James Becker - The Nosferatu Scroll

But this didn’t explain why she, too, hadn’t been raped and her lifeblood drained. Had the men been interrupted? But that was pretty unlikely, because they were on a remote island in the Venetian lagoon, where the only access was by boat or possibly helicopter. There was almost no chance, she knew, of anyone appearing there unexpectedly.

In fact, she could only think of one reason why she was still in the cellar and still alive: the hooded men must have got enough blood from Benedetta to satisfy their repulsive desires and hadn’t needed hers as well. In which case, Benedetta must surely be dead.

Marietta shuddered. She’d been granted a temporary reprieve, but her prolonged and violent death would surely follow, as inevitably as night follows day. In fact, she guessed she had less than twenty-four hours to live.

The realization hit her hard. Ever since she’d been abducted, she’d been clinging to the hope that somehow she’d be able to escape. But what she’d witnessed just hours before had finally extinguished even this faint comfort.

Shaking with fear, Marietta curled up into a ball underneath her coarse, damp blanket and squeezed her eyes tight shut, sobs racking her body as she gave way to the utter despair that overwhelmed her.

In the mortuary, the three men stood in a rough circle around the trolley, staring down at the violated body lying on it, but their thoughts and feelings very were different. Bianchi was professionally distant and reserved, concerned only with the proper identification of the young woman whose death he would now have to investigate. The attendant was bored, if anything. But Bronson was trembling with emotion, so much so that he barely heard Bianchi’s next words, and the inspector had to repeat himself.

‘So you can confirm that this is the body of your wife, Angela Lewis?’ he again asked softly.

‘No,’ Bronson said, a lot more firmly than he felt. ‘I can confirm that I’ve never seen this woman before in my life. This is definitely not my wife.’

‘But I thought … I mean, your description? Her hair, eyes, skin colour?’

‘It’s a good match, but this is definitely not Angela.’

Again Bronson looked down at the body lying in front of him, then he reached forward, towards the neck of the corpse, around which a padded bandage had been placed, and tugged down on the material. Immediately, the mortuary attendant pushed him back and started smoothing the bandage back into position, but by then Bronson had seen enough.

The girl’s neck bore a large oval wound, the flesh cut and bruised around it, the blood faded to a dull red-brown colour.

‘Signor Bronson,’ Bianchi snapped, ‘kindly remember where you are. Do not try to touch the corpse.’

Bronson looked at him levelly. ‘Her skin’s very pale,’ he said. ‘Was she killed like the others? Her blood drained from that wound in the side of her throat? Is that why you’ve put that dressing there?’ He pointed at the bandage the attendant was still repositioning around her neck.

Bianchi stared at him in a hostile manner. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I was the man who found the three bodies dumped together in the tomb on the Isola di San Michele, the corpses you were sent out there to investigate,’ Bronson replied. ‘I’m a policeman, and when I smelt rotting flesh, I took a photograph through the hole in the slab covering the tomb. When I looked at the picture afterwards, I could clearly see a mark just like that’ — he pointed down at the sheeted corpse — ‘on the neck of each of those girls. And I saw the same thing on the body of the other girl your men found out on San Michele. I didn’t find her, but I was out there, watching, when her body was removed from the scene.’

Bronson paused, looked again at the corpse on the trolley, then back to Bianchi.

‘What you’ve got going on here, right now, in Venice, is the work of a serial killer.’ Then he shook his head. ‘No, in fact it’s much more complicated than that. I think there’s a gang of people who are snatching girls off the streets, sucking the blood from their necks, and then dumping the bodies.’

By now Bianchi had recovered his composure. ‘What you just said is a complete fantasy, a fabrication, Signor Bronson. We have had some missing girls, it’s true, and we have unfortunately discovered some bodies, but all this stuff about blood-sucking is complete nonsense.’

The mortuary attendant reached out and started to pull the sheet over the dead girl’s face once more, but again Bronson stopped him.

‘Then take off that bandage so we can all see this girl’s neck,’ he snapped. ‘If I’m making all this up, then you’ll be able to tell me exactly what she died from, and you’ll be able to show me that her neck is unmarked.’

‘I don’t have to show you anything, Signor Bronson,’ Bianchi responded sharply. ‘I asked you here because I thought this body might be that of your missing partner. I’m relieved for you that it’s not her, obviously, but I still have to try to identify this young woman and break the news to her family. I’m certainly not prepared to discuss how she died with you or with any other civilian. And here in Venice, that’s what you are, Signor Bronson, just a civilian, a tourist. I suggest you remember that.’

‘I know exactly what my status is in Italy,’ Bronson said. ‘But I also know that if this poor girl hadn’t got a gaping wound on her neck, you’d be only too pleased to show me, just to prove me wrong.’ He pointed at the sheeted figure. ‘I saw her wound; I know that she died at the hands of these lunatics. And that makes at least five victims who have all been killed in the same way: massive blood loss from some sort of incisions made in the side of their necks, just like the sort of wounds supposedly inflicted by the vampires of fiction.’

Bianchi raised a warning finger. ‘Signor Bronson, I suggest you refrain from repeating anything you’ve said here to anyone in Venice. If the newspapers start printing lurid stories, I’ll know exactly where they got the information from, and I’ll take great pleasure in arresting you.’

‘On what charge?’ Bronson asked mildly.

‘I’ll think of something. Now I suggest you get out of here, before you say anything else you might regret.’

An hour later, Bronson was back in his hotel room. The diary Angela had taken was the key to her abduction, he was certain, and he was keen to get back to it. Locking the door firmly behind him, he switched on Angela’s computer again, and opened up the scanned image of the final section of the book, the part which obviously hadn’t been written in diary format. Then he opened Angela’s translation of the first part of the text, and read it again. He remembered that one word seemed to be repeated over and over again, a word which Angela had rendered as the ‘answer’. That seemed to sit rather oddly in some of the sentences that she’d already translated into English.

But she’d obviously done more work on the book the previous evening, and had transcribed more of the Latin text, although none of this seemed particularly helpful. She’d also revised the translations that mentioned the ‘twin angels’ tomb, and had clearly decided that a more accurate meaning of the ‘answer’ would be the ‘source’.

Bronson again read the passages Angela had translated. The text was specific about only one thing: that the tomb of the twin angels, the grave they thought they might have located in the cemetery on the Isola di San Michele, held the ‘answer’ or the ‘source’ or whatever the Latin word actually meant to the woman who’d written the diary.

It was odd, Bronson thought, the way the Island of the Dead seemed so intimately connected with the events they’d become involved with in Venice. The shattered tomb and the mutilated corpse had started the puzzle, and the cemetery had also been chosen as a dumping ground for the bodies of the girls once the group of killers had finished with them. And, of course, the vampire’s diary itself had come from the first tomb, and contained references to at least one other burial on San Michele.