Craig Russell - The Carnival Master

Belotserkovsky gave a decisive nod and Buslenko knew he was fully back in the game.

‘Let’s move.’

They moved in a half-run, covering a considerable distance in a short time. The forest on either side of the river had begun to thin out, offering less cover for their pursuers. Added to which the dawn that Buslenko had dreaded now worked in their favour. Maybe they were going to make it after all.

The only thing that worked against them was that the Teteriv river was wider and shallower here, and they had lost the cover of a steep bank. Buslenko heard a cry behind him and turned to see Olga Sarapenko fall, her rifle clattering on the stones.

‘You all right?’ he asked.

She sat up and cradled her ankle. ‘Nothing broken.’ She got up with a struggle. ‘It’s badly sprained, but my boot saved it from anything worse.’

‘Can you walk?’

‘For now,’ she said, with an apologetic expression on her face. ‘I’ll slow you down.’

‘We stick together,’ said Belotserkovsky. The big Ukrainian threw his rifle to Buslenko and then hoisted Olga Sarapenko onto his shoulders as if she were a deer that he had bagged hunting. ‘We’re nearly there. You have to keep us covered, boss,’ he said to Buslenko.

Buslenko grinned and shouldered both Olga’s and Belotserkovsky’s rifles. At his command, they made off again towards the houses on either side of the river that marked the outskirts of Korostyshev. But Buslenko was focused on more than making it alive to the town of his birth. Instead he was fixed with grim determination on a goal far to the west: a strange city in a foreign country. Where he had an appointment to keep.

1-3 February

Fabel put the phone down. It all made sense now.

Something had been nagging away at him for days and he hadn’t been able to put his finger on what it was. It had unsettled him, because every time he had had a feeling like this in the past it had turned out to have a solid foundation. He understood the process behind it: little scraps of seemingly unrelated information that he had picked up coming together in his subconscious to start an alarm bell ringing. There had been nothing unusual about the telephone conversation that he had had with Maria, but her claim that her psychologist had said she should cut herself off from her colleagues for a while had rung false with him.

And now, two weeks later, Minks had called him at the Presidium and everything had fallen into place.

Fabel had come across Dr Minks as part of a previous investigation. Minks was an expert in post-trauma stress and phobic behaviour. As such he had set up a specialised Fear Clinic in Hamburg. The Polizei Hamburg had brought in counsellors to help Maria, but the main element of her treatment was now provided by Dr Minks. Minks had been one of Susanne’s lecturers at Munich University and she rated his skills very highly.

‘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.

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 Kolner, 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.