Craig Russell - The Carnival Master

But Fabel was not here now, in Cologne. And anyway, he was giving up his career as a policeman. Maria knew that she would never go back to duty. She would resign too. Or she would die here. It was not a thought that troubled her too much. Maria knew that Vitrenko had really already killed her, three years ago in that field. All he would be doing now would be to exorcise Maria’s tortured ghost from the world. Maybe it would have been better if Fabel hadn’t found her. Death would have been better than the hell she’d endured.

And then there had been Frank. Maria knew it was as close to love as she could have come. He had helped her through the worst times. He had been gentle, loving, kind. He had been a killer.

A car passing along the street outside the hotel sounded its horn and temporarily brought her back to the present and Cologne. Maria thought of Frank and wept. Not just for him, but for herself. He had been her last chance for salvation.

Maria felt empty and aching and old. But there was something else. The idea. The idea had been there, fully formed in her mind as soon as she woke up. And with it came a strength and sense of purpose she thought she had lost for ever.

Maria showered, changed and tore the page she needed from the telephone directory. She was about to go straight out, again skipping breakfast, but she checked herself. She went into the dining room and forced herself to eat some muesli and fruit. The breakfast and the coffee she drunk seemed to fuel her instantly. And this time there would be no trip to the toilets to void her gut. She headed purposefully out of the hotel. There had been a light fall of snow during the night that had turned into a mucky grey slush. She left the car and walked into the city centre. She found the hairdresser’s first. Maria’s hair was never particularly long and she usually spent a small fortune on expensive Hamburg stylists. This salon was the standard sort of place with a limited range of styles and an even more limited range of skills. A girl who looked as if she should have still been at school shampooed Maria’s hair and asked her what she wanted done. Maria took a photograph from her handbag.

‘That,’ she said. ‘I want to look like that.’

‘You sure?’ asked the hairdresser. ‘Your hair has a lovely natural colour. Most of my customers would kill for hair your shade of blonde. They keep asking me but I never manage it, of course.’

‘Can you manage that?’ asked Maria.

The hairdresser shrugged and handed back the photograph of Maria and her friend and colleague Anna Wolff. ‘Easy. If you’re sure that’s what you want…’

An hour and a half later, Maria was out on the street again. Despite the cold she didn’t put her hat back on. The chill air nipped at her newly exposed ears and every now and then she would stop and look at her reflection in a shop window. Her hair was now a very dark brown, not quite as dark as Anna’s and not quite as spiky-short, but it changed her appearance considerably.

The cosmetics assistant in the department store on Hohe Strasse was a little puzzled as to why her customer seemed so unsure about what went with her colouring, but a few minutes later Maria, who had always been conservative with her make-up, had a bag full of strong colours in eyeshadow, blusher and lipstick. The next store she went to, she described exactly the make-up she had just bought and claimed that she’d been wearing those shades for years and she wanted something completely different.

Before she found the next shop, she had to stop a couple of times to take the page she had torn from the telephone directory from her pocket and check the address against her street plan of Cologne. It was about lunchtime and, although her belly felt swollen to her from her unaccustomed breakfasting, she had a light lunch of soup and bread in the restaurant across the street. Maria now felt totally bloated and imagined her stomach distended, but she fought back the urge to make herself sick. It was all part of the plan.

It was a middle-aged and clearly gay man who took her through the selection of wigs. Maria told him that she was an actress and was always looking for something to change her look. It was clear that the salesman had doubts about her story, but she explained that she often had to supply her own wigs and costumes. It was, she explained, a very specific form of acting she did, mainly for the DVD market. The salesman smiled knowingly, and took her through a range of styles, short and long, brunette, blonde and redhead. Maria bought five wigs, which delighted the salesman, although she was horrified at the cost.

‘We could always put one back…’ suggested the salesman tentatively.

‘No… it’s fine. I’ll take them all.’

Maria called into another couple of clothes stores on her way to the hotel and arrived back in her room laden with shopping bags. She drew the curtains and stripped naked, standing with all the lights on in front of the mirror. She had been dreading this moment, knowing that after eating two meals in one day for the first time in months she would see how hideously bloated and fat she would have become. But she didn’t. For so long Maria had been used to regarding her naked form with loathing, seeing the flesh swollen and fat. But not this time. It was as if her decision to become someone else had shifted her perspective and she was looking at someone else’s body. So much damage. Maria had always been shapely, but slim. Now, after months of binging, purging and weeks of semi-starvation, Maria’s body looked emaciated. Her ribs showed through the skin and her thighs seemed thinner than her knees. Her upper arms were stick-thin and the knife scar beneath her shrunken breasts contrasted pink against her pale, lifeless skin. Her face, beneath its new crown of near-black, short-cropped hair, looked gaunt and drawn. What had she done to herself?

She dismissed the thought: she would separate herself from the flesh of which she was composed. Her body would now simply be a canvas that she could use to create a dozen different Marias. The idea had been there when she had woken up: she had wished she could have brought in Anna to help her with the surveillance. Well, she could: by making herself into Anna and anyone else she chose to be. As the thought had evolved from an idea to a strategy to a plan, Maria had rediscovered a sense of resolve and direction. Instead of trying to dissolve into the background with her grungy clothes, she would become other people.

Oliver drank his coffee and gazed at the blank white-tiled wall opposite him. But he wasn’t seeing anything. Instead his mind dwelt on what had happened in the hotel room. It had been five days now and he had heard nothing. But he knew it would take the police some time to trace him, if ever. He had been extremely careful in his planning; in ensuring that his tracks were covered. She had made so much fuss, so much noise. She had known what he had wanted, that he had special needs: so why had she started to scream? Why did the stupid sluts always scream when they knew all along what he had to do to them? Oliver had had no choice other than to shut her up before someone in the hotel heard her.

He took another sip of coffee. No. He had nothing to worry about. He would never use that escort agency again and he would lie low for a while. And if he needed to exercise that deliciously dark side of his nature, then he would travel to another city.

Oliver drained his cup. He pulled on surgical gloves of a particularly heavy latex and snapped the cuffs around the sleeves of his protective gown. He went through the door and into a room flooded with a cheerless, harsh luminescence from neon strip lights. The steel tray was already set out with all the blades and tools he would need.