The Nosferatu Scroll

13

‘Any luck?’ Bronson asked, opening the door to their hotel bedroom. It was early afternoon, and Angela was sitting near the window in the pale sunshine, frowning at her computer screen.

‘That really depends on your definition of luck,’ she said. ‘Rather than trying to tackle the diary, which I thought might take me a while because my Latin is probably a bit rusty, I decided to do the easy bit first. I thought I’d start by trying to trace the family history of the woman in the grave.’

‘And did you?’

‘Well, you know that I photographed the slab that covered the tomb?’ Bronson nodded: she’d photographed everything in sight the previous evening. ‘When I looked at the pictures, even blown up on the screen of my laptop, almost the entire inscription is illegible. Absolutely the only thing I can make out for certain is the date of the burial, which was eighteen twenty-five, and I actually read that when we were in the cemetery last night.’

‘That slab looked very badly weathered to me,’ Bronson said. ‘In fact, I suggested to one of the carabinieri officers that you might be able to assist with dating the grave by looking at those shards of pottery we saw in the tomb.’

Angela shook her head. ‘No, you misunderstood me. The slab was weathered, I agree. That’s not surprising, bearing in mind it’s been sitting out there, exposed to the elements, for nearly two hundred years. But that wasn’t why I can’t read the name on the gravestone. The letters have actually been chipped off, probably with a hammer and chisel, because I can just about make out the marks of a steel tool on the stone.’

‘You mean it’s been vandalized?’

‘Unless Venetian vandals are better equipped than their British counterparts, probably not. To me, this looks like a determined attempt to obliterate the name of the woman in the grave.’

‘Could you make out any part of the inscription?’ Bronson asked.

‘I thought her surname began with the letter “P”, but I couldn’t even swear to this with what I found on the tomb. There’s a short gap where none of the stone has been chipped away, which I assume was the space between her first name and her family name, and in one of my photographs you can just about see the upper half of the letter carved into the stone. But it could also be the letter “R”, “B” or even a “D” – not much to go on.’

‘Can I see it?’

Angela turned the laptop so that Bronson could see the screen easily.

The display showed a greyish stone, the surface marked with patches of lichen in faded reds and greens. On the right-hand side of the frame was a faint semicircular mark, barely visible, with a straight line on the left-hand side of it. It looked like the upper part of the letter ‘P’. Above and around the marks, several parallel scratches could be seen.

Angela pointed at them. ‘You can’t see it terribly well in this picture,’ she said, ‘but that area is lower than the surrounding stone, and I think those marks were left by the chisel that hacked away that piece of stone.’

‘So why didn’t the person who did this chip off the rest of the letter?’

‘They did,’ Angela said shortly, ‘or they tried to. Most inscriptions on masonry use a V-shaped cut to form the letters, and that was done here. The upper part of the letter was removed, and what we’re seeing in this picture is the deepest cut made by the mason’s chisel, the very bottom of the V-cut that formed the letter. This is the only picture that shows it, and I think that was just luck. The camera angle meant that the flash just managed to pick it out.’

Angela looked away from the screen and up at Bronson. ‘And where did you get to? You’ve been gone for hours.’

‘I know. Oddly enough, I went back to the Isola di San Michele. I followed those two carabinieri to the edge of the lagoon where there was a police launch waiting for them. I watched them head out to the island, then I hopped on a vaporetto and followed them.’

‘They went back to the grave, you mean?’

‘That was my assumption too, but they went to a different part of the cemetery because another body had been found there. A fresh corpse, I mean, not another old burial.’

Bronson explained to Angela what he’d seen, not mentioning the video and still images he’d taken at the scene, because he was, in truth, still a little embarrassed about what he’d done.

‘So that’s an entirely separate crime,’ Angela said.

‘Actually, I don’t even know if it was a crime. All I saw was the body of a girl with long blonde hair being carted off, presumably for forensic examination and an autopsy. She could easily have been the victim of accidental death. All I saw, really, was her hair.’

