The Nosferatu Scroll

by James Becker

  But a few moments later, it became obvious to both of them that they weren’t going to be able to visit Murano or, at least, not that morning.

  The dining-room door swung open, and the hotel receptionist peered inside. Spotting Bronson and Angela, she pointed them out to somebody waiting just outside. A moment later, two Italian police officers walked in, and crossed briskly to the table where they were sitting.

  ‘Signor Bronson?’ the first officer asked.

  From the insignia on his uniform, Bronson guessed he was the equivalent of a sergeant, and the other man probably a constable. He nodded.

  The officer pulled out a notebook, flipped through it until he found what he was looking for, and glanced at something written on the page.

  ‘I understand you speak Italian,’ he said, and Bronson nodded again. ‘Where were you last night?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I asked where you were last night,’ the police officer repeated.

  ‘I understood what you said,’ Bronson said, ‘but I don’t know why you’re asking me this.’

  ‘There was an incident, and we are trying to establish the movements of anybody who might have been involved. It’s routine.’

  Bronson didn’t like the sound of that. In his experience, whenever a policeman assured a suspect that a particular line of questioning was ‘routine’, it usually meant that it was anything but.

  ‘What sort of incident?’ he asked, deciding to play along. He knew he had absolutely nothing to worry about, whatever the ‘incident’ might be. ‘I was here, in this hotel, after we got back from the Isola di San Michele. Then we went out for a late dinner, probably at about nine, and returned to the hotel just after eleven. We were in our room all night until about an hour ago, when we came down for breakfast.’

  The carabinieri officer noted down Bronson’s answer, then looked at him again. ‘Can anyone substantiate your account, Signor Bronson?’

  ‘I paid for the meal at the restaurant with a credit card,’ he replied, ‘so that will establish where I was between about nine and eleven. After that, Angela and I were together, and as far as I’m aware nobody else saw us after we came back to the hotel.’

  The officer frowned, and Bronson could tell that his answers hadn’t satisfied him.

  ‘If you can tell me what incident you’re talking about, and the time it took place, we might be able to help.’

  The officer shrugged. ‘There was a break-in at the mortuary last night, and some damage was done.’

  ‘What’s he saying, Chris?’ Angela asked.

  Bronson briefly translated what the officer had just told him.

  ‘Somebody burgled the mortuary?’ Angela sounded incredulous. ‘Why on earth would anyone want to do that?’

  ‘Was anything taken?’ Bronson asked. ‘And when did it happen?’

  ‘We think the break-in occurred at about two or three in the morning. No valuables were stolen, as far as I know, apart from a camera.’

  ‘Then I have no alibi,’ Bronson said, ‘except that my partner is a very light sleeper, and if I had got up and left the room, I’m sure she would have heard me. What damage was done?’

  ‘You saw a corpse, I believe, on the Isola di San Michele, at the Cimitero Comunale?’ Bronson nodded. ‘Whoever broke into the mortuary removed its head, and scattered all the other bones and pieces of pottery, as if they were looking for something. And they stole an expensive digital camera.’

  Bronson leaned forward. He’d guessed that it had to be something to do with the events of the previous night; otherwise he could see no possible reason why the Italian police would want to question him.

  ‘It wasn’t us,’ he said firmly. ‘If you want to search our room, you’re very welcome to do so. We’ve got nothing to hide, and absolutely no reason to steal an ancient skull or take a camera.’

  The Italian officer shrugged again and closed his notebook with a snap. As he did so, his radio emitted a static-laden squeak, and he turned his head and pressed the transmit button to respond. For some reason the radio reception in the hotel wasn’t particularly good, but despite that Bronson was able to make out a few phrases of the message that the carabinieri control room was passing. One in particular seized his attention: ‘there’s been another, but we’ve found this one’. Taken in isolation, this phrase seemed innocuous enough, but it clearly meant something more to the sergeant, who immediately gestured to his companion to leave the room.

  ‘How long will you be staying in Venice?’ he asked Bronson.

  ‘For the rest of this week.’

  ‘Good. We may need to speak to you again.’

  ‘So what the hell was all that about?’ Angela demanded, when they were once again on their own.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Bronson replied, ‘but I intend to find out.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’m going to follow those two. Something’s going on, and it must be linked to that corpse we saw in the cemetery last night.’

  9

  Marietta Perini woke with a yelp of fear as something brushed across her face. Her eyes snapped open. She rubbed desperately at her cheeks, but whatever had touched her – a fly or spider, or whatever it was – had disappeared. The rattle of the chain that secured her left wrist to the wall, and the impenetrable blackness that surrounded her, only confirmed her terror. The nightmare of her dreams was her living reality.

  She ran her hands over her body, checking that no other insects were anywhere on her skin or clothes, because she now knew the source of the noise that had so alarmed her the previous night. It was the sound of dozens, maybe hundreds, of tiny pointed feet moving across the flagstone floor and along the walls. The cellar was alive with cockroaches.

  She had screamed at the realization, and had immediately lifted her feet off the floor and on to the mattress, away from what she’d felt sure was a plague of insects heading towards her. And then she’d heard a louder, more pronounced scurrying noise, and she’d screamed again.

  Cockroaches were bad enough, but that noise had then convinced her that there were also rats or mice down there with her in the darkness.

  Within minutes, the sound seemed to have spread all around her, and she’d created a terrifying mental image of tens of thousands of cockroaches swarming on to the bed and all over her, and rats gnawing at her flesh. But actually, the reality had been considerably less traumatic. She’d continued hearing the insects and the rodents scurrying about, but not one creature had touched her or climbed on to the bed – yet.

  She hadn’t expected to sleep, because of her fear and loathing of the other residents of the cellar, but the air down there was cold, and eventually she’d pulled an old and smelly blanket – the only piece of bedding provided – over her, simply to keep warm. And within a few minutes she’d drifted off into a fitful sleep, from which she had awoken, shivering and terrified, at intervals during the night.

  Marietta had no watch on her wrist, but she guessed it was mid-morning, and she was ravenously hungry and really thirsty. She’d had nothing to eat or drink since the previous afternoon, and her throat was parched and dry.

  She consoled herself with the thought that if her captors had intended to kill her, they would probably already have done so. And that meant that they wanted her alive. But why? It couldn’t be for ransom – her family wasn’t rich, and she had no money of her own. There must be something else. And if they didn’t want her to die, they would have to feed her.

  Even as that thought gave her some slight comfort, she heard a grating and rumbling sound as the door at the top of the spiral staircase was opened, and the cellar lights snapped on.

  Blinking in the harsh illumination, she stood up, shivering and waiting. Alone. And very frightened.

  10

  Bronson picked up the compact binoculars and small digital camera that he’d brought down from their room in readiness for their day of sight-seeing. He slipped both instruments into the pockets of his leather j
acket.

  ‘Are you sure about this, Chris?’ Angela asked.

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ Bronson replied with a rueful smile. ‘Look, while I’m out following those two carabinieri, maybe you could have a look at the pictures you took of the grave. See if anything strikes you as being odd, apart from the decapitated body and the brick, I mean. It might also be worth trying to find out the name of the woman in the grave.’

  He glanced through the window at the street outside, where the two policemen had stopped for a few moments. Bending down, he kissed Angela lightly on the lips, and then strode across the dining room and walked out of the hotel.

  The two carabinieri were on foot, of course – Venice being a car-free zone – and were walking north-east along the street from the hotel, turning right at the end, and then left. It looked to Bronson, who was following about fifty yards behind them and taking frequent glances at the street map of Venice he’d picked up at the airport, as if they were heading towards the edge of the lagoon. This suspicion was confirmed when the two men walked on to the jetty by the Fondamente Nuove vaporetto stop. There he saw a police launch waiting for them, the engine running and two other officers already on board.

  Although Bronson guessed that he would look just like any other tourist in the anonymous throngs already crowding the streets, he hung back, waiting for the vessel to depart. As soon as the sergeant and constable were sitting down in the launch, the driver freed the mooring line and gunned the engine. Bronson took out his binoculars and watched the vessel and its passengers. Once it had cleared the other water traffic that was manoeuvring near the vaporetto stop, the boat swung round to the left and headed north-east, accelerating across the lagoon towards the northern end of the Isola di San Michele – in other words, pretty much as he’d expected.

  About ten minutes later, shortly after the police launch had reached the jetty on the island, in fact, Bronson boarded a number forty-two vaporetto and began the same journey himself.

  The Isola di San Michele was reasonably large, about five hundred yards by four hundred yards, he guessed, and very popular with visitors to Venice, so he didn’t anticipate any particular difficulty in remaining unobserved once he got there.

  He stepped out of the vaporetto on to the jetty more or less in the middle of a group of German tourists, and headed towards the part of the cemetery where they’d found the broken tomb the previous evening.

  That was his first surprise. The tomb was covered in a heavy green tarpaulin, which was lashed down and held in place with a couple of orange polypropylene ropes. Clearly the authorities had decided to shield the broken structure from prying eyes. And there was no sign of any police officers. Whatever the carabinieri had come over to the island to investigate, it was obviously nothing at all to do with that grave.

  Bronson looked round the vast cemetery, and over to one side he finally spotted a handful of police officers clustered around another grave. Feeling somewhat like a ghoul, he headed that way himself, taking a circuitous route so as not to make his approach too obvious.

  Standing at the edge of the group of tourists that had gathered at the site, Bronson pulled his camera from his pocket, held it unobtrusively by his side and aimed it in the general direction of all the activity. The camera was equipped with a powerful zoom lens and had both still and movie modes, so he pressed the button that would provide him with a video record of what was going on.

  The carabinieri had erected a temporary screen on the far side of the new grave. This, like the broken grave of the previous night, was another stone box with a slab covering the top, but as far as Bronson could see, it was completely intact. Instead, the police officers’ attention was directed towards the ground beside the tomb. As he watched, a man wearing a set of white waterproof overalls, cap, gloves and rubber boots, and carrying a large plastic toolbox, emerged from behind the screen. He paused for a moment to exchange a few words with a couple of the police officers, then walked over to a patch of grass on which several other cases had been left. Bronson had been involved with enough serious crimes to know what the man’s job was, and then, as the white-clad figure turned slightly towards him, he recognized the man as the same forensic pathologist who’d travelled out to the island the previous night. And that, he knew, meant that another body had been discovered.

