The Carnival Master

by Craig Russell

  ‘Obviously I cannot go into the specifics of Frau Klee’s treatment,’ Minks had said on the phone. ‘But I know that she values your … guidance … very highly. I mean not just as her professional superior. That’s why I thought I’d give you a call.’

  ‘What’s the problem, Herr Doctor?’

  ‘Well … I really felt I was getting somewhere with Frau Klee and I think she is making a big mistake in breaking off her therapy. She is far from well. I was hoping that you could get her to see sense.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Dr Minks,’ said Fabel. ‘I don’t understand. Are you saying that Maria hasn’t been keeping her appointments?’

  ‘Not for the last four or five weeks.’

  ‘Tell me, doctor, did you suggest it would be a good idea for Maria to avoid contact with me or any of her colleagues for the time being?’

  ‘No …’ Minks sounded puzzled. ‘Why would I say any such thing?’

  Fabel had promised to speak to Maria about returning to therapy and hung up. Maria had lied to him. Not just about the therapy: she had lied about her whereabouts. And now Fabel knew exactly where she was.

  He sat for a moment, his hands pressed flat on his desk, staring at them absently. Then he snatched up the phone and made the first of the three calls that he knew he had to make.

  2.

  Benni Scholz was growing to hate Karneval. There were hotels just outside the city that had started to offer sanctuary from Cologne’s carnival madness and compulsory bonhomie: places where order remained unchallenged and where a serene sanity was guaranteed until Lent. He had never before understood why some people sought out these places, or why many Cologne families took a holiday away from the city at Karneval time. Benni had always felt that, as a Kölner, Karneval defined who and what he was. But now, with deadlines looming and the police Karneval committee hounding him with e-mails, texts and phone calls, Scholz found himself wishing he had been born in Berlin.

  But now there was something else to add to his stress. He had just over three weeks until Women’s Karneval Night. He knew that the Karneval Killer would strike again. Another woman would die unless they got a lead on the murders of the previous two years. Files lay scattered across his desk and in an untidy arc on the floor. Scholz had the feeling that there was something he wasn’t seeing in the available evidence. He had learned about serial killers. At least the theory. But this was the first time he’d ever been involved with a case and he felt out of his depth. He had called the Polizei Hamburg again, but had been told that the Murder Commission boss, Fabel, was leaving the force and really wasn’t interested in taking on Scholz’s case. He was going to have to think the Karneval Killer case through again, alone, without the assistance of some Hamburg supercop. Fuck him, thought Scholz, stuck-up Fischkopp. Scholz had been to Hamburg only a couple of times. Beautiful city, shame about the people. And the food was crap: all they ate was fish or that shit Labskaus.

  He turned from the files and looked out of his office window in Cologne’s Police Presidium but didn’t see anything of the city that lay grey dark under the moody winter sky. Scholz turned his thoughts from the murders he was investigating back to his other problem: getting this bloody Karneval float and costumes organised. Scholz had studied so many books and researched so much stuff on the Internet about Karneval. Its origins, its significance, what had changed and what had stayed the same throughout the centuries. Maybe that was where he was going wrong: he was over-thinking it all.

  It was while Scholz was in this doubly darkened mood that the phone rang. He was surprised to hear that it was the Hamburg cop, Fabel.

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to be leaving the force?’ said Scholz. ‘I didn’t think I’d hear from you.’

  ‘I am supposed to be leaving the force and you are hearing from me,’ said Fabel. That famous northern charm, thought Scholz.

  ‘Have you looked at the files I sent up, Herr Fabel?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And you’ve got a cannibal on your patch, in my opinion,’ said Fabel.

  ‘Shit …’ said Scholz. ‘So the piece of arse he takes away … it goes straight into the pan, you reckon?’

  ‘I would have put it a little more technically than that, Herr Scholz, but effectively yes. He’s probably cooking his trophy and consuming it. There are contradictions in his offending pattern, but my guess is that he is a sexual cannibal. His consumption of the flesh is probably accompanied by either involuntary ejaculation or active masturbation.’

