Angela.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Get started.’
Angela knew she had no choice. She picked up the first sheet and looked at it. She’d already seen that the writing on the scroll was indistinct, the ink a faded grey against the brown of the parchment, but the photocopies were actually fairly clear. She nodded and reached for the Latin-English dictionary she’d been using previously.
Within minutes it was clear that what she was looking at was not a piece of text like those she’d worked on before. The first two pages appeared simply to contain a list of names, divided up into groups and interspersed by a number of Latin words that she had not encountered before. Words like agnatus, abdormitus and cognationis appeared frequently, and it was only when she translated these expressions that she realized what she was looking at. Agnatus meant a ‘blood relative in the male line’; abdormitus translated as ‘died’, and cognationis referred to a ‘blood relationship’, a meaning that she’d guessed even before the dictionary confirmed it. The list was simply a genealogy, one section of a family tree.
The first name on the list was familiar to her, because she’d seen it somewhere in the very recent past, though it still took her a few seconds to place it. The genealogy that she was transcribing traced the blood relationship of a number of Italian families back to a single royal source: the Princess Eleonora Elisabeth Amalia Magdalena of Lobkowicz, Princess of Schwarzenberg, the woman who was also known as the Vampire Princess.
Angela sat back from the desk and stared across at Marco, who was sitting in his easy chair on the opposite side of the room. He was looking in her general direction, and when she met his glance, he nodded.
‘Do you know what this is?’ Angela asked.
‘Yes. But you don’t have to list all the members of the family. We’re only interested in the names of the people who died here in Venice in the late eighteenth century. In fact, it’s only one of those names that we need you to check, just to confirm his link to the princess.’
‘Which is?’
‘Nicodema Diluca.’
The name meant nothing immediately to Angela, though again the surname had a slightly familiar ring to it. She turned back to the photocopied sheets, quickly found what she was looking for and painstakingly traced the names of Diluca’s forebears back to the Princess of Schwarzenberg. If the names and relationships listed were correct, then Diluca was undeniably one of her blood descendants.
‘He’s a descendant, yes, according to this,’ she reported to Marco. ‘Why is it important?’
He looked at her for a moment, then shook his head. ‘You really don’t understand, do you? It’s all in the blood. There’s nothing quite so important as the bloodline. That’s why you won’t find the name Carmelita Paganini listed anywhere on those pages. She wasn’t part of the sacred family, though she obviously wished she had been. But she did do one thing useful. She – or rather her diary – pointed us towards the correct grave on San Michele.’
Then the penny dropped. ‘The tomb of the twin angels?’ Angela said. ‘We found it, but I thought the name inscribed on it was Delaca.’
‘You were nearly right. I have men out on the island now, recovering what we need.’
Angela didn’t know what he meant by that remark, unless there was some other document or relic they needed hidden in that tomb as well.
Then there was an urgent double knock on the door. Before Marco could even get out of his seat, the door swung open and a man Angela hadn’t seen before stepped into the room. Obviously agitated, he strode over to Marco and held a brief but animated conversation with him. Part-way through, they both paused to stare across at Angela for a few seconds. Then Marco smiled. The other man pointed back towards the door, and then left the room.
‘What?’ Angela demanded, conscious that Marco was staring at her again.
‘I have good news and bad news for you, I suppose,’ he said. ‘The good news is that your ex-husband wasn’t killed when my men attacked him on the street, because he’s just been spotted chasing around the lagoon in a powerboat. The bad news is that he encountered two of my men in one of the canals in Venice and they shot him.’
Angela’s face displayed the turmoil of emotions flooding through her body as she absorbed Marco’s matter- of-fact statements, and for several seconds she found she couldn’t speak.
‘Is he…?’ she finally managed.
‘Dead?’ Marco supplied for her. ‘I’ve no idea. Probably. But whether he’s alive or dead makes no difference to you, here and now. The important thing is that he’s no longer of any concern to us. We now have both of the things that we needed, the scroll and the relic, and that’s all that matters. And we’ll be keeping you alive for a little while longer.’
Angela was starting to recover her composure. She knew Chris, and knew he had a habit of bouncing back. Just because he’d been shot at didn’t mean he was dead. At least, that’s what she would cling to. She turned slightly to face Marco.
‘You’re letting me live?’ she asked.
Marco nodded. ‘At least until you’ve finished the translation,’ he said, and walked across to her. ‘This scroll,’ he continued, pointing at the photocopied sheets on the desk in front of her, ‘is the most important document you’ll ever see. This is the source, the sacred record. This is what we’ve been seeking all these years. Forget Carmelita Paganini’s diary: this scroll contains the answers to every question we’ve ever wanted to ask. Translating it will keep you alive, at least for a few more hours.’
He paused and smiled. ‘In fact, if everything works out as we hope, whether you live or die might not matter one way or the other.’
57
Despite the veiled threat Bianchi had made for Bronson to stay away from the investigation, he had absolutely no intention of sitting around in his hotel room waiting for the phone to ring. Angela had to be on that island, and he was determined – after all he’d been through – to stay close to her.
This time he knew exactly where he was going, and steered a direct course from the mouth of the Canal Grande across the waterway and through the gap between the islands of Giudecca and San Giorgio Maggiore. Once he was clear of the water traffic around the islands, he opened the throttle and accelerated towards his destination. He kept his eyes open, looking for any sign of the police launch that Bianchi had said he’d be sending to the island to investigate. He saw several of the distinctive blue-and-white craft in the lagoon, but none appeared to be heading in the direction he was going.
After several minutes of travelling at almost full speed, Bronson reached the small islet where he’d beached the boat previously. He throttled back, bringing the powerboat to an almost complete stop about fifty yards away from the shore of the islet, and for a few moments considered his next course of action. The problem he’d had previously was that the bulk of the house on the larger island to the south of him obscured his view of the jetty where the two men must have landed. It would obviously be far better for him to find a position from which he could see this part of the island, if only to observe the arrival of the police launch – assuming, of course, that one was going to turn up.
Finally he made a plan. He would head south, towards the end of the lagoon, just like any other tourist exploring this part of Venice, then turn round and come back. That way he would achieve two things: he’d get a far better look at the island itself, and, with any luck, he’d find another island from which he’d be able to watch. At all costs he had to avoid alerting anybody on the island of his interest in them. In other words, he had to play the tourist card.
Steering the boat around the islet, he meandered south, sitting on the plastic seat in the powerboat and looking all around him, exactly as an innocent tourist would do. But behind his mirrored sunglasses, he was focusing on the island to his right.
As he’d observed earlier, the island was a reasonable size – big enough for the house to look comfortable in its setting – and as he steered the boat further south, a small inlet came into view. Within it, he could see a
