‘It sounded like a hungry German shepherd,’ Bronson suggested. ‘But don’t worry – it’s a long way off and not about to rip out our throats.’
Angela laughed out loud, then stopped as the sound of a solid thump echoed from somewhere nearby, and a scream of pure, undiluted terror cut across the noise of the revelry with the awful finality of the fall of a guillotine blade.
2
On the Island of the Dead, the mist was thick, and visibility was reduced to a matter of only a few yards. To complicate things further, it was difficult to identify the direction from which the first scream had come. But by now, Bronson and Angela were surrounded by people in a hurry, and who seemed to be moving south, towards the centre of the island. So Bronson and Angela headed in the opposite direction, to where they thought the commotion had occurred.
Moving aside to avoid the sea of people rushing straight towards them, they threaded their way between the tombstones and, moments later, found themselves facing a group of men and women who were standing in a rough circle, staring at one of the larger tombs.
Bronson’s police training kicked in, despite the fact that he was about a thousand miles from his home beat. He switched to Italian and pulled out his British warrant card – he knew it would mean absolutely nothing to anybody there, but it would give him a thin veneer of authority while he found out what had so alarmed everyone in the cemetery.
‘Police. Let me through… Police officer,’ he kept repeating, waving the warrant card like a talisman as he pushed his way through the unmoving crowd, Angela following just a few feet behind him.
Almost reluctantly the people parted to allow him passage. Unusually for any group of Italians, they were almost silent, staring in fascination at something on the ground in front of them. And then Bronson reached the middle of the group, and could see precisely what had sparked the general exodus from the area.
The Festival of the Dead was in some ways a misnomer. The revellers who travelled to the cemetery were not there to celebrate the dead, but rather to celebrate the lives and memories of friends and relatives who had passed away. Absolutely the last thing they actually expected to see in the cemetery was a body. But that was the sight which now confronted Bronson.
And it wasn’t just any corpse.
‘Fascinating,’ Angela breathed as she stopped beside him and looked down at the tomb. ‘Though I can’t believe this was the cause of so much panic in the crowd.’
Bronson took a couple of steps forward to study the tomb.
It was clearly one of the older burial chambers in the cemetery, an oblong stone box about four feet high and topped by a flat stone slab. The sides were carved with symbols or scenes, but the old stone had weathered so much that it was difficult to make out exactly what was depicted, while the slab on top bore faint and virtually illegible marks – presumably an ancient inscription that gave the name and date of death of the occupant.
Bronson didn’t know exactly how it had happened, but one of the sides of the tomb had cracked into three pieces and then fallen out, and in doing so had dragged the upper slab of stone with it. That must have caused the sound they’d heard, he thought. And now, the previously sealed box was open to the elements, and the body inside exposed to view for the first time in what he guessed was at least a hundred years.
Unsurprisingly, the remains were mainly skeletal. Parts of the coffin had survived, but only as fragments of wood along both sides of the corpse. A few wisps of rotted cloth still clung to the long bones of the legs, and part of the rib cage was encased in leathery, dark brown skin. In short, the corpse looked almost exactly as one might expect a body to appear if it had been buried in a wooden coffin inside a sealed tomb for over a century. Except in two respects.
Above the rib cage the neck terminated in a single shattered vertebra. The head of the body which, like the rib cage, was still partially covered in skin, and even had a few tufts of white hair clinging to it, was positioned centrally between the bony feet. That was unusual enough in itself, but to add a further layer of the macabre to the scene, the mouth of the skull had been levered open and a thin half brick jammed firmly between the jaws.
For a few seconds, Bronson stared at the desiccated – and desecrated – corpse, then he glanced sideways at Angela. ‘What did you mean when you said “fascinating”?’ he asked.
‘I’ll explain later,’ she said. ‘This is something I’ve heard about and read about, but I never thought I’d actually get to see an example of it.’
She opened her handbag, pulled out a compact digital camera and started snapping pictures of the scene before them. She moved closer to the corpse, and took several shots of the severed neck and the head with its bizarre mutilation.
There was a further commotion behind them, and Bronson turned to see two uniformed carabinieri approaching. Behind him, Angela was still snapping away, recording the scene.
The two carabinieri looked closely into the open tomb. One of them crossed himself and muttered something that could have been a short prayer.
‘Your name, please, signor?’ the other officer asked.
Bronson pulled out his passport and gave it to him.
The officer wrote down Bronson’s name and passport number, handed back the document, and then asked, in halting English, what he was doing in Venice. Bronson replied in fluent Italian that he was on holiday with a friend. They had heard shouts and screams from the vicinity of the tomb and had come to investigate. He also produced his warrant card and explained that he was a British police officer, and his former wife – the woman who was still taking pictures of the open tomb behind them – worked for the British Museum.
The policeman glanced at her. ‘And why is she taking so many pictures of that skeleton?’ he asked.
Bronson raised his voice slightly, and repeated the question to Angela, in English.
‘It’s not actually the bones I’m interested in,’ she replied, ‘but these pottery vessels in the tomb. They’ve been broken, but I think they were probably intact when they were put in beside her.’
‘How do you know that the skeleton is female?’ Bronson asked.
‘The pelvis is fully exposed, and the male pelvis and female pelvis are very different in shape. This skeleton is definitely that of a woman.’
Bronson translated what she’d told him to the police officer.
‘It’s very strange, what’s happened to that body,’ the Italian said. ‘Perhaps it was done by vandals, a couple of centuries ago.’
‘What will you do with it?’ Bronson asked.
‘Eventually, I expect we’ll bury it again, but for the moment we’ll have to take it into custody. Our orders in this kind of circumstance are quite clear. It’s the body of the human being, and because it’s skeletal we will need to get a forensic pathologist out here to inspect the scene and ascertain its age. Then we’ll transport it back to the mortuary for examination, just in case any kind of crime has been committed.’
‘Well, whoever did that to her head is certainly guilty of a crime.’
Privately, Bronson thought that transporting the body to the local morgue was a complete waste of everyone’s time and effort, but he fully understood the position of the Carabinieri. Police forces in Britain had similar regulations governing the handling of both corpses and skeletal remains. It was not unknown for murderers to conceal the bodies of their victims inside existing graves.
A few of the onlookers had started to drift away, many of them taking pictures of the tomb and its occupant as they left, but others, curious at the presence of two police officers beside an ancient open grave, were beginning to appear.
‘I don’t know if it would be of any help to you,’ Bronson said, ‘but my partner is an expert on pottery. If you have a problem dating the burial – if the inscription on the tomb can’t be read, I mean – then she can probably help by analysing those pottery shards.’
‘Thank you for the offer, Signor Bronson. Which hotel are you staying at?’
Bronson told him, as Angela finally finished her photographic record and stepped forward to join him.
The second police officer was already speaking into his radio, organizing transport for the forensic pathologist
