The Carnival Master

by Craig Russell

  He followed the track around the corner. The river was now behind him and thick forest on either side. He waited until the others flanked him, sheltered on the edges of the forest. About three hundred metres down the track he found fresh bootprints in the snow. Vorobyeva’s: he was the only member of the group who wore Russian OMON boots. Buslenko crouched down and signalled for the others to follow him twenty metres behind, on either flank. He followed the bootprints into the forest and deeper snow. He could tell that Vorobyeva had swung across here to check something out. Buslenko felt his heart pound. He was only a few kilometres from his old home town, yet he knew he was at war. Clearly Vitrenko had decided not to wait until Buslenko travelled to Germany before finishing him off. He froze. About twenty metres ahead was a clearing in the forest, illuminated like a stage by the moonlight. He took aim at the figure kneeling at the edge of the clearing, not moving. He drew closer, trying to minimise the sound of his progress through the snow and the forest debris, always keeping his aim locked on the kneeling figure. He was ready to fire if any sound he made caused the man at the edge of the clearing to turn. Buslenko’s foot sunk into a snow-filled hollow, making a slow crunch that the kneeling man must have heard. But he didn’t move. Buslenko moved further forward; from this distance he could recognise the black parka, its hood pulled over the man’s head.

  ‘Vorobyeva!’ he hissed. ‘Vorobyeva … are you all right?’ Still no answer. He moved further forward. ‘Vorobyeva!’

  He signalled for the others to join him. Stoyan and Belotserkovsky appeared like ghosts from the undergrowth.

  ‘Where are Tenishchev and Serduchka?’ Buslenko asked.

  ‘They were there a minute ago …’ said the Tatar.

  Buslenko scoured the forest to their right. There was no sign of the other two Spetsnaz. No sound.

  ‘Cover me,’ said Buslenko. ‘We’ve definitely got hostiles.’

  Buslenko crawled through the snow. He reached the kneeling figure.

  ‘Vorobyeva!’

  For the last three minutes Buslenko had known what to expect. The snow in front of the kneeling Vorobyeva was stained dark. Buslenko touched the figure’s shoulder and Vorobyeva toppled backwards. His throat was gashed open and glistened a cold crimson-black in the moonlight.

  ‘Fuck!’ Buslenko turned his attention like a searchlight on the fringes of the clearing, scanning them for any sign of the enemy. He moved back to where he had left Stoyan and Belotserkovsky.

  ‘He’s dead. Vorobyeva was one of the best in the business. Whoever’s taken him by stealth must be even better. We’re in trouble.’

  ‘Vitrenko?’

  ‘God knows how he tracked us here, but that’s who’s behind this.’

  ‘What about Tenishchev and Serduchka?’ asked Belotserkovsky. ‘Them too?’

  Buslenko suddenly remembered Olga Sarapenko. ‘We’ve got to get back to the lodge. Now!’

  4.

  He looked down at the corpse on the table.

  For Oliver, death held no mystery. He had become accustomed to it: so many dead over the years. He could still recall his first, how he had looked into her face and had seen the person instead of the flesh; someone with a history, who had had a life and a personality, who had dreamed and laughed and felt the sun on her face. He had seen the stretch marks of distant pregnancies, the scar on her knee from an even more distant childhood injury, the lines around her mouth from a lifetime of laughing. Then he had pushed his knife into her and had begun to cut her up and she had ceased to be a person. After her, after his first, it had become so much easier. He still looked at a face before he started to cut, but he never looked into one. Now they were all simply so much cold flesh: doubly chilled from death and from their refrigerated storage until Oliver was ready for them.

  He drew a deep breath before starting. The dismemberment of a human body was much harder work, physically, than most people imagined. Deprived of its vitality, a corpse was a heavy, dead mass, its density varying radically from the almost liquid, to gristly, to the solid and unyielding. Organ and bone, skin and fat, cartilage and sinew: cutting through the material of a human corpse required robust tools, some even power-driven. Oliver had all he needed to hand. Breadknife. Electric saw. Hand-held saw. Shears. Scissors. Knife.

