James Becker - The Nosferatu Scroll

‘Why didn’t you mention this before?’ Bianchi snapped.

Bronson shrugged. ‘It didn’t honestly seem that important at the time. Now, I wish we’d just walked away from that first broken tomb and never spoken to a soul.’

‘Yes,’ Bianchi murmured, ‘hindsight is a wonderful tool.’

‘So this island …’ Bronson continued. ‘Are you going to send somebody to check it out?’

Bianchi nodded, somewhat reluctantly. ‘You’ve made a report, and I am duty-bound to respond to it, no matter how unbelievable your statement is, and despite my personal misgivings. I will order one of our police patrol boats to go out there now and make inquiries.’

This wasn’t quite the response that Bronson had been hoping for, but it was better than nothing.

‘Can I go with them?’ he asked. ‘That way I can make sure they go to the right place.’

‘Certainly not,’ Bianchi said. ‘If they find anything — which I doubt very much — I will call you at your hotel. You will be there, won’t you?’

The inference was obvious. ‘I might be out and about,’ Bronson said, lightly, ‘so it would probably be best if you called me on my mobile instead.’

Bianchi looked at him in silence for a few moments, and then nodded. ‘Very well, Signor Bronson. Just ensure that you stay out of trouble. I wouldn’t want our patrol officers to visit that island and find that you were already there. Do you understand what I mean?’

‘Of course,’ Bronson said. ‘I can promise you that they won’t see me anywhere near the island.’ Which wasn’t quite the same as saying he wouldn’t go there, of course, but it seemed to satisfy Bianchi.

Ten minutes later, Bronson was walking quickly back through the crowded streets to where he’d moored the powerboat. He started the engine, cast off the line, and motored slowly away, deep in thought.

The first thing he was going to have to do, he knew, was top-up the boat’s fuel tank, to ensure that he had enough petrol for whatever the night might bring.

He was also worried about Bianchi’s apparent reluctance to take his claim seriously. The island might be the property of an Italian politician, but Bronson couldn’t think of a single country anywhere in the world that didn’t have a large and successful crop of corrupt politicians — and in Italy being corrupt seemed to be a part of the job description for a career in government.

His second worry was that Bianchi was only apparently going to send a single patrol boat over to the island, where the officers would presumably ask politely if anybody in the house knew anything about the bunch of murdered girls. He could guess the probable answer. And that was assuming that Bianchi actually sent anyone at all.

Bronson had seen the fast, blue-and-white patrol boats in the Venetian lagoon — normally crewed by about three or four officers apparently only armed with pistols, though it was possible, Bronson guessed, that they might have heavier weapons inside the vessels. Even so, they were obviously more concerned with minor crimes, essentially traffic offences, committed on the waters of the lagoon rather than anything more serious.

But the thing that concerned him most wasn’t anything Bianchi had said. It was actually something the inspector hadn’t said. Specifically, it was a question the man hadn’t asked. It was, of course, possible that Bianchi had simply missed it, in which case it just meant he wasn’t a particularly good policeman, but Bronson doubted this. In his short acquaintance with Bianchi, the inspector had never struck Bronson as a particularly likeable character, but he had always seemed competent.

The other explanation was that Bianchi hadn’t needed to ask the question because he already knew the answer, and this was a real worry.

Angela heard the engine note of the powerboat die away to nothing a few seconds after it reached the jetty. Moments later, Marco opened the door to the cabin and stepped inside.

Angela tensed, wondering if she dare try to escape right then but, even before he unlocked the handcuff, she realized any attempt was doomed to failure: another one of the men stood waiting by the cabin door, clearly ready for trouble. She doubted she could tackle Marco with any degree of success, and she certainly couldn’t cope with the two of them. So she meekly allowed her wrists to be handcuffed in front of her, and was led along the path from the jetty and back towards the house.

She was almost at the door when an unearthly howling noise echoed from somewhere nearby. Angela froze in mid-stride, her eyes wide as she stared around her. She couldn’t pinpoint the location of the sound, but she was certain it was very close.

‘What on earth was that?’ she asked.

Marco didn’t bother to reply, just led her through the front door of the house and into the drawing-room. Only when she was standing beside the desk were the handcuffs finally removed.

‘So what now?’ Angela asked.

‘I would have thought that was obvious. One of my men is making a photocopy of the scroll. As soon as he’s done that, you can start translating it. And then we’ll find the answer.’

‘The answer to what?’

But before Marco could reply there was a double knock on the door and one of his men appeared carrying half a dozen sheets of paper. Marco took them, glanced at each in turn, and then placed them on the desk in front of Angela.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Get started.’

Angela knew she had no choice. She picked up the first sheet and looked at it. She’d already seen that the writing on the scroll was indistinct, the ink a faded grey against the brown of the parchment, but the photocopies were actually fairly clear. She nodded and reached for the Latin-English dictionary she’d been using previously.

Within minutes it was clear that what she was looking at was not a piece of text like those she’d worked on before. The first two pages appeared simply to contain a list of names, divided up into groups and interspersed by a number of Latin words that she had not encountered before. Words like agnatus, abdormitus and cognationis appeared frequently, and it was only when she translated these expressions that she realized what she was looking at. Agnatus meant a ‘blood relative in the male line’; abdormitus translated as ‘died’, and cognationis referred to a ‘blood relationship’, a meaning that she’d guessed even before the dictionary confirmed it. The list was simply a genealogy, one section of a family tree.

The first name on the list was familiar to her, because she’d seen it somewhere in the very recent past, though it still took her a few seconds to place it. The genealogy that she was transcribing traced the blood relationship of a number of Italian families back to a single royal source: the Princess Eleonora Elisabeth Amalia Magdalena of Lobkowicz, Princess of Schwarzenberg, the woman who was also known as the Vampire Princess.

Angela sat back from the desk and stared across at Marco, who was sitting in his easy chair on the opposite side of the room. He was looking in her general direction, and when she met his glance, he nodded.

‘Do you know what this is?’ Angela asked.

‘Yes. But you don’t have to list all the members of the family. We’re only interested in the names of the people who died here in Venice in the late eighteenth century. In fact, it’s only one of those names that we need you to check, just to confirm his link to the princess.’

‘Which is?’

‘Nicodema Diluca.’

The name meant nothing immediately to Angela, though again the surname had a slightly familiar ring to it. She turned back to the photocopied sheets, quickly found what she was looking for and painstakingly traced the names of Diluca’s forebears back to the Princess of Schwarzenberg. If the names and relationships listed were correct, then Diluca was undeniably one of her blood descendants.