as she saw the guard approaching her carrying a towel and a metal bucket, the contents of which steamed slightly.

The guard went straight over to where Marietta sat, and placed the bucket on the floor in front of her.

‘Wash yourself,’ he instructed curtly, then turned and left.

The other man, who had presumably delivered a bucket and towel to Benedetta, followed him from the room.

‘What do we do now?’ Benedetta asked, her voice trembling with fear.

‘We do what they tell us,’ Marietta said.

Ten minutes later, the guards returned, carrying two bundles of white material, one of which they tossed onto Marietta’s bed, the other one on to Benedetta’s. One of the men removed a key from his pocket and the taser from another, and then stepped forward.

‘Give me your left hand,’ he said. ‘I’m going to release your handcuff so you can get changed. If you try anything, you’ll taste the taser again. Do you understand?’

Marietta nodded. ‘Get changed into what?’ she asked. ‘What for?’

‘You’re to put on that white robe I’ve given you, ready for the ceremony. Take off all your other clothes. All of them — your underwear as well. And then wash your whole body again. You have to be clean.’

Releasing her handcuff, he stepped back. ‘Now get on with it,’ he snapped. ‘We haven’t got much time. The ceremony must begin on time.’

Bronson was no further forward. He was unfamiliar with Latin, and had spent most of that time reading through Angela’s translations of the pages of the diary, looking for something — anything — that might give him a clue about what had happened to her. He looked at the computer screen, his gaze unfocused, as he mentally relived the events of the previous two days, and the macabre mystery that they had become embroiled in. The desecrated tomb; the vampire’s diary; the dead girl in the cemetery; the three corpses jammed into the grave; the burglary of their hotel room, and, finally, the attack on Bronson himself and Angela’s abduction. Running through the sequence of events, two things immediately stood out.

First, the desecrated tomb and the vampire’s diary were clearly important, very important, to somebody in Venice. The only reason, he was convinced, that he’d been attacked was so that the group of men could grab the diary, and they’d needed to get him out of the way first. But what he still didn’t understand was why they had taken Angela as well.

Then he remembered his conversation with the carabinieri officer in the cemetery on San Michele. He’d mentioned to the Italian that Angela worked for the British Museum and, actually, that might provide some kind of a motive. Because of the burglary at the hotel, Bronson was fairly sure somebody in the Italian police force had leaked the information about where they were staying. Maybe her kidnappers had also learned that she was an archaeologist, and believed she could help them translate the text in the diary.

It was a stretch to reach that conclusion, but why else would anyone want to kidnap an English woman who spoke almost no Italian? Bronson immediately felt better, because it suggested an alternative to the only other reason why Angela had been kidnapped: that she’d been grabbed by a serial killer who was operating in Venice. And that was a possibility he simply wasn’t prepared to face.

The second factor that seemed obvious to him now was that the Isola di San Michele, the Venetian Island of the Dead, was inextricably linked with what had been going on in the city.

This set Bronson thinking about the four dead girls whose bodies had been found in the cemetery, and he decided to take a look at the pictures he’d taken out on the island, to see if there were any visible clues on the corpses. As he transferred the images from his camera on to the laptop — Angela had already downloaded all the still images and video films from her digital camera on to the hard drive — he acknowledged the possibility that he’d been trying to avoid ever since the attack, that the girls had been killed by the same people who were accumulating the vampire relics.

Setting his misgivings aside, Bronson concentrated on the images that were now appearing on the screen of the laptop. When he’d taken the video film of the police recovering the body of the first girl on the island, he’d been trying to use the camera as inconspicuously as possible. The inevitable result was that the video was jerky and frequently didn’t actually show the scene he’d been trying to capture.