by James Becker
His second worry was that Bianchi was only apparently going to send a single patrol boat over to the island, where the officers would presumably ask politely if anybody in the house knew anything about the bunch of murdered girls. He could guess the probable answer. And that was assuming that Bianchi actually sent anyone at all.
Bronson had seen the fast, blue-and-white patrol boats in the Venetian lagoon — normally crewed by about three or four officers apparently only armed with pistols, though it was possible, Bronson guessed, that they might have heavier weapons inside the vessels. Even so, they were obviously more concerned with minor crimes, essentially traffic offences, committed on the waters of the lagoon rather than anything more serious.
But the thing that concerned him most wasn’t anything Bianchi had said. It was actually something the inspector hadn’t said. Specifically, it was a question the man hadn’t asked. It was, of course, possible that Bianchi had simply missed it, in which case it just meant he wasn’t a particularly good policeman, but Bronson doubted this. In his short acquaintance with Bianchi, the inspector had never struck Bronson as a particularly likeable character, but he had always seemed competent.
The other explanation was that Bianchi hadn’t needed to ask the question because he already knew the answer, and this was a real worry.
56
Angela heard the engine note of the powerboat die away to nothing a few seconds after it reached the jetty. Moments later, Marco opened the door to the cabin and stepped inside.
Angela tensed, wondering if she dare try to escape right then but, even before he unlocked the handcuff, she realized any attempt was doomed to failure: another one of the men stood waiting by the cabin door, clearly ready for trouble. She doubted she could tackle Marco with any degree of success, and she certainly couldn’t cope with the two of them. So she meekly allowed her wrists to be handcuffed in front of her, and was led along the path from the jetty and back towards the house.
She was almost at the door when an unearthly howling noise echoed from somewhere nearby. Angela froze in mid-stride, her eyes wide as she stared around her. She couldn’t pinpoint the location of the sound, but she was certain it was very close.
‘What on earth was that?’ she asked.
Marco didn’t bother to reply, just led her through the front door of the house and into the drawing-room. Only when she was standing beside the desk were the handcuffs finally removed.
‘So what now?’ Angela asked.
‘I would have thought that was obvious. One of my men is making a photocopy of the scroll. As soon as he’s done that, you can start translating it. And then we’ll find the answer.’
‘The answer to what?’
But before Marco could reply there was a double knock on the door and one of his men appeared carrying half a dozen sheets of paper. Marco took them, glanced at each in turn, and then placed them on the desk in front of 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 wooden jetty and beside it a launch, quite a bit larger than the powerboat Bronson had hired. The inlet wasn’t very big and as far as he could see, there wasn’t much room for any other vessels if the launch was moored there.
Then he noticed something else. Behind the house, and about midway between the property and the inlet, was an area of level ground that appeared to have been tarmacked, and on it he could just about make out something painted in white. Playing the tourist again, Bronson looked casually around him, then turned back to look once more towards the island. And now, from his slightly altered perspective, he could see exactly what was on the tarmac.
It was a large white circle, inside which was painted a letter ‘H’: a helicopter landing-pad, which made perfect sense. Bianchi had told him that the island was owned by a senior Italian politician, so travelling to the island by boat would probably be a last resort. It would be so much more impressive, and cater to the politician’s inevitable sense of his own importance, to arrive there by helicopter.
Bronson continued ambling gently south, past the island and towards a handful of others in the same loose group, most of which had houses built on them. Again, he tried to look like a tourist as he steered the craft around and past these islands.
About two hundred yards from the politician’s island was another very small island, upon which was a simple structure that looked something like a car port — just a flat roof resting on four vertical supports with a rough wooden table underneath it. Bronson guessed that was probably a picnic spot, the roof providing some shade from the heat of the midday sun. He looked closely at the island, trying to see if there was anyone ashore there. He glanced at his watch. It was now late afternoon in November, and unlikely to be in use. Certainly, it appeared to be deserted.
Bronson spotted a narrow bay where he thought he could easily beach his craft. He took a quick look around, but there were no other boats near him, and less than ten minutes later, he was hauling on the bow line to pull the powerboat a few feet further up the muddy beach. He turned off the outboard motor, tied the rope around the trunk of a small tree that was growing near the beach, checked he had his binoculars and the pistol — just in case — and made his way quickly across the small island until he could see his target.
He had quite a good view of the front of the house, and of the small inlet with its wooden jetty, and the launch moored against it. He lay down, resting on his elbows, and peered through the binoculars. There was no sign of life around the house so he switched his attention to the lagoon that lay beyond the island.
And then, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, he saw an approaching police launch, its distinctive colour scheme making it quite unmistakable. It looked as if Bianchi had done what he had promised, and had despatched a police patrol to check out the island. Bronson was glad that both he and his powerboat were well out of sight.
He moved the binoculars again, and looked back at the house. It was, like many of the other properties he’d seen on the outlying islands, built of a kind of grey stone, the windows fitted with wooden shutters and the roof covered in terracotta tiles. But as he looked at it again, he was struck by something else. All the shutters on the windows were firmly closed, and the house seemed to exude an indefinable sense of desolation, of emptiness. If he hadn’t known better — if he hadn’t seen the two men in the powerboat arrive with his own eyes — he would have assumed that it was deserted.
But then, bearing in mind the activities of the group that had snatched Angela, they would hardly be likely to advertise their presence.
The police launch was now much closer. It had slowed down, and the bow wave was about half the size it had been previously. As Bronson watched, the boat swung around the end of the island and slowed even more, finally coming to a halt beside the entrance to the inlet, where the driver of the vessel reversed the direction of the propeller in a short burst to bring the boat to a stop. He didn’t steer the boat into the inlet, which puzzled Bronson for a moment until he focused the binoculars more carefully and saw a substantial chain locked across the seaward end of the inlet, preventing the launch from entering.
Two police officers leapt nimbly on to the jetty from the cockpit of the launch and walked unhurriedly along a gravel path towards the house. At the front door they paused and then one of them pressed the bell push. But the door remained firmly closed and there was no sign of life whatsoever from the house. Eventually, the officers stepped back from the door and looked up at the house. Even from the distance he was watching, Bronson saw one of them give an expressive shrug of his shoulders, then they walked back to the police launch and got back on board. The driver gunned the engine, turned sharply in a sudden spray of white water and accelerated away from the island.
For a few seconds, Bronson just lay there staring through the binoculars at the departing vessel. As searches went, the most accurate description of what he’d just witnessed would be ‘pathetic’. The officers had made no attempt to look around the island, to try opening the main door, or even to try the other entran
ce to the house — there would certainly be a second and maybe even a third door into the property.
He sighed. If the Italian police weren’t prepared to search the place, he would just have to do it himself.
With a deep sense of foreboding, he stood up, took a final look towards the house on the island, and strode back to the small bay where he’d left his boat.
58
Angela sat at the desk and stared down at the text she was translating. In her work at the British Museum, she had quite often had to translate passages of Latin, usually sections of very old documents or inscriptions that dated back almost two millennia to the height of the Roman Empire, and she’d become familiar with the syntax and sentence construction of writings from that period.
But she’d also worked on documents that were much more recent, everything from documents produced at the height of the Byzantine Empire at the end of the First Millennium through mediaeval texts and all the way to passages that were only a couple of hundred years old. It had always fascinated her the way that Latin, though essentially ‘dead’ and unchanging, had been adapted by its users to the changing patterns of speech and writing over the centuries. It was sometimes possible to estimate the age of a piece of text simply from the way the Latin had been written, by the words that were used.
And what she was working on now was clearly much more ancient than the bulk of the diary that she’d seen before. The syntax suggested it was probably late mediaeval, dating from between the tenth and fourteenth centuries, hundreds of years before Carmelita Paganini had started keeping her journal. That suggested that Marco had been right in the date he’d ascribed to the scroll.
On one level, Angela was quite enjoying what she was doing, working out the meaning of the Latin sentences and transcribing them into clear and understandable English. But even as she worked, a growing sense of foreboding was creeping over her, a foreboding that gave way to a kind of numb resignation as she understood the full implications of the information contained in the scroll. Even the title of the text was disturbing, though not entirely a surprise: The Noble Vampyr.
