brown colour.
‘Signor Bronson,’ Bianchi snapped, ‘kindly remember where you are. Do not try to touch the corpse.’
Bronson looked at him levelly. ‘Her skin’s very pale,’ he said. ‘Was she killed like the others? Her blood drained from that wound in the side of her throat? Is that why you’ve put that dressing there?’ He pointed at the bandage the attendant was still repositioning around her neck.
Bianchi stared at him in a hostile manner. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I was the man who found the three bodies dumped together in the tomb on the Isola di San Michele, the corpses you were sent out there to investigate,’ Bronson replied. ‘I’m a policeman, and when I smelt rotting flesh, I took a photograph through the hole in the slab covering the tomb. When I looked at the picture afterwards, I could clearly see a mark just like that’ – he pointed down at the sheeted corpse – ‘on the neck of each of those girls. And I saw the same thing on the body of the other girl your men found out on San Michele. I didn’t find her, but I was out there, watching, when her body was removed from the scene.’
Bronson paused, looked again at the corpse on the trolley, then back to Bianchi.
‘What you’ve got going on here, right now, in Venice, is the work of a serial killer.’ Then he shook his head. ‘No, in fact it’s much more complicated than that. I think there’s a gang of people who are snatching girls off the streets, sucking the blood from their necks, and then dumping the bodies.’
By now Bianchi had recovered his composure. ‘What you just said is a complete fantasy, a fabrication, Signor Bronson. We have had some missing girls, it’s true, and we have unfortunately discovered some bodies, but all this stuff about blood-sucking is complete nonsense.’
The mortuary attendant reached out and started to pull the sheet over the dead girl’s face once more, but again Bronson stopped him.
‘Then take off that bandage so we can all see this girl’s neck,’ he snapped. ‘If I’m making all this up, then you’ll be able to tell me exactly what she died from, and you’ll be able to show me that her neck is unmarked.’
‘I don’t have to show you anything, Signor Bronson,’ Bianchi responded sharply. ‘I asked you here because I thought this body might be that of your missing partner. I’m relieved for you that it’s not her, obviously, but I still have to try to identify this young woman and break the news to her family. I’m certainly not prepared to discuss how she died with you or with any other civilian. And here in Venice, that’s what you are, Signor Bronson, just a civilian, a tourist. I suggest you remember that.’
‘I know exactly what my status is in Italy,’ Bronson said. ‘But I also know that if this poor girl hadn’t got a gaping wound on her neck, you’d be only too pleased to show me, just to prove me wrong.’ He pointed at the sheeted figure. ‘I saw her wound; I know that she died at the hands of these lunatics. And that makes at least five victims who have all been killed in the same way: massive blood loss from some sort of incisions made in the side of their necks, just like the sort of wounds supposedly inflicted by the vampires of fiction.’
Bianchi raised a warning finger. ‘Signor Bronson, I suggest you refrain from repeating anything you’ve said here to anyone in Venice. If the newspapers start printing lurid stories, I’ll know exactly where they got the information from, and I’ll take great pleasure in arresting you.’
‘On what charge?’ Bronson asked mildly.
‘I’ll think of something. Now I suggest you get out of here, before you say anything else you might regret.’
An hour later, Bronson was back in his hotel room. The diary Angela had taken was the key to her abduction, he was certain, and he was keen to get back to it. Locking the door firmly behind him, he switched on Angela’s computer again, and opened up the scanned image of the final section of the book, the part which obviously hadn’t been written in diary format. Then he opened Angela’s translation of the first part of the text, and read it again. He remembered that one word seemed to be repeated over and over again, a word which Angela had rendered as the ‘answer’. That seemed to sit rather oddly in some of the sentences that she’d already translated into English.
But she’d obviously done more work on the book the previous evening, and had transcribed more of the Latin text, although none of this seemed particularly helpful. She’d also revised the translations that mentioned the ‘twin angels’ tomb, and had clearly decided that a more accurate meaning of the ‘answer’ would be the ‘source’.
Bronson again read the passages Angela had translated. The text was specific about only one thing: that the tomb of the twin angels, the grave they thought they might have located in the cemetery on the Isola di San Michele, held the ‘answer’ or the ‘source’ or whatever the Latin word actually meant to the woman who’d written the diary.
It was odd, Bronson thought, the way the Island of the Dead seemed so intimately connected with the events they’d become involved with in Venice. The shattered tomb and the mutilated corpse had started the puzzle, and the cemetery had also been chosen as a dumping ground for the bodies of the girls once the group of killers had finished with them. And, of course, the vampire’s diary itself had come from the first tomb, and contained references to at least one other burial on San Michele.
One way or another, the island and its ancient graveyard were inextricably linked to the events of the present day. Maybe, Bronson thought, he should go back there, take another look at that tomb of the twin angels, and see if he could work out anything useful from the inscriptions on the old stone. It wasn’t much of a plan, and he wasn’t sure it was even worth doing, but it was, he reflected, probably better than sitting in the hotel room trying to translate an old Latin text.
He shut down the computer, checked he had his camera and his binoculars, took his leather jacket out of the wardrobe, and walked down to the reception desk.
Half an hour later he was again sitting at the controls of his small red boat, and steering the small vessel north-east across the choppy waters of the Venetian lagoon.
34
Apart from a few visits to the loo, each time accompanied by one of her silent and unsmiling guards to the door of a ground-floor lavatory – which had a barred window and no internal lock or bolt – Angela hadn’t left the elegant room in the house since she’d arrived. Early in the evening, a tray of food had been put in front of her, and around midnight she’d eventually tried to get some sleep on the wide sofa in front of the fireplace.
But she hadn’t been idle that evening. The suave but indescribably menacing man had seen to that. He had finally introduced himself as ‘Marco’, but she had no idea if that was what he was actually called or just a convenient name he’d pulled out of the air.
As soon as he’d shown her the appalling collection of ‘souvenirs’, Angela had realized that cooperation with her captors was hardly a choice: it was an absolute necessity if she was to avoid the agonizing mutilation that the group was so obviously capable of inflicting. So when Marco had asked if she was prepared to complete the translations, she’d simply nodded her agreement.
She’d been led across to a large oak desk set in one corner, and been told to sit on a leather swivel chair right in front of it, an incongruously modern piece of furniture in the elegant and old-fashioned room. Even those few steps across the polished wooden floor left her feeling as weak as a kitten: presumably she’d been pumped full of a cocktail of drugs to keep her quiet while they transported her to the house – wherever it was – and her body was still feeling the after effects. She knew that trying to fight her captors or run out of the room would be completely futile. Before she could do anything to try to escape, she would have to wait until she’d regained her strength. And she also needed to find out a lot more about the house in which she was being held prisoner, and its location. And especially what lay outside the windows.
On the desk was a selection of reference books of various types, the majority clearly written in English, about half a dozen pencils, roughly half a ream of white paper, the battered leather-bound diary itself, and two separate piles of pages which she saw immediately were photocopies of the diary entries.
Marco had pointed to those two sets of pages. ‘Ignore the one on the left,’ he said. ‘Those are just records of Carmelita’s life: interesting but not important for us. The other section is the one we’re interested in. You can start translating that right now.’
Angela shook her head. ‘I’ll need a Latin dictionary,’ she said. ‘I don’t have the vocabulary to translate this. Can you find one on the Internet for me?’
Marco laughed shortly. ‘We’re not going to let you anywhere near a computer,’ he said. Then he searched