  ‘I guess that would be enough to get you chucked out of McDonald’s.’ Scholz laughed at his own joke. There was silence on the other end of the line. ‘Have you had experience of this type of offender before, Herr Principal Chief Commissar?’ Scholz adopted a more sober and official tone.

  ‘Similar,’ said Fabel. ‘But your killer seems fixated on the run-up to Karneval. I’m guessing it has some symbolic significance for him.’

  ‘Him and the entire population of Cologne, Herr Fabel. You don’t have Karneval up there in Hamburg, do you?’

  ‘No. We don’t.’

  ‘Karneval is more than you see on the television. It’s not just fancy dress and reciting lame Büttenrede comic monologues in front of the Elferrat. Sorry, the Elferrat is the eleven elected members of the Karneval committee …’

  ‘I know what the Elferrat is, Herr Scholz,’ said Fabel drily. ‘I’m from Hamburg, not Ulan Bator.’

  ‘Sorry … anyway, my point is that Karneval defines what it is to be a Kölner. It’s part of our soul. It’s an emotional experience that can’t be explained, only experienced. The fact that this nut-job focuses on Karneval is no surprise. It just tells me that he’s a born Kölner.’

  ‘I think there’s more to it than that,’ said Fabel. ‘But we can discuss this when I come down to see you.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I’ve cleared it with the Polizei Hamburg. I’ll drive down on Friday. I should be there sometime between two and three p.m. Can you fix me up with a hotel? Nothing too fancy. I’m afraid your people will be picking up the tab.’

  What else could you expect from a northerner? thought Scholz. ‘Fine …’ he said cheerily. ‘No problem.’

  3.

  After he hung up from his call to Cologne, Fabel used his cellphone to reach Anna Wolff and asked her to meet him at Maria’s flat.

  ‘You know that bunch of keys you keep in your drawer, Anna?’

  ‘Yes?’ she said hesitantly and with a hint of suspicion.

  ‘Well, bring that with you.’

  ‘Do I detect a whiff of illegality about this?’ Anna said. Then, more seriously: ‘Is Maria all right?’

  ‘That’s what I want to establish, Anna. And yes, this is probably illegal, but I dare say Maria won’t file charges.’

  ‘I’ll meet you there in half an hour.’

  Maria shared the floor of her apartment building with two other flats. Fabel rang the buzzers for both but only got an answer at the second, which had the name ‘Franzka’ by the bell-push: a small woman in late middle age and with a weary expression came to the door.

  ‘The Mittelholzers are both out at work at this time of day,’ explained Frau Franzka.

  Fabel showed her his Murder Commission ID and told her there was nothing to be alarmed about. Frau Franzka’s countenance suggested it would take a lot more than Fabel’s presence to alarm her. ‘I’m Frau Klee’s boss,’ he explained. ‘She’s been unwell recently and we were a little concerned about her. Have you seen her lately?’

  ‘Not for a while,’ Frau Franzka replied. ‘I saw her take some luggage down to her car. It was a Wednesday, so exactly two weeks ago today. It looked like she was going away on business. She had a computer bag and a briefcase with her.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Fabel. He and Anna went across to Maria’s apartment door. Frau Franzka watched them from her doorway, then shrugged and went back inside. Anna had brought her collection of keys: a wire coat-hanger bent into a circ
le with a hundred or more keys attached, like some improvised tribal necklace. Fabel remembered that in the days before central locking and keyless remotes, every uniformed station had the same arrangement for car keys. He decided not to ask Anna why she felt it necessary to have such comprehensive means of illegal entry; he had always suspected that Anna bent the rules a little too far at times. Until today, he had pretended to be unaware of her key collection. After about five minutes and countless keys, they were rewarded by a click. Anna paused and looked over her shoulder at her boss.

  ‘Does Maria have an alarm system?’

  ‘I don’t know …’ Fabel looked uncertain for a moment, then nodded decisively.

  Anna shrugged and pushed open the door. There was a loud electronic beeping from the alarm keypad inside in the hall.

