Angela wasn’t quite certain what the girl meant. She was obviously alive so she had to be talking about someone else, unless Angela had completely misunderstood what she was saying.
‘What do you mean?’
‘There was another girl down here. Her name was Benedetta.’ Marietta’s voice was fracturing under the emotional strain she was feeling, the words indistinct.
‘Just tell me, Marietta. Take your time.’
‘There’s a ceremony. They made me wash and put on a robe. But they took Benedetta first and I watched.’ Marietta’s voice broke again, and for several minutes she sobbed uncontrollably before she regained some semblance of composure.
In a shaking voice, she hesitantly described the rest of the ceremony she’d witnessed. As she did so, Angela’s terror increased. What the other girl was describing was an almost exact match for the ritual that had been described in the scroll – the Noble Vampyr document.
Until that moment, Angela had harboured the faint and completely irrational belief that what she was experiencing was somehow unreal, an elaborate charade or something of that sort. But Marietta’s words, as she described the brutal rape and murder of another girl in that very room the previous day, completely destroyed even that tiny hope.
She shuddered when she heard Marietta’s description of the ritual rape, but it was the very last part of the ceremony, the last acts that Marietta had witnessed, which frightened her the most.
‘Please tell me that again,’ Angela asked.
‘The man who killed her, the man who bit into her neck, he was a vampire.’
Before she’d arrived in Venice, Angela would have unhesitatingly countered such a claim with a calm and reasoned statement of her own. Vampires, she would have said, do not exist and have never existed. Belief in such creatures is a pre-mediaeval legend with no basis whatsoever in reality.
She was tempted to say something like that to Marietta, but for a moment she didn’t. Because, whatever the truth or otherwise of the vampire legend, she knew beyond any doubt that the group of people who were holding them believed absolutely in the reality of the undead. For them, vampires were undeniably real.
And, though she wouldn’t even admit it to himself, the hooded man, the apparent leader of the group, bothered her more than she could say. His ability to move in complete silence, the fact that she’d never seen his face because it was kept permanently in shadow under his hood, and above all the stench of rotting flesh that clung to him all seemed so totally non-human that she was beginning to doubt her own mind. Her rational brain still rejected utterly the concept of the existence of vampires, but at that moment, in those circumstances and in that place, she was no longer certain that she was right.
But she tried to persuade the girl anyway. ‘Vampires are not real, Marietta,’ she said soothingly. ‘You must have seen something else.’
‘You didn’t see him. He had huge teeth, long and pointed, and he drank the blood from her neck.’
Angela let it go. ‘So what happened then?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. I screamed and one of the men hit me with the taser and knocked me out. When I came round, the cellar was empty and Benedetta was gone. One of the men told me they’d taken her to San Michele, so I know she was dead.’
For a few moments, Angela sat in silence, wondering if she should share what she knew about the group, about the lapsed Hungarian monk Amadeus, about Nicodema Diluca, the Venetian who had claimed descent from the Princess Eleonora Amalia von Schwarzenberg, and who both Marietta and the dead girl had unfortunately been related to. But she knew that wouldn’t help, wouldn’t help either of them, and so she held her tongue.
There was just one last question she needed to ask, though she already knew the answer: ‘But how do you know they’re going to kill you as well?’
Marietta sobbed out her reply. ‘Because they told me it’s my turn on the table tonight,’ she said.
68
The last group of men who had arrived by launch – including Inspector Bianchi – had now disappeared inside the house, and there was no sign of anyone moving about on the island. But that didn’t mean that nobody was watching, so Bronson wasn’t going to drive his boat into the inlet and moor it there. Instead, he decided that his best option was to steer a course that would take him well away from the island and allow him to approach it from the southern end, the shore opposite the jetty and furthest away from the house.
Bronson started the engine of his boat and immediately closed the throttle almost fully, muting the outboard’s exhaust note as much as he could. Then he steered away from the island, out to the west, before starting a gentle turn that would take him on a semicircular course around to the south of his objective. The boat was moving at little more than walking pace, but that suited him fine. He knew that silence and stealth were both far more important than speed.
Keeping the boat moving slowly until he estimated that he was directly behind the grey stone house on the island, he turned the wheel to point the bow of the craft towards his objective. When he estimated that he was probably about fifty yards from the shore, he cut the engine completely and let the boat drift on in silence. A lot of the water in the Venetian lagoon was very shallow, and he guessed he might well be able to wade ashore, pulling the boat behind him. He should have checked the chart before the light faded, he realized, but it was too late to try to do so now. At worst, once the boat stopped moving forwards, he might have to swim ashore and pull it.
In fact, he wouldn’t have to do either, because the shore of the island was looming up in front of him out of the murk, and the boat still had enough forward speed to reach it without any difficulty. The bow of the powerboat ran through a clump of reeds, and then grounded on something solid. Immediately Bronson stepped over the side, trying to be as quiet as he could, strode forward and tied the bow line around a projecting tree stump. With the boat secured, he crouched down to avoid being seen in silhouette, and studied the ground around him.
Over to his left was an old jetty, much smaller than the large landing stage he’d seen at the front of the house, and tied up to it was a small powerboat.
As he’d already established from his survey of the island before night fell, the land was reasonably flat, and projected only a matter of a few feet above the water level in the lagoon. There were no fences or barriers that he could see, and the most distinctive feature was the bulk of the house that stood at the northern end of the island and was blotting out the night sky directly in front of him, a massive, featureless grey monolith, its shape relieved only by the lighter grey outlines of the shuttered windows.
Between Bronson and the house were the walls of the ruined building, which he now thought might be the remains of another house, or possibly a chapel or small church. The light wasn’t good enough for him to tell for sure. And a short distance over to his left was the other structure, which looked like a wooden stable or a farm outhouse.
Bronson sniffed the air. He’d never thought he had a particularly sensitive nose, but he’d detected an unusual smell. He sniffed again. Whatever it was, it seemed to be emanating from the wooden structure.
He checked around him, then ran across to it. There was a single door on one side, and a window to the right, through which he looked cautiously. The interior was completely dark, but he had the strange sense that there was something, something large, moving around inside. He pressed his ear against the wooden wall, and quite clearly detected a rubbing, scuffing sound from the interior. The door was secured by a large new padlock and a substantial hasp, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to unlock it or force it without tools. He could probably shoot off the padlock with the Browning, but that was hardly an option.
For a few moments, he wondered if Angela might be held captive inside the building, and if he should tap on the glass or the door, to attract her attention. But something stopped him – some visceral feeling that told him whatever was imprisoned in the shed was not human. His heart thumping, he stepped backwards, away from the door.
Instead, he switched his attention to the grey stone house and the ruins behind it. Choosing his path carefully, every sense attuned to any signs of life, he walked as quietly as he could towards the stone wall that marked the end of the tumbledown building.
As he approached, he realized that his earlier guess had been correct. It was a small church. A few of the
