The Nosferatu Scroll (15 page)

That started a new train of thought. One thing he could do was to ensure that he was as mobile as possible.

Standing up, he walked out of the bar and across to the reception desk. The pretty dark-haired girl who’d checked them in was on duty, and gave him a welcoming smile as he walked across the lobby.

“Signor Bronson, what happened to your head?” she asked, looking with concern at the bandage around his skull.

“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, 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 right 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 screen saver appeared, and when Bronson touched the space bar to clear it, a dialog 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 gotten 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 onto 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 and get 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 Englishwoman 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 onto the laptop—Angela had already downloaded all the still images and video films from her digital camera onto 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 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.

He watched carefully as the two men emerged from behind the temporary screen carrying the body on a stretcher, and then saw a police officer step forward and unzip the body bag. The dead girl’s tumble of blond hair filled the screen as Bronson had used the camera’s zoom lens to focus on her face. For the briefest of instants he saw her forehead, her open left eye—at the moment of death, the eyes don’t close serenely the way they do in the movies, but remain open and staring—the side of her face, her cheek and part of her neck.

Something struck him about what he was seeing, and he wound the movie sequence back to the point just before the police officer unzipped the body bag. Then he ran it forward in slow motion. This helped clarify what he
was seeing, but he still couldn’t be certain. So he ran it again, this time advancing the video film frame by frame.

Three of the frames offered him the clearest possible view of the dead girl’s face, and he examined each of them carefully, enlarging one particular section to study it more closely.

The girl’s skin was marred, almost freckled, by dark marks, which Bronson guessed were either dried blood or earth from where her body had been dumped; the skin itself was mottled with the first signs of decomposition. But there were several marks that he didn’t understand, but which filled him with unease.

Bronson closed down the video and searched the hard drive until he found the pictures that he’d taken with Angela’s camera of their discovery of the three dead bodies in the cemetery and the subsequent events.

The first image he opened was the shot he’d taken through the hole in the slab over the grave. It was, by any standards, an extremely gruesome picture. The image showed the stone sides of the grave, the ancient coffin lying on the floor of the tomb, and the naked and decaying bodies of three young women dumped on top of it. Unsurprisingly, given the circumstance in which the picture had been taken, it was a little out of focus, and the flare of the automatic flash meant that some parts of the scene were so brightly lit that little or no detail was visible. But the upper corpse, the girl who’d been put in the grave last, was reasonably clear. Bronson enlarged the part of the picture that showed her head and neck, and
studied it closely for some minutes. Then he sat back in his chair and shook his head. What he was seeing just didn’t make any sense.

In both the images he enlarged, he’d found what looked like the same type of injury: on the sides of the girls’ necks puncture marks stood out. He frowned. When any animal—a dog, a cat or a human being—bites, both the upper and lower jaws are involved. If it’s small enough, the object being bitten will have marks on both sides.

The twin puncture wounds used by Hollywood directors to portray the bite of a vampire are impossible to make unless the vampire’s mouth is capable of entirely encircling the neck of the victim, something that is at best extremely unlikely. In fact, any creature with jaws the approximate size and shape of the human mouth, whether equipped with oversize canine teeth or not, would leave bite marks on the side of a human neck completely unlike the neat twin puncture wounds of the classic vampire mythology.

The most likely shape of such a wound would probably be two semicircular marks made by the jaws, probably with deeper wounds where the longest teeth would have sunk into the flesh. And if the bite was delivered powerfully enough, quite probably the skin and flesh might be bitten through to leave an almost circular wound. And that, Bronson realized, was exactly what he was staring at in these photographs.

It looked to Bronson as if the people who were collecting
vampire relics were far from the bunch of harmless nutters that he and Angela had assumed. Whoever they were, they’d clearly moved a long way beyond just collecting old books and ancient bones.

The girls in the cemetery might have been enthusiastic members of the group, for whom it had all gone badly wrong. But Bronson doubted it. He thought it was far more likely that they were innocent victims on whom the vampirists—for want of a better description—had been feasting.

The very idea was manifestly ridiculous, but Bronson couldn’t doubt the evidence before his own eyes. And what he’d seen on those images lent a still-greater urgency to his search for Angela, because he now had no doubt that she was in the clutches of a group of people who had killed at least four women already, and would presumably have no qualms about increasing that tally.

Getting washed when the only equipment at hand was a bucket of lukewarm water and a small bar of soap was difficult enough. Doing so standing up in front of a stranger—a man—who was staring at her body with unconcealed lust was one of the most unpleasant experiences of Marietta Perini’s short life.

She began by trying her best to conceal her private parts from his gaze, but quickly realized that this was impossible. Eventually she just ignored him, never looked in his direction, and pretended that she was alone. When she’d finished and dried herself, the guard nodded his approval.

“Very good,” he said. “Now put on the robe. Don’t bother with any underwear. You’re not going to need it.”

Shaking with fear, Marietta pulled the robe on over her head; then her captor snapped the handcuff back around her wrist, securing her to the wall of the cellar once again.

Then he walked out of the room to the adjoining cell, and repeated the operation with Benedetta, who initially refused point-blank to take off a single item of clothing. But her resistance ended moments later when the crackle of the Taser told its own story. When she’d recovered she washed and put on the white robe, but Marietta could hear her sobbing in terror and fury as she did so.

As soon as Benedetta had finished dressing, the guard turned to leave the cellar. But before he could walk across to the foot of the stone spiral staircase, another sound intruded into the relative silence of the cellar. Somebody, or something, was coming down the steps, but the noise sounded more like a kind of slithering than footsteps.