The Nosferatu Scroll

10

Bronson picked up the compact binoculars and small digital camera that he’d brought down from their room in readiness for their day of sight-seeing. He slipped both instruments into the pockets of his leather jacket.

‘Are you sure about this, Chris?’ Angela asked.

‘I’m afraid so,’ Bronson replied with a rueful smile. ‘Look, while I’m out following those two carabinieri, maybe you could have a look at the pictures you took of the grave. See if anything strikes you as being odd, apart from the decapitated body and the brick, I mean. It might also be worth trying to find out the name of the woman in the grave.’

He glanced through the window at the street outside, where the two policemen had stopped for a few moments. Bending down, he kissed Angela lightly on the lips, and then strode across the dining room and walked out of the hotel.

The two carabinieri were on foot, of course – Venice being a car-free zone – and were walking north-east along the street from the hotel, turning right at the end, and then left. It looked to Bronson, who was following about fifty yards behind them and taking frequent glances at the street map of Venice he’d picked up at the airport, as if they were heading towards the edge of the lagoon. This suspicion was confirmed when the two men walked on to the jetty by the Fondamente Nuove vaporetto stop. There he saw a police launch waiting for them, the engine running and two other officers already on board.

Although Bronson guessed that he would look just like any other tourist in the anonymous throngs already crowding the streets, he hung back, waiting for the vessel to depart. As soon as the sergeant and constable were sitting down in the launch, the driver freed the mooring line and gunned the engine. Bronson took out his binoculars and watched the vessel and its passengers. Once it had cleared the other water traffic that was manoeuvring near the vaporetto stop, the boat swung round to the left and headed north-east, accelerating across the lagoon towards the northern end of the Isola di San Michele – in other words, pretty much as he’d expected.

About ten minutes later, shortly after the police launch had reached the jetty on the island, in fact, Bronson boarded a number forty-two vaporetto and began the same journey himself.

The Isola di San Michele was reasonably large, about five hundred yards by four hundred yards, he guessed, and very popular with visitors to Venice, so he didn’t anticipate any particular difficulty in remaining unobserved once he got there.

He stepped out of the vaporetto on to the jetty more or less in the middle of a group of German tourists, and headed towards the part of the cemetery where they’d found the broken tomb the previous evening.

That was his first surprise. The tomb was covered in a heavy green tarpaulin, which was lashed down and held in place with a couple of orange polypropylene ropes. Clearly the authorities had decided to shield the broken structure from prying eyes. And there was no sign of any police officers. Whatever the carabinieri had come over to the island to investigate, it was obviously nothing at all to do with that grave.

Bronson looked round the vast cemetery, and over to one side he finally spotted a handful of police officers clustered around another grave. Feeling somewhat like a ghoul, he headed that way himself, taking a circuitous route so as not to make his approach too obvious.

Standing at the edge of the group of tourists that had gathered at the site, Bronson pulled his camera from his pocket, held it unobtrusively by his side and aimed it in the general direction of all the activity. The camera was equipped with a powerful zoom lens and had both still and movie modes, so he pressed the button that would provide him with a video record of what was going on.

The carabinieri had erected a temporary screen on the far side of the new grave. This, like the broken grave of the previous night, was another stone box with a slab covering the top, but as far as Bronson could see, it was completely intact. Instead, the police officers’ attention was directed towards the ground beside the tomb. As he watched, a man wearing a set of white waterproof overalls, cap, gloves and rubber boots, and carrying a large plastic toolbox, emerged from behind the screen. He paused for a moment to exchange a few words with a couple of the police officers, then walked over to a patch of grass on which several other cases had been left. Bronson had been involved with enough serious crimes to know what the man’s job was, and then, as the white-clad figure turned slightly towards him, he recognized the man as the same forensic pathologist who’d travelled out to the island the previous night. And that, he knew, meant that another body had been discovered.

If any confirmation was needed, it followed just moments later, when two men dressed in civilian clothes, and carrying a black body bag and a collapsible stretcher, walked behind the screen.

A few minutes later they emerged, carrying a zipped body bag on the stretcher. Before they moved away, however, one of the policemen halted them with a gesture, and unzipped the bag just far enough to allow him to see the head of the victim.

Bronson lifted the camera higher, pressed the zoom button and tried to get a close-up shot. A tumble of blonde hair filled the LCD screen, but it looked as if the face of the girl – and the victim was obviously a young woman – was invisible. Several of the tourists standing near him were also using their cameras, snapping away, and one of the carabinieri shouted angrily at them.

Bronson stepped back and tucked the camera into his pocket, a flush of embarrassment warming his cheek. He’d never liked the salacious attitude of the public – and especially of the British press – to accidents and crime, and he didn’t much like the feeling of being on the other side of the crime-scene tape, of being one of the morbid spectators.

And, he admitted to himself, he was probably just wasting his time. He had no idea whether the girl who was being carried away from the tomb had died by accident or from some other cause. About the only thing he was sure of was that it had nothing to do with the ancient mutilated corpse they’d seen the previous evening.

Turning away, he walked quickly through the graveyard towards the Cimitero vaporetto stop. He would go back to Angela, he decided, and they would resume their holiday and try to forget all about the vampire’s tomb and the dead girl he’d just seen.

But as the vaporetto cut through the waters of the lagoon, a part of what he’d overheard continued to nag at him. The radio broadcast to the sergeant had included the phrase ‘there’s been another’. This could only mean one thing: the blonde-haired girl hadn’t had an accident; she had been the victim of foul play. And she hadn’t been the first.