  ‘Bollocks …’ she said. Fabel brushed past her and typed in a sequence of numbers. The display flashed ERROR CODE and continued to beep. He hit the clear button and typed in a new sequence. The beeping stopped.

  ‘Her date of birth?’ Anna sighed.

  ‘The date she joined the Polizei Hamburg. I checked both in her file.’

  ‘What would you have done if neither had worked?’

  ‘Arrested you for housebreaking,’ said Fabel and headed along the hall.

  ‘You probably would …’

  They stood in the living room of Maria’s flat. It was, exactly as they had expected, pristine, ordered and furnished with immaculate taste. The walls were painted white but were hung with brightly colourful paintings. Oils, and originals. He guessed they would be by up-and-coming artists on the cusp of saleability. Maria was the kind of person to temper her art appreciation with acumen.

  ‘I always envied Maria, you know,’ said Anna.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Wanted to be like her. You know … Elegant, cool, together.’

  ‘She’s not together now.’

  ‘Do you never feel that way?’ Anna asked Fabel as she examined Maria’s CD collection. ‘You know, wish that you could be someone else? Even for a little while?’

  ‘I don’t give myself as much to philosophical musings as you do,’ he lied, with a smile.

  ‘I always thought of myself as too impulsive. Chaotic. Maria was always so disciplined and organised. Having said that …’ Anna indicated the CD collection. ‘This is bordering on the anally retentive. Look at these CDs … all ordered by genre and then alphabetically. Life’s too short …’

  Fabel laughed, mainly to disguise the unease he felt at seeing how similar Maria’s taste and way of living were to his. They went through to the flat, checking each room. Fabel found what he was looking for, but had hoped not to find, in the smallest of the three bedrooms.

  ‘Shit …’ Anna gave a low whistle. ‘This is not good. Not good at all. This is obsessive.’

  ‘Anna …’

  ‘I mean, this is the kind of thing we’ve come across with serials …’

  ‘Anna – that’s not helping.’

  Fabel took in the small room. The walls were covered with photographs, press cuttings and a map of Europe with location pins and notes attached. There wasn’t a square centimetre of clear wall space. But this was no chaos. Fabel could see four defined areas of research: one related to Ukraine, one to Vitrenko’s personal history, one to people smuggling, one to organised crime in Cologne.

  ‘Maria hasn’t been spending her time recuperating,’ said Anna. ‘She’s been working. On her own.’

  ‘You’re wrong. This isn’t work. This is vendetta. Maria’s planning her revenge on Vitrenko.’

  Anna turned to Fabel. ‘What do we do, Chef?’

  ‘You take the desk. I’ll go through the filing cabinet. And Anna … this stays between us. Okay?’

  ‘You’re the boss.’

  Fabel and Anna spent two hours going through Maria’s files and notes. They were full of contacts with whom she had spoken, probably using her position as a Polizei Hamburg officer to gain access to otherwise confidential information: the Anti-Trafficking Centre in Belgrade, Human Rights Watch, a people-smuggling expert at Interpol. There were notes on all aspects of current people-trafficking in Europe, a full dossier on Ukrainian Spetsnaz units and a file of even more cuttings that hadn’t made it to the wall display. Among them were articles about a fire in a container truck in which several illegal immigrants heading for the West had been burned to death; about a model in Berlin who had been murdered with acid; about a bloody underworld feud in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia; about a Ukrainian-Jewish crime Godfather who had been found murdered in his luxury apartment in Israel.

  ‘What have you got?’ he asked Anna.

  ‘A list of hotels in Cologne. Nothing to say which one she’s going to use, but I’d say it was a short-list. She’s been corresponding with someone in the Interior Ministry of Ukraine. Sasha Andruzky.’

  Fabel nodded. What they had been looking at was detailed but peripheral. The solid core of Maria’s research had gone with her to Cologne. He scanned the small bedroom-office for a bag or holdall. ‘Help me pack up some of these files. Then I’ve got a few calls to make.’

  4.