  He started as he always did, walking around the table and observing the lifeless body. The dead man was still fully dressed and Oliver noticed that some of the material from his blood-soaked T-shirt and kitchen overalls had been forced into the deep gashes. Oliver counted the cuts out loud, some of which gaped open, exposing the subcutaneous layer of pale marbled fat and the darker, denser mass of sinew and muscle beneath. Some of the slashes exposed white bone and as Oliver leaned closer to examine the wounds he saw where the bone had been chipped by the cleaver, the primary evidence of sharp-force trauma.

  There were two other men in the room; together they helped Oliver turn the cadaver onto its belly. He examined its back. There were fewer wounds there, but they were still significant.

  ‘Let’s get him undressed,’ Oliver said and the two other men helped him cut and remove the dead man’s clothes. After the body was naked, Oliver repeated his observational circuit of it, again speaking his thoughts out loud.

  It had been one of the first things Oliver had learned as a forensic pathologist: to take time and use his eyes. To make observations. He had often compared his work to that of an archaeologist, where technology, science and professional skills combined to uncover a complete history. But first, like an archaeologist viewing a landscape and identifying a likely dig site, you had to know where to look.

  ‘Deceased is male, early twenties, light build. There are multiple wounds indicating sharp-force trauma …’ As he looked at the corpse, Oliver voiced his thoughts into the Dictaphone. ‘Incised wounds and lacerations suggest the deceased was in motion for much of the attack and are primarily anterior but with several posterior.’ Oliver nodded to the technician and the other attending pathologist and between them they used a tape to take the body’s measurements. He took his time, examining every mark, every bruise, and noting it out loud into the Dictaphone. The man on the table had been hacked to death but Oliver saw no horror, no pain, only injuries and traumas to be methodically and individually enumerated, location on the body noted, and their length and depth measured. For Oliver in his work, death had become nothing more than a point in time: a moment that divided every injury, every mark, into ante-mortem, perimortem or post-mortem. Within seconds of death occurring, a whole new chronology began: cells started to break down; blood that had been pumped on an endless cycle for a lifetime sank to the lowest points of the body and empurpled the skin with post-mortem lividity; the chemistry of the muscles became altered causing rigor mortis; bacteria in the blood and organs began to produce gases that inflated cavities and soft tissues.

  Oliver started at the head and worked his way to the feet, talking his way across the topography of the body. Observing, remarking, measuring. He marked on a body map each of the incised wounds, where the cut had been clean and sharp-edged, and lacerations, where the weapon had sliced through the flesh but had caused tearing to the wound edge. To a forensic pathologist, there was always a distinction. When he had finished he nodded to the technician who lifted the corpse’s head and eased a body block under the neck.

  As he worked, Oliver thought back to his childhood and remembered his father carving meat. A long time ago. The technician swept a scalpel in a U-cut around the base of the scalp while Oliver began slicing a T-shaped incision into the body: one cut across the upper chest, from below the outer edge of one collarbone across to the outer edge of the other; then he made a long steady slice from the throat to the groin. He peeled back the skin and the subcutaneous tissue to reveal the ribcage. The process was a lot more awkward than usual because of the numerous other slashes that had been made to the body by the attackers. He also couldn’t free himself of the butterfly flutter in his chest whenever he thought about w
hat had happened in the hotel. He picked up a pair of shears that looked as if they should be used to prune rose bushes and started to snip through the ribcage. Two cuts: one right and one left of centre along the mid-clavicular lines where the ribs were composed of cartilage. He lifted out the sternum and exposed the pericardial sac which he in turn cut open with the smaller scissors.

