by James Becker
In any event, he was somebody that Lombardi, as the senior investigating officer in charge of the case, needed to talk to. ‘Marco’ had told Lombardi that he would only meet him alone and face-to-face in a public area, and the Campo Santa Maria Formosa had seemed as good a spot as any. And Lombardi was going there alone and on foot, as he’d been instructed, just in case the man was mounting surveillance of the streets between the police station and the square. But that didn’t mean that their meeting would go unobserved.
Lombardi had already dispatched a dozen police officers to cover the eight or so exits from the Campo, and four more to position themselves with parabolic microphones and high-resolution still and video cameras in a couple of the buildings that lined the square, to record the meeting. ‘Marco’ would find it easy enough to get to the Campo and to the cafe he’d selected, but he would find it much more difficult to leave afterwards.
Lombardi’s orders had been absolutely clear: the man he was going to meet was to be arrested as soon as he left the cafe.
The senior police officer didn’t hurry as he walked up the Calle Drio La Chiesa, allowing his men plenty of time to get into position. He turned left past the Museo Guidi, still closed after proving too expensive to run, then right again, following the west bank of the canal towards the square.
Carlo Lombardi had been born in Venice and prided himself on knowing every street and alley and canal in the city, and he believed he’d covered every possible way out. He was quite certain that once ‘Marco’ walked into the Campo Santa Maria Formosa, he would only leave the square in handcuffs. And, at last, they might finally have a break in the case that had been both puzzling and alarming Venetian police officers for the previous two years.
He still remembered that dreadful afternoon when he’d responded to a call from one of his senior inspectors, and had travelled in a police launch out to the Isola di San Michele. He had stood over a shallow pit behind a line of trees and looked down on to the white and waxy naked body of a twenty-year-old girl, apparently dumped there only a few hours earlier. Her eyes had been wide open, though already discoloured by the action of insects, attracted by the faint smell of decomposition. As Lombardi had stared down at the body, he’d heard a faint buzzing sound, and then a couple of blowflies had emerged from the girl’s open mouth, where they’d doubtless been laying eggs. Other flies were clustered around the left-hand side of her neck.
Lombardi had looked at the inspector, his eyes questioning, but the man had simply flapped a handkerchief beside the girl’s neck to drive away the insects. And then he and Lombardi had stared down at the fatal wound, its edges raised and ragged, which marred the perfect white skin of the corpse.
The results of the subsequent autopsy hadn’t been a surprise. The girl had died from loss of blood — exsanguination — which had pumped out of the wound on her neck. There was also clear evidence of restraints: the marks of ropes or straps around her wrists and ankles. And she’d been raped, raped violently, several times, her genital area marred by heavy bruising. The body had yielded no useful clues to suggest where the girl had died, or any indication of the identity of her killers. Despite the evidence of rape, traces of lubrication within her vagina meant that the rapist, or rapists, had used a condom; and the body appeared to have been thoroughly washed after death to remove any pubic hairs or other trace evidence.
The one slight oddity revealed at the post-mortem was the contents of the stomach. Very shortly before she died, the girl had ingested about a quarter of a litre of milk. That in itself was unsurprising, but extensive bruising to the lips and the inside of her mouth suggested she might have been force-fed the liquid, which was unusual. But the analysis of the milk itself provided the biggest surprise, because the pathologist hadn’t been able to identify the animal from which it came. All he could tell Lombardi was that it wasn’t from a cow, sheep, goat or any other farmed animal he was aware of, nor even from a human female. It simply wasn’t in the database.
There were, of course, a lot of animal species in which the female produced milk to nourish her offspring, and testing the samples removed from the dead girl’s stomach against every possible mammal would have been a lengthy and very expensive process — and probably ultimately pointless. So Lombardi had told the pathologist not to bother, because it was already clear that the milk hadn’t contained any form of drug, and had in no way contributed to the girl’s death. It was just a curious anomaly.
Lombardi was quickly convinced that she had been the victim of a kind of ritualized murder, and he’d vowed there and then that he would bring the perpetrators — and there were obvious indicators that several men had been involved — to justice.
Since then, there had been other disappearances of young girls, usually between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. Some of the bodies had been found, but in other cases the girls had simply vanished without trace. The recovered corpses bore the same indicators of a hideous death as the first corpse: evidence of multiple rape and exsanguination through severe wounds in the neck. And in every case, a small amount of the unidentifiable milk had been recovered from the victim’s stomach.
Lombardi mused on this as he walked along beside the canal. As was so often the case with investigations into serious crimes, the Italian police had been plagued by the usual crop of nutters who wanted to confess to the murders, or to produce convincing — to them — evidence that the killer was the man next door or the Pope or the American President or even a visiting alien. They’d talked to most of them, just in case they were involved in some way, but they were quite satisfied that none of the people they’d interviewed had had anything to do with the crimes.
But the thing that had convinced Lombardi that ‘Marco’ could help him with the murders was the single sentence the man had said during his telephone conversation: ‘I know about the milk.’