‘So the fact that her body was on the island, not far from the broken grave, is just a coincidence,’ Angela said, looking sceptical. ‘You think that the two incidents are entirely unconnected.’

Bronson paused. ‘As far as I can tell, there’s no link between the two apart from their location. But there is one thing that intrigues me, something I overheard when that police sergeant received the radio message.’

‘I guessed you’d heard something when you decided to follow them.’

‘The dispatcher, or whatever they’re called in the carabinieri, said that “there’s been another, but we’ve found this one”. Then the two officers went straight out to the island. To me, that suggests young women have been disappearing, and only some of their bodies have been recovered.’

Angela sighed, got up from her chair and stretched. ‘In other words, it rather looks as if there could be a serial killer operating here in Venice.’ She turned to Bronson. ‘And you want to investigate, don’t you?’

Bronson stood up too and put his hands on her shoulders. ‘I’m not going to get involved, I promise. I’m just interested in what’s going on. Just like you’re interested in that vampire diary or whatever it is.’

Angela smiled gently. ‘Touche,’ she murmured. ‘So what are you going to do about it?’

‘Nothing much. I thought I might just check the archives of the local newspaper and see if I can spot a pattern. That’s all. And what about you?’ he added. ‘Have you got anywhere with that thing yet?’

Angela gestured towards the small black leather-bound volume lying on the desk next to her laptop.

‘Not really. It’s in pretty poor condition, as you might expect. I still think it was put in the grave underneath the coffin when the woman was buried. That makes the most sense, especially if the people who buried her, her family or her friends, accepted her for what she was.’

‘That she was a vampire, you mean?’ Bronson said.

‘Well, to be accurate, she was a woman who believed she was a vampire, which isn’t exactly the same thing. But to honour her memory, as it were, they buried her diary with her, and those two small pottery jars as well. I still think they most likely contained blood, intended to sustain her. They probably just thought they were humouring her last wishes.’

‘But later on, somebody took her claim to be a vampire a lot more seriously, and they had a very different attitude to her.’

‘Exactly. It was someone who obviously believed absolutely in the vampire myth, and was probably appalled to think that the body of such a creature should be buried here in Venice. They went to enormous trouble to obliterate her name from the tomb, and to desecrate her body, to kill her off if she was a vampire, at the same time.’

‘So what have you found in the diary?’ Bronson asked.

‘I’ve only had a quick look at some of the early pages,’ Angela replied. ‘But the exciting thing is that I now know her name, because on one of the first pages she’s explained the purpose of the book. The translation of one phrase she wrote is “the record of the life of Carmelita Paganini”, and that ties up with the remains of the letter “P” I deciphered on the slab over her grave. I also tried to see if the lengths of the obliterated words from the slab more or less matched that name, and they do.’

Bronson picked up the book and opened it carefully, but the closely written text meant nothing to him. It was obvious that Carmelita had used different types and colours of ink over the years, because on some pages the writing was as clear and sharp as if it had been done the day before, while on others the ink had faded to a grey or reddish shadow.

‘Be careful with it, Chris,’ Angela said, taking it back from him. ‘It’s very fragile.’

‘I suppose you’re using the scanned images,’ he replied, ‘because the writing on some of these pages is virtually illegible.’

‘Oddly enough, because I could adjust the sensitivity of the scanner, the images in my laptop are a lot clearer than the original text. So, yes, I am working on the computer, and not from the book.’

Angela glanced at her watch. ‘Why don’t we go out for a bite of lunch now? And then I’ll do a bit more work on the diary, and you can amuse yourself digging around in some newspaper’s morgue, looking for clues, just like a real detective.’

‘I am a real detective,’ Bronson protested faintly, ‘but that’s a good idea. I’ll just see if I can find out anything, just to satisfy my curiosity, and then we can forget about it. And tomorrow we’ll go back on the sight-seeing trail.’