Craig Russell - The Carnival Master
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- Название:The Carnival Master
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‘It looks expensive enough to me,’ said Fabel.
‘I didn’t say it wasn’t expensive,’ said Scholz. ‘It’s just that her earning bracket was way above this. She cleared over three hundred thousand Euros a year. It was her own business and even after she sold the games on to the big games producers she retained the copyright and earned a royalty for each game sold. Her friends said she loved her work. Too much.’
Fabel, who had been looking out of the window along towards the twin spires of the cathedral, turned to Scholz. ‘What do you mean?’
‘They were beginning to get worried about her state of mind. Melissa built alternative realities for her games. Invented worlds. Her friends said that she spent far too much time in this alternative existence. They were worried she was losing her grip on reality. When she wasn’t working on developing other worlds she was living in them, playing online games.’
Fabel nodded. ‘It’s called data addiction. Or hyper-connected disorder… Messing up your mind by spending too much time interfacing with technology and not enough interacting with reality and real people. It creates real mental problems. Interestingly, it is particularly rife amongst people with poor self-image, particularly poor body image. It’s their way of existing beyond the confines of their physical selves… the selves they are dissatisfied with.’
‘It would fit with what we know about Melissa…’ said Tansu Bakrac. She was standing under one of the downlighters and the copper in her hair burned redder. ‘The