Nobody, apart from the pathologist and the senior carabinieri officers investigating the murders had been told what had been found in the victims’ stomachs. Now they had a potential witness, or perhaps even a member of the group responsible for the killings, who was prepared to talk to them. This, Lombardi knew, could finally break the case wide open.
By now he was walking towards the end of the street. The last part of his journey — a right turn over one bridge and then an immediate left turn over another — would take him into the southern end of the Campo.
Then somebody grabbed his arm and swung him round, and Lombardi found himself looking into the hostile eyes of a man he was sure he’d never seen before.
‘Who are you?’ Lombardi demanded, casually loosening his jacket so that he could reach his pistol more easily.
The stranger smiled slightly and slid his hands into his jacket pockets. ‘I’m Marco.’
‘But we were supposed-’ Lombardi began.
The other man shook his head. ‘By now, you’ll have plain-clothes officers and uniformed police forming a nice tight circle around the Campo, and probably a surveillance unit or two watching the cafe. If I walk into the square with you, I’ll only leave it with my hands cuffed behind my back. And that’s not a part of my plan at all.’
‘And what is your plan, Marco?’ Lombardi asked, relaxing slightly.
‘You don’t need to know that.’ The man’s voice was almost haughty, his manner arrogant, as if he were talking to an inferior. ‘All I want to do is give you a message to take to your colleagues, because we think you’re getting a little too close to us. And that must stop.’
‘So what’s the message?’
‘This,’ Marco replied. Shifting his right hand slightly, he pulled the trigger of the compact semi-automatic pistol he held concealed in his pocket.
The nine-millimetre bullet, fired at almost point-blank range, ploughed through Lombardi’s stomach, driving him on to the ground, his hands clutching at the wound. The sound of the shot echoed deafeningly around the street, and the few pedestrians in the vicinity stopped dead and stared in horror at the scene
being played out in front of them.
Unhurriedly, Marco walked a couple of paces forward to where Lombardi lay writhing and screaming on the ground and looked down at him.
‘You should have stuck to what you’re good at,’ he said, ‘which is catching common criminals, and left us to get on with our important work.’
He pulled the pistol from his pocket, and almost casually fired two further shots into Lombardi’s chest. Then he turned and strode away, tucking the pistol out of sight as he did so.
Behind him, Lombardi’s legs twitched a couple of times in his death throes. And then he lay still.
13
‘Any luck?’ Bronson asked, opening the door to their hotel bedroom. It was early afternoon, and Angela was sitting near the window in the pale sunshine, frowning at her computer screen.
‘That really depends on your definition of luck,’ she said. ‘Rather than trying to tackle the diary, which I thought might take me a while because my Latin is probably a bit rusty, I decided to do the easy bit first. I thought I’d start by trying to trace the family history of the woman in the grave.’
‘And did you?’
‘Well, you know that I photographed the slab that covered the tomb?’ Bronson nodded: she’d photographed everything in sight the previous evening. ‘When I looked at the pictures, even blown up on the screen of my laptop, almost the entire inscription is illegible. Absolutely the only thing I can make out for certain is the date of the burial, which was eighteen twenty-five, and I actually read that when we were in the cemetery last night.’
‘That slab looked very badly weathered to me,’ Bronson said. ‘In fact, I suggested to one of the carabinieri officers that you might be able to assist with dating the grave by looking at those shards of pottery we saw in the tomb.’
Angela shook her head. ‘No, you misunderstood me. The slab was weathered, I agree. That’s not surprising, bearing in mind it’s been sitting out there, exposed to the elements, for nearly two hundred years. But that wasn’t why I can’t read the name on the gravestone. The letters have actually been chipped off, probably with a hammer and chisel, because I can just about make out the marks of a steel tool on the stone.’
‘You mean it’s been vandalized?’
‘Unless Venetian vandals are better equipped than their British counterparts, probably not. To me, this looks like a determined attempt to obliterate the name of the woman in the grave.’
‘Could you make out any part of the inscription?’ Bronson asked.
‘I thought her surname began with the letter “P”, but I couldn’t even swear to this with what I found on the tomb. There’s a short gap where none of the stone has been chipped away, which I assume was the space between her first name and her family name, and in one of my photographs you can just about see the upper half of the letter carved into the stone. But it could also be the letter “R”, “B” or even a “D” — not much to go on.’
‘Can I see it?’
Angela turned the laptop so that Bronson could see the screen easily.
The display showed a greyish stone, the surface marked with patches of lichen in faded reds and greens. On the right-hand side of the frame was a faint semicircular mark, barely visible, with a straight line on the left-hand side of it. It looked like the upper part of the letter ‘P’. Above and around the marks, several parallel scratches could be seen.
Angela pointed at them. ‘You can’t see it terribly well in this picture,’ she said, ‘but that area is lower than the surrounding stone, and I think those marks were left by the chisel that hacked away that piece of stone.’
‘So why didn’t the person who did this chip off the rest of the letter?’
‘They did,’ Angela said shortly, ‘or they tried to. Most inscriptions on masonry use a V-shaped cut to form the letters, and that was done here. The upper part of the letter was removed, and what we’re seeing in this picture is the deepest cut made by the mason’s chisel, the very bottom of the V-cut that formed the letter. This is the only picture that shows it, and I think that was just luck. The camera angle meant that the flash just managed to pick it out.’
Angela looked away from the screen and up at Bronson. ‘And where did you get to? You’ve been gone for hours.’
‘I know. Oddly enough, I went back to the Isola di San Michele. I followed those two carabinieri to the edge of the lagoon where there was a police launch waiting for them. I watched them head out to the island, then I hopped on a vaporetto and followed them.’
‘They went back to the grave, you mean?’
‘That was my assumption too, but they went to a different part of the cemetery because another body had been found there. A fresh corpse, I mean, not another old burial.’
Bronson explained to Angela what he’d seen, not mentioning the video and still images he’d taken at the scene, because he was, in truth, still a little embarrassed about what he’d done.
‘So that’s an entirely separate crime,’ Angela said.
‘Actually, I don’t even know if it was a crime. All I saw was the body of a girl with long blonde hair being carted off, presumably for forensic examination and an autopsy. She could easily have been the victim of accidental death. All I saw, really, was her hair.’
‘So the fact that her body was on the island, not far from the broken grave, is just a coincidence,’ Angela said, looking sceptical. ‘You think that the two incidents are entirely unconnected.’
Bronson paused. ‘As far as I can tell, there’s no link between the two apart from their location. But there is one thing that intrigues me, something I overheard when that police sergeant received the radio message.’
‘I guessed you’d heard something when you decided to follow them.’
‘The dispatcher, or whatever they’re called in the carabinieri, said that “there’s been another, but we’ve found this one”. Then the two officers went straight out to the island. To me, that suggests young women have been disappearing, and only some of their bodies have been recovered.’
Angela sighed, got up from her chair and stretched. ‘In other words, it rather looks as if there could be a serial killer operating here in Venice.’ She turned to Bronson. ‘And you want to investigate, don’t you?’
Bronson stood up too and put his hands on her shoulders. ‘I’m not going to get involved, I promise. I’m just interested in what’s going on. Just like you’re interested in that vampire diary or whatever it is.’
Angela smiled gently. ‘Touche,’ she murmured. ‘So what are you going to do about it?’
‘Nothing much. I thought I might just check the archives of the local newspaper and see if I can spot a pattern. That’s all. And what about you?’ he added. ‘Have you got anywhere with that thing yet?’
Angela gestured towards the small black leather-bound volume lying on the desk next to her laptop.
‘Not really. It’s in pretty poor condition, as you might expect. I still think it was put in the grave underneath the coffin when the woman was buried. That makes the most sense, especially if the people who buried her, her family or her friends, accepted her for what she was.’
‘That she was a vampire, you mean?’ Bronson said.
‘Well, to be accurate, she was a woman who believed she was a vampire, which isn’t exactly the same thing. But to honour her memory, as it were, they buried her diary with her, and those two small pottery jars as well. I still think they most likely contained blood, intended to sustain her. They probably just thought they were humouring her last wishes.’
‘But later on, somebody took her claim to be a vampire a lot more seriously, and they had a very different attitude to her.’
‘Exactly. It was someone who obviously believed absolutely in the vampire myth, and was probably appalled to think that the body of such a creature should be buried here in Venice. They went to enormous trouble to obliterate her name from the tomb, and to desecrate her body, to kill her off if she was a vampire, at the same time.’<
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‘So what have you found in the diary?’ Bronson asked.
‘I’ve only had a quick look at some of the early pages,’ Angela replied. ‘But the exciting thing is that I now know her name, because on one of the first pages she’s explained the purpose of the book. The translation of one phrase she wrote is “the record of the life of Carmelita Paganini”, and that ties up with the remains of the letter “P” I deciphered on the slab over her grave. I also tried to see if the lengths of the obliterated words from the slab more or less matched that name, and they do.’
Bronson picked up the book and opened it carefully, but the closely written text meant nothing to him. It was obvious that Carmelita had used different types and colours of ink over the years, because on some pages the writing was as clear and sharp as if it had been done the day before, while on others the ink had faded to a grey or reddish shadow.
‘Be careful with it, Chris,’ Angela said, taking it back from him. ‘It’s very fragile.’
‘I suppose you’re using the scanned images,’ he replied, ‘because the writing on some of these pages is virtually illegible.’
‘Oddly enough, because I could adjust the sensitivity of the scanner, the images in my laptop are a lot clearer than the original text. So, yes, I am working on the computer, and not from the book.’
Angela glanced at her watch. ‘Why don’t we go out for a bite of lunch now? And then I’ll do a bit more work on the diary, and you can amuse yourself digging around in some newspaper’s morgue, looking for clues, just like a real detective.’
‘I am a real detective,’ Bronson protested faintly, ‘but that’s a good idea. I’ll just see if I can find out anything, just to satisfy my curiosity, and then we can forget about it. And tomorrow we’ll go back on the sight-seeing trail.’
