and see if I can find out anything else about this “answer” our diarist talks about.’
‘And I suppose you can do that once we get back to England, so tomorrow we can start our holiday again?’
Angela nodded in agreement and laced her arm through his as they walked back towards the entrance to the cemetery.
They’d gone about fifty or sixty yards when Bronson suddenly stopped and looked around.
Angela looked at him enquiringly. ‘What is it?’
‘Can you smell something?’
‘Sorry?’
‘It’s foul and unpleasant – and I have a horrible feeling I know what it is.’
For a second or two, Angela looked at him. ‘We are standing in the middle of a graveyard,’ she reminded him.
‘I know. But even in a cemetery you shouldn’t be able to smell a decomposing corpse. That’s why bodies are buried in coffins – to keep everything inside.’ Bronson glanced around. ‘I think it’s coming from over there,’ he said, gesturing over to the right of the path they were following.
He stepped off the path and walked slowly through the graves. ‘It’s definitely stronger over here,’ he called out.
‘I can smell it now,’ Angela confirmed, joining him.
The odour faded slightly as they passed a line of tombs, and they turned round to retrace their steps.
‘That might be it,’ Bronson suggested, pointing at an old grave. ‘You see the corner of it? A section of the slab has broken off.’
They walked over to the sarcophagus-type structure that Bronson had indicated, and with every step they took, the smell grew stronger and more offensive. Angela took a handkerchief from her bag and pressed it against her nose, but it made little difference.
The stone box that comprised the grave was about eight or nine feet long, about four feet wide and roughly the same high. The slab covering the top had obviously cracked in one corner and that section of the stone had fallen on to the ground beside the tomb. Bronson stepped closer to the opening that had been created, then retreated.
He coughed a couple of times, trying to rid his lungs of the stench of decay, then turned back to Angela.
‘I left my camera back at the hotel,’ he said. ‘Can I borrow yours?’
‘You’re going to photograph a rotting body?’ Angela looked shocked.
‘Don’t you see? This is an old grave, so the body should have decayed into nothing years and years ago. Whatever is causing that smell is very recent. We’ve got two choices. Either we slide the slab off the top of the grave, which is something I really don’t want to do, or I point your camera into the tomb through that hole in the corner and take a picture of the interior. If it’s just a cat or some animal that’s crawled in there to die, we can forget all about it. But if it’s something else, we’ll be able to tell exactly what it is from the image, and then, if we have to, we can make a call.’
‘You think there’s a fresh corpse in there, don’t you?’ Angela asked, and Bronson nodded. ‘Right, here’s my camera.’
Bronson took it from her, walked back to the tomb, aimed the lens through the hole, and pressed the shutter release. There was a sudden explosion of light as the flash was triggered. It took the camera a couple of seconds to process the image, and then a picture of the interior of the tomb appeared in full colour on the small LCD screen.
Bronson turned away from the tomb, and handed the camera back to Angela.
‘Oh my God, Chris,’ she whispered, her face turning pale.
Bronson nodded grimly, took his mobile phone from his pocket and dialled 112. They needed the emergency services, fast.
19
‘Signor Bronson, we meet again.’ The carabinieri sergeant looked at Bronson appraisingly. ‘You seem to be making something of a habit of being at the scene of desecrated tombs.’
‘It’s only happened twice,’ Bronson objected.
‘Apart from some simple vandalism over the past few years, there have only been two cases that I know of where graves in this cemetery have been desecrated. The first one was yesterday, just over there’ – the sergeant pointed – ‘and when two police officers arrived on the scene, the first person they spoke to was you. And now you’ve called us to report this one as well. That’s two in two days, and the only common factor, Signor Bronson, seems to be you. That’s what I call a habit.’
Behind the sergeant, about half a dozen police officers were in attendance, as well as numerous other people wearing civilian clothes – Bronson presumed they were scene-of-crime technicians, the pathologist and staff from the mortuary.
‘In your call,’ the sergeant referred to his notebook, ‘you said there was a dead girl in the tomb.’
Bronson shook his head. ‘No, I didn’t,’ he said. ‘I actually told the operator there were three dead girls.’
‘Three?’
Bronson nodded.
‘So you looked into the grave?’
‘As a matter of fact, I didn’t. I haven’t got a torch and I wouldn’t have been able to see anything inside the tomb without one. Instead, I used a digital camera with an automatic flash.’
Bronson reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out Angela’s camera, switched it on and found the photograph he had taken through the crack in the lid of the tomb.
The sergeant muttered something under his breath. The image was pin-sharp, and the flash had driven away the darkness inside the grave, and recorded for ever the appalling scene inside it.
Clearly visible in the picture were the stone base and sides of the tomb, and the remains of a very old coffin, most of the wood disintegrated and rotten. Mixed in with the wooden fragments were a few tattered scraps of cloth and, at one end of the grave, the leg bones of a human skeleton. But it wasn’t this evidence of an ancient burial that had transfixed the sergeant. It was the three naked female bodies that were lying on top of the disintegrated coffin, one on top of the other, their corpses already bloated and discoloured as the disintegration of their tissues accelerated.
The sergeant looked at the picture on the LCD screen for a few moments longer, then handed the camera back to Bronson. He turned away and addressed the men who’d arrived in response to Bronson’s call, issuing orders and instructions.
Temporarily dismissed, Bronson walked a few paces to where Angela sat on the ground, her back resting against a gravestone. He sat down beside her and took her hand. She looked pale and shaken by what she’d seen.
‘Why did whoever killed those girls dump their bodies here?’ she asked.
‘That’s easy. Where’s the best place to hide a body?’
‘In a graveyard?’
‘Exactly. And that’s what happened here. If the corner of that slab hadn’t cracked and fallen off, they might never have been discovered.’
‘So can we go home? Back to the hotel, I mean?’ Angela asked.
Bronson shook his head. ‘Not yet. We’ll have to make statements, obviously, and my guess is that the investigating officers will want to speak to us before they’ll let us leave.’
He looked across at the tomb, which was now isolated behind a perimeter of tape to prevent anyone approaching it. Several tripod-mounted floodlights had been positioned around the scene, illuminating the grave in the evening darkness. A technician, wearing white coveralls, latex gloves and with slip-on bootees covering his shoes, was standing just outside the tape, carrying a powerful digital camera. As Bronson watched, he shot at least a couple of dozen pictures of the grave from various angles, moving around the perimeter to do so. Then he ducked