  If any confirmation was needed, it followed just moments later, when two men dressed in civilian clothes, and carrying a black body bag and a collapsible stretcher, walked behind the screen.

  A few minutes later they emerged, carrying a zipped body bag on the stretcher. Before they moved away, however, one of the policemen halted them with a gesture, and unzipped the bag just far enough to allow him to see the head of the victim.

  Bronson lifted the camera higher, pressed the zoom button and tried to get a close-up shot. A tumble of blonde hair filled the LCD screen, but it looked as if the face of the girl – and the victim was obviously a young woman – was invisible. Several of the tourists standing near him were also using their cameras, snapping away, and one of the carabinieri shouted angrily at them.

  Bronson stepped back and tucked the camera into his pocket, a flush of embarrassment warming his cheek. He’d never liked the salacious attitude of the public – and especially of the British press – to accidents and crime, and he didn’t much like the feeling of being on the other side of the crime-scene tape, of being one of the morbid spectators.

  And, he admitted to himself, he was probably just wasting his time. He had no idea whether the girl who was being carried away from the tomb had died by accident or from some other cause. About the only thing he was sure of was that it had nothing to do with the ancient mutilated corpse they’d seen the previous evening.

  Turning away, he walked quickly through the graveyard towards the Cimitero vaporetto stop. He would go back to Angela, he decided, and they would resume their holiday and try to forget all about the vampire’s tomb and the dead girl he’d just seen.

  But as the vaporetto cut through the waters of the lagoon, a part of what he’d overheard continued to nag at him. The radio broadcast to the sergeant had included the phrase ‘there’s been another’. This could only mean one thing: the blonde-haired girl hadn’t had an accident; she had been the victim of foul play. And she hadn’t been the first.

  11

  ‘Sit down,’ the man holding the taser instructed.

  Marietta knew she had to obey, so she nodded meekly and backed towards the bed.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked, fighting to keep her voice level, to sound unafraid, despite the abject terror that had her nearly paralysed. She’d tried running, she’d tried fighting back; neither had done her any good at all. The memory of the bolts of electricity she’d endured from the taser still seared through her brain. She would do anything – almost anything – to avoid experiencing that agony again.

  ‘You’ll find out soon enough,’ the man said, his voice indifferent, almost conversational. He gestured to the other man who’d accompanied him into the cellar, and who was carrying a laden tray. ‘Breakfast,’ he added shortly, and instructed his companion to place the tray on the floor well within Marietta’s reach.

  She eyed the food hungrily. She was absolutely famished, but for the moment she didn’t move. She remembered reading somewhere that hostages – and to quiet her escalating terror she’d decided that she was, for whatever reason, a hostage – stood more chance of surviving their ordeal if they could establish some kind of rapport with their captors. With no other options, this seemed to be the only viable course of action she could take.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

  The man with the taser looked at her. ‘My name is not important,’ he said, ‘and I don’t think you’ll be around long enough for us to become friends.’

  His words, and the light, almost careless manner with which he said them, sent a chill through Marietta, but she forced a smile on to her face. ‘My name’s Marietta,’ she said.

&n
bsp; ‘I know. Marietta Perini,’ the guard replied.

  Marietta felt a lurch of despair. She’d rationalized that perhaps she resembled someone else, that she’d been snatched by mistake, and that once her captors realized their error, she’d be released unharmed. The guard’s matter-of-fact statement meant that she’d been abducted for a specific reason, and she didn’t like to think what this reason might be.

  ‘Eat some food,’ the guard instructed, pointing at the tray.

  ‘When I’ve finished,’ Marietta said, ‘could I please wash?’

  ‘I’ll have a bucket of warm water brought down, with some soap and a towel. Anything else?’

  ‘Yes. Can you please, please, leave the light on, at least while I’m eating? Just to keep the rats and insects away.’

  The guard nodded, then he turned on his heel and walked out, his companion following.

  The moment Marietta heard the cellar door slam shut, she picked up the tray of food and attacked it ravenously. There were bread rolls, butter and preserves, a small plate of ham and cheese, a large glass of water, a cup of black coffee, two cubes of sugar and a plastic container of milk. She needed the water more than anything else, and drank it all in moments, then slowed down, taking her time over the rest of the meal. She ate every scrap, then poured the milk in the coffee and drank that. She didn’t put the sugar in the drink, but hid the cubes under the mattress, as a pathetic reserve, just in case they didn’t bring her anything else to eat or drink for the rest of the day.

  She scanned the tray for the last time, to see if there was anything she’d missed, or if there was anything on it that she could use as a weapon or a tool to try to free herself. But the only utensils she’d been given were a plastic knife, fork and spoon, and none of them would be of the slightest use to her. She replaced everything neatly on the tray, walked forward and put it down on the floor where it had been left.