  Fabel broke the four-hour journey to Cologne under a slate sky at a Raststätte on the A1 and filled up his BMW. A few unconvinced fluffs of snow drifted into his face as he did so. Instead of going into the service-station restaurant, Fabel bought a coffee and a salami roll to take out. He sat in the car with the heater on and consumed his lunch without tasting it, reading through the notes he had made on the information that Scholz had supplied. For Fabel, this process was not unlike reading a novel. It took him to a different time, a different place and a different life. He had all the details of the night when the first victim had died, two years ago. The strange thing was that Fabel found it difficult to place himself in the context of Karneval. The Cologners seemed obsessed with its forced jollity and irreverence. He read about the first victim’s movements on the night she had died. Sabine Jordanski had not officially been working that day, but had spent most of it doing exactly the same kind of thing that she would have done if she had been at work. As it was Women’s Karneval Night she and a group of female friends had planned to take part in a procession through the city before hitting a few of the bars where exuberant Kölsch bands would be playing. Sabine had spent the day colouring first her friends’ hair, then her own. The dyes differed from the ones she normally used: vivid pinks, reds, electric blues and yellows, and often more than one colour was used on a single head. There seemed to be an element of becoming someone else at Karneval, a belief that true release from everyday order only came with a mask, a costume or a radical change of look.

  Sabine Jordanski seemed to be a typical Cologner: exuberant, friendly, fun-loving. She was twenty-six and had been working at the salon for four years. There was no boyfriend at the time of her death, or at least no permanent boyfriend who could be traced, but it would have appeared that this was a strictly temporary situation. Sabine had enjoyed the attentions of several young men. On the night of her death she had been seen talking earlier to three men, all of whom had been traced and eliminated from the police’s inquiries. The group of six girls had visited four bars that night. All had been drinking but none was drunk. The girls had walked together to Sabine’s apartment in Gereonswall at about two in the morning and had said goodnight to her outside. There had been several people milling around, but no one whom the girls particularly noticed. No one had seen Sabine go into her apartment, but all had assumed that was what she had done.

  She was found the next morning in an alley only two hundred metres from her apartment building. She had been strangled with a red tie which had been left at the scene, partially stripped and 0.468 kilos of flesh had been removed from her right buttock. Time of death had been estimated at around the time her friends had said goodnight to her. Someone had been waiting for her, or had been following the group around the city, stalking them like a lion waiting for a straggler to become
separated from the herd.

  Sabine Jordanski had been a cheerful, uncomplicated girl who had not demanded much from life. Fabel bit into the salami roll and looked at the scene-of-crime photographs again. Sabine’s heavy, white buttocks lay exposed. The excised trench in the right buttock stood out with violent vividness against the paleness of the skin. Scholz had been right: the killer had executed his butchery with a swift precision. There was no raggedness, no tentative first cuts. This guy had known what he was doing. Fabel suddenly realised that he was chewing a mouthful of salami while looking at images of a mutilated corpse. In that moment the reasons he had sought escape from the Murder Commission crystallised. What had he become?

  Fabel closed the file, finished his hurried lunch and headed back out onto the autobahn towards Cologne.

  5.

  Ansgar’s expression was one of anguish. He sat, knowing what he was going to do but trying to persuade himself that he was not going to do it. He knew he had times of weakness. Times like this, when he had half an hour to spare before he started his shift at the restaurant.

  As he had sat down in front of the computer, Ansgar had told himself that he wouldn’t visit the website again. He had promised himself that the last time he had been on it. And the time before that. But his computer’s screen glowed malevolently, opening up a window on another reality for Ansgar. A way into abandonment and chaos.

  Ansgar let his fingers hover above the keyboard. He could still walk away. He could switch off the computer. He struggled so hard to keep the chaos within himself contained. Karneval was coming. And during Karneval … well, everybody let themselves go. But this little screen was dangerous: it allowed the chaos within to connect with a greater, wider chaos. Ansgar realised that this didn’t satisfy his hunger. It sharpened it. Turned it ravenous.

  His fingers trembled with delicious anticipation, disgust, fear. He typed in the website address and gave an anguished cry as the images opened out before him. The women. The flesh.