maintenance jobs, or even a couple of bureaucrats counting the graves or something equally mundane.
Bronson moved the binoculars slightly so that he could see the tomb itself. From the angle he was looking at it, he could see one side of the structure, while the two men were on the far side, both of them looking down at the ancient stone. Then one of the men bent down beside the grave, and was lost to sight.
Bronson wondered if he should simply stroll through that part of the cemetery towards the grave he was interested in, playing the part of an innocent tourist, because he was still unsure about who the two men were. If they were just workers, he would be able to examine the grave without any problems, and if they were in some way connected with Angela’s abduction, he might see them clearly enough to provide a photofit for the carabinieri. Or perhaps he could even follow them when they left the island. Either way, getting closer to the tomb seemed like a good idea.
He slipped the binoculars back into his pocket, stepped out from behind the tree, and started making his way across the grass that carpeted the area between the graves. He’d only gone half a dozen steps when he heard a sudden noise from behind him, and glanced back to see another man walking swiftly towards him through the graves. Instinctively, Bronson stepped to one side to allow the man to hurry past.
The new arrival nodded his thanks and stepped past Bronson. And as he did so, he abruptly turned and swung his right arm towards Bronson’s head. But something in the way the man moved must have triggered some subliminal warning, because as he did so Bronson realized two things simultaneously: first, that the figure beside him was one of the men who’d attacked him in the street when Angela was abducted, and, second, that he was trying precisely the same technique again, swinging a heavy blackjack with the intention of smashing it into the back of Bronson’s skull.
37
Angela had woken stiff and aching from her fitful sleep on the sofa, and had been allowed to wash in a bathroom adjacent to the lavatory she’d used the previous day. Her breakfast had consisted of a plate of pastries and coffee, and as soon as she’d finished it, Marco had told her to carry on working on the translation.
She had acquired her knowledge of Latin over the years that she’d worked at the British Museum, building on the lessons in the dead language she’d enjoyed at school, more years ago than she could now contemplate with any degree of comfort. But try as she might to concentrate on the words in front of her, her thoughts kept returning to the awful reality of her situation and, inescapably, to Chris. She had no idea whether he was alive or dead. If he was alive, if he’d survived the attack on the street, she knew he’d be trying to find her, and would be frantic with worry. But how on earth would he be able to track her down?
She had no idea how long she’d spent in a drug-induced state of unconsciousness, but it must have been several hours, perhaps even days, and it was entirely possible that she was no longer in Venice at all. Her only reassurance was that her captors spoke together in Italian, which presumably meant that she was still in Italy. But even that, she had to acknowledge, was actually pure conjecture. It was just as possible that she’d been snatched by a gang of Italians, and then taken to some other country entirely.
And she’d found the coolly dispassionate attitude of her captors enormously alarming. She really believed that any one of them could kill her with as little compunction or concern as he would exhibit if he swatted a fly. As far as she could see, the only reason she was still alive at that moment was because they needed her translation skills, and Marco – or whatever his real name was – had implied that they only wanted to see her version of the ancient text to check that whoever else they had employed to decipher it had got it right.
That meant they already had a good idea of what the Latin text said, which in turn meant that she had to do a reasonably good job herself. But not a perfect job, she decided. Perhaps she would make a handful of trifling errors in the translation – errors that she could explain away because of her unfamiliarity with Latin, and which might mean they would keep her alive for a bit longer while they ensured that she’d done the best job she could, and that the text she’d produced was accurate. That was the only thing she could think of doing to make her abductors think twice before killing her. And the longer she stayed alive, Angela knew, the better the chances of her finding some way of getting out of the house – wherever it was – and escaping. And maybe somebody, Chris or the police or even the occupants of a neighbouring property, if there was one, might discover where she was being held prisoner. It was a cliche, obviously, but it was just as obviously true: while there was life, there really was hope.
Angela dabbed her eyes angrily with a tissue, cleared her mind of all extraneous thoughts, and again focused on the task at hand.
Quite a lot of the Latin words were familiar to her. One of the advantages of learning Latin was that it had an essentially finite vocabulary, unlike English and other modern languages in common usage, which acquire new words, new meanings and new variants of existing words on an almost daily basis. Once you knew the meaning of a Latin word, you knew it for ever, because it would never change.
She remembered most of the declensions and many of the conjugations of verbs, and she was able to jot down the general sense of several of the sentences quite quickly, just leaving a handful of blanks for the words that she was either unfamiliar with or unsure of. Then she’d open the dictionary and flick through the pages until she found the first word she needed to check. Then she’d fill in the meaning, and move on to the next word. When she’d finished each sentence she paused for a moment to read it in its entirety, to make sure that it made sense, then re-wrote it in modern English.
The translation itself had proved to be relatively straight-forward, but she soon realized what Marco had meant when he referred to ‘unusual aspects’ in the text. Although the references to the tomb of the twin angels still seemed fairly clear, other passages in the Latin were ambiguous at best, and she was increasingly unsure whether or not she was getting it right. In some passages, Carmelita had referred to the Isola di San Michele as the insula silenti, the phrase translating as the ‘island of the dead’, but there were several occurrences of an entirely different phrase – insula vetus mortuus – which puzzled her.
Her literal translation rendered this as the island of the ‘ancient dead’ or ‘old dead’, which she really didn’t understand. It wasn’t clear to her whether Carmelita was using the expression as a synonym for San Michele, or if she meant somewhere completely different, possibly a more ancient graveyard located elsewhere in Venice.
And there was another phrase which sent a chill through her. The pages referred to planctus mortuus, which translated as the ‘wailing dead’ or the ‘screaming dead’. ‘Dead’, as far as she was concerned, meant exactly that: death, the cessation of life. The dead could neither scream nor wail. But the same expression appeared in several places in the text, and the context suggested that Carmelita was referring to a specific place where the dead had screamed.
Angela shook her head and continued working through the text.
38
When anybody asked him if he knew any of the martial arts, Bronson normally told them he had a black belt in origami – it amused him to see the conflicting emotions this statement usually produced. In fact, he’d trained to an intermediate level in aikido.
Perhaps the most unusual, and certainly the least known, of the oriental fighting techniques, aikido is purely defensive. No master of aikido could attack anyone using the art, because no offensive moves exist. But once an aikido practitioner is attacked, his or her response to that attack can easily prove fatal to the assailant. It relies heavily on unbalancing the opponent, essentially using the attacker’s own weight and speed and aggression against him.
Bronson’s tutor, a Japanese man barely five feet five inches tall and aged sixty-three, had told him years before that an aikido master could take on as many as three masters in any of the other martial arts, at the same time, and still expect to be standing when the dust settled.
Bronson frankly hadn’t believed him, but one evening when the two of them had left the dojo and were walking over to where Bronson had parked his car, a gang of six scarf-wearing football supporters, high on drink or