  Oliver knew he would get caught eventually. He was an intelligent man, and his work brought him into contact with the police all the time. He knew they weren’t stupid, and he also knew that every time he did what he did the chances of arrest increased exponentionally. He used the long sharp knife, known as the bread knife, and cut out the heart. The pathologist assisting Oliver sucked out some of the blood from the heart with a syringe and placed it in a sample tub. Oliver eased back the skin of the neck. One of the blows from the victim’s attackers had sliced into his neck, so Oliver opened up the throat, cutting from the jugulum up to the chin. He could see where the cleaver had severed the sternomastoid muscle almost completely. Here lay the immediate cause of death. The victim had died by exsanguination, resulting from the multiple incised wounds, but the slice into the subclavian artery had been what had caused him to bleed out fast. Oliver imagined the death, something he was not normally inclined to do: the victim would have been in extreme shock, would have felt extremely cold, and unconsciousness and death would have come pretty swiftly.

  Maybe the police already had their suspicions; maybe Oliver had said something or done something or had left something behind that would lead them to him. Maybe they were watching him. Waiting for him to do it again.

  He made a midline incision into the peritoneal cavity and used the bread knife to sever the organs of the neck and removed the victim’s tongue and throat. Then he carefully lifted out the slippery mass of the lungs, bronchi and aorta, all of which were left connected. Oliver took great care while cutting free from the mesenterium the seven metres of upper and lower intestines and removing them from the body. He had learned from experience that a rupture could result in content escape, the stench of which was somewhere between that of vomit and excrement combined and ten times as potent. He then excised and removed the liver, pancreas, spleen and stomach from the upper abdomen, again keeping them connected. No, he thought, it doesn’t make sense. If the police suspected him then he would have been immediately suspended from work.

  While the assistant carried out weighing duties, Oliver removed another connected set of organs, this time the kidneys, urinary bladder and abdominal aorta. The subject’s body cavity was now empty and the grey-white of his spine was exposed. Oliver turned his attention to the head, removing the brain and inspecting the inner aspect of the skull. Once the exenteration was finished, Oliver cut sections for histology and later microscopic inspection, dropping the samples into formaldehyde. There was no need for the whole brain to be fixed in formaldehyde and sliced in two weeks’ time for detailed study: there were no significant cranial traumas, so he took slices from the brain to be sent for toxicology along with the body fluids. It took Oliver another hour to lift the skin from around the slice wounds for detailed inspection.

  After the autopsy was completed, Oliver washed up and drove home to his flat. The city slid by, glistening-wet dark in the night. He smiled to himself. The butterfly sensation had gone. A voice deep inside seemed to reassure him: no, he said to himself, they won’t catch you. You’re too clever for them. And soon it will be Karneval.

  5.

  It was about half an hour before the man whom Maria had seen Viktor talking to left the bar. He came out alone, but Maria recognised him. He was shorter than Viktor and not as heavily built, but there was something about his physique and the way he moved that told Maria that this was the ‘soldier’ Slavko had talked about. Maria had made an in-depth study of Soviet and post-Soviet Spetsnaz soldiers. Vitrenko was the devil she had had to get to know. Part of the selection criteria was that the men chosen were never particularly tall or muscle-bound: they had to be able to dissolve into the background, whether that was in a desert, a jungle or a city. But there was always something in the way they moved that identified them. Maria had no doubt that she was looking at an ex-Spetsnaz. And that she had just taken a significant step up in Vitrenko’s organisation.

  Maria felt afraid. She knew that tailing this man was a whole different ball game. Unlike Viktor, this guy would have been trained to spot surveillance. She would only have one shot at this.

  The Ukrainian got into a mid-range BMW and drove off. Maria waited until there were several cars between them before she pulled out into the traffic. She would have to risk losing him rather than have him detecting her too close on his tail. They headed out of Nippes. Maria struggled to steer with one hand while stealing glances at the Cologne city plan in her other. They seemed to be heading along Kempener Strasse towards Neu Ehrenfeld and she guessed they might be destined for the autobahn. It started to rain heavily and Maria had to switch the wipers on to the fastest setting. Her head ached after the adrenalin rush of testing her new look in the bar and from concentrating through the dark and rain on the distant tail lights of the Ukrainian’s BMW.

  They joined the autobahn heading north. Maria relaxed a little. She could drop back even further, accelerating only as they approached an exit, in case he took it. Eventually Cologne’s silhouetted skyline disappeared from the edges of the autobahn and they seemed to be heading towards Düsseldorf. The BMW suddenly veered off the autobahn without indicating. Maria felt a tightness in her chest. Was there a significance in him pulling off without signalling? She put her indicator on and followed him off the autobahn. As she followed the circular sweep of the exit, she found she had lost sight of the BMW. The rain still pounded on the windscreen and the unlit arc of road seemed crowded in by trees. The road straightened and she came to a junction. She could see as far along the road in both directions as the darkness and the rain would permit. No tail lights. She stopped. There were no cars behind or in front of her – she was isolated in the tiny universe of her car and the silver rods of rain caught in her headlights. She sighed. She accepted she would have to lose him rather than stick too close and if she had to pick up his trail every night at the bar where he obviously had a regular meeting with Viktor, then that was what she would do. She put the car back in gear and drove off.

  Maria knew she would get lost if she blindly followed the road, so she decided to turn and head back in the direction of the autobahn. She reckoned that the Saxo’s turning circle would be tight enough for her to swing round without finding a junction to turn in. She checked her rear-view mirror. Clear. Maria swung the Saxo around and, apart from the right front tyre mounting the verge a little, did a perfect turn. It was then that the headlights of the BMW came on full beam, blinding her. The Ukrainian’s car was on the wrong side of the road and she realised that until that moment it had been heading straight for her at high speed, its lights switched off. Maria pulled hard on the steering wheel and the BMW flashed by, but it caught the rear right wing of the much lighter Citroën and sent her into a sideways skid. Maria’s training took over from her instinct and she straightened the Saxo. She floored the accelerator and the little car surged forward faster than she had anticipated. She checked the rear-view mirror: the BMW had been forced to do a three-point turn, giving her time to open up a precious lead on it.

  Maria’s mind worked hard and fast. Bastard, she thought, you were hiding with your lights out in that entrance to the woods. She knew what he had intended: to knock the Saxo off the road, then probably smash her head in and make it look like she’d been killed in the crash. Maybe that’s what they had done with Turchenko, the Ukrainian investigator who had come after Vitrenko. Maria was aware of the nauseating fear that gripped her, but there was also a sense of exhilaration. And defiance. There was no way this prick was going to chase her to her death.

  She saw the headlights of the BMW behind her. A couple of cars passed in the opposite direction, then nothing. He
had known that this was a relatively deserted stretch of road and had led her here deliberately. The BMW was still some distance behind, but she calculated that he was closing. If there had been more bends on the road she would have stood a better chance: the Saxo was quick to accelerate and handled corners well, but on a straight stretch like this she was no match for the BMW’s horsepower. Maria kept her foot pressed hard to the floor and tried to achieve the same with her mental processes. He was a soldier. A Spetsnaz. He could probably kill someone with a paper clip in a snowstorm, but that didn’t necessarily give him an advantage in this environment. There was a gentle bend ahead; he would lose sight of her for thirty or forty seconds. She took the bend fast, the rain now driving hard against the windscreen. As she did so she unbuckled her seat belt and killed her lights. She swung the Saxo round in the road as fast as she could without losing control on the rain-sleeked tarmac. The BMW was already round the corner by the time she had completed her turn. Maria braked hard, leaving the Saxo on the wrong side of the road, hit the lights and jumped from the car.

  6.

  The three Spetsnaz made their way back along the edge of the Teteriv river. Buslenko had calculated that, in this moonlight, anyone approaching them would be silhouetted against the sky. When they reached the lodge it was still in darkness, the door wide open. Buslenko sent Stoyan around to the back, got Belotserkovsky to cover him, and swung his aim into the lodge.

  ‘Captain Sarapenko?’

  ‘Here,’ said Olga, and switched on a table lamp. She was aiming her automatic at him. She eased the safety catch back on and lowered the weapon.

  ‘Very good …’ Buslenko smiled. ‘But switch the light off. We’ve got trouble.’

  ‘Vorobyeva?’

  Buslenko shook his head. ‘And we think Tenishchev and Serduchka too.’