slightest difference to the outcome.
The mortuary was in an adjacent building, and Bronson was led there by Bianchi himself, who’d been waiting for him near the reception desk in the station. Bianchi was a bulky, heavily built man in his mid-fifties, and Bronson recognized him at once – he’d been the senior investigating officer who’d appeared on the Isola di San Michele to investigate the three dead bodies that he and Angela had found in the tomb there.
It wasn’t the first time Bronson had visited a mortuary, though he’d never before been in the position he was in now. Normally, he was the presiding police officer, waiting for an anxious relative to confirm the identification of the body lying under a white sheet. He saw immediately that the Italians did things in much the same way as the British.
The viewing room was cold, much colder than the air-conditioned chill he’d experienced when they’d walked through the doors and into the mortuary, but it wasn’t just the chill in the air that made Bronson shiver. It was a small oblong space, three walls painted white and the fourth entirely invisible behind a deep purple curtain, behind which he knew would be the fridges that held the bodies. A large but simple crucifix adorned the wall beside the door, and a row of half a dozen uncomfortable-looking metal and plastic chairs lined the adjacent wall.
He registered all that as soon as he walked in, but what gripped and held his attention was the sheeted corpse lying on a trolley directly in front of him, in the middle of the room.
Bianchi strode across to one end of the body and positioned himself there, a mortuary attendant beside him. Bronson stepped closer to the trolley.
‘Are you prepared, Signor Bronson?’ Bianchi asked.
Bronson took a deep breath and nodded.
The police officer gestured to the attendant, who released a safety pin from the sheet covering the body, and gently pulled back the material that covered the face of the corpse.
Bronson noticed the hair first. Blonde and about shoulder-length, the way Angela normally wore it. Then his gaze moved slowly down her face, noticing the closed eyes, small nose and wide, generous mouth. He took a step closer to the trolley, to the midpoint of the dead body, and for a long moment stared down at the woman’s pale face, her skin white and waxy.
‘Signor Bronson, can you confirm whether or not this young woman is your wife?’ Bianchi asked quietly.
Bronson looked up at the police officer and the silent, unsmiling mortuary attendant standing next to him.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I can.’
32
Marietta awoke slowly in the darkness of the cellar. For a few seconds she had no recollection of where she was, but then she moved her left arm and the rattle of the chain and handcuff brought the hideous knowledge flooding back.
Instinctively she glanced down at her wrist, but her watch had been taken, so she had no idea what time of day or night it was. The last thing she recalled was the surge of current from the taser, a bolt of electricity so powerful that she’d lost consciousness. But she also knew, because of her previous experiences with the weapon, that she recovered quite quickly from it. So something else must have happened to her afterwards, because the cellar was now still and quiet and absolutely dark, and she couldn’t see any sign of the silent and malevolent figures who’d so terrified her.
And what of Benedetta? The last image, burned indelibly into her brain, was of the girl strapped down on the table, one man violently raping her while another collected the blood pouring from the wound on her neck. Had she survived? Or was she lying dead, her body even then growing cold on the stone table, or on the rough wooden bed in the adjacent cell?
‘Benedetta?’ Marietta whispered. There was no response. She repeated the name, raising her voice. Still there was no reply. As the echoes of her calls died away, a deep silence fell once again. It sounded as if Marietta was entirely alone.
Tears filled her eyes, and panic gripped her as she remembered the way Benedetta had suffered at the hands of their captors. And with that memory came a sense of confusion. Because they’d both been prepared for the ‘ceremony’, Marietta had assumed that, once the men had finished with Benedetta, she would have suffered the same fate.
She reached up and felt her neck, her sensitive fingertips tracing the skin on both sides. It felt bruised. This didn’t surprise her – the memory of the man with the taser grabbing her throat was still very vivid – but she could feel no evidence of a wound or any other damage. And she knew that she hadn’t been violated. So when they’d finished with Benedetta, they hadn’t come for her. Why not? And why had she remained unconscious for so long?
With her right hand, Marietta gently explored her body. She was naked – the white robe must have been ripped off after the taser hit her – and somebody had then dumped her on the bed and tossed the rough blanket over her body. She felt her left arm. Where the veins ran close to the surface of the skin, in the crook of her elbow, it was sore, and she guessed that she’d been given an injection to knock her out.
But this didn’t explain why she, too, hadn’t been raped and her lifeblood drained. Had the men been interrupted? But that was pretty unlikely, because they were on a remote island in the Venetian lagoon, where the only access was by boat or possibly helicopter. There was almost no chance, she knew, of anyone appearing there unexpectedly.
In fact, she could only think of one reason why she was still in the cellar and still alive: the hooded men must have got enough blood from Benedetta to satisfy their repulsive desires and hadn’t needed hers as well. In which case, Benedetta must surely be dead.
Marietta shuddered. She’d been granted a temporary reprieve, but her prolonged and violent death would surely follow, as inevitably as night follows day. In fact, she guessed she had less than twenty-four hours to live.
The realization hit her hard. Ever since she’d been abducted, she’d been clinging to the hope that somehow she’d be able to escape. But what she’d witnessed just hours before had finally extinguished even this faint comfort.
Shaking with fear, Marietta curled up into a ball underneath her coarse, damp blanket and squeezed her eyes tight shut, sobs racking her body as she gave way to the utter despair that overwhelmed her.
33
In the mortuary, the three men stood in a rough circle around the trolley, staring down at the violated body lying on it, but their thoughts and feelings very were different. Bianchi was professionally distant and reserved, concerned only with the proper identification of the young woman whose death he would now have to investigate. The attendant was bored, if anything. But Bronson was trembling with emotion, so much so that he barely heard Bianchi’s next words, and the inspector had to repeat himself.
‘So you can confirm that this is the body of your wife, Angela Lewis?’ he again asked softly.
‘No,’ Bronson said, a lot more firmly than he felt. ‘I can confirm that I’ve never seen this woman before in my life. This is definitely not my wife.’
‘But I thought… I mean, your description? Her hair, eyes, skin colour?’
‘It’s a good match, but this is definitely not Angela.’
Again Bronson looked down at the body lying in front of him, then he reached forward, towards the neck of the corpse, around which a padded bandage had been placed, and tugged down on the material. Immediately, the mortuary attendant pushed him back and started smoothing the bandage back into position, but by then Bronson had seen enough.
The girl’s neck bore a large oval wound, the flesh cut and bruised around it, the blood faded to a dull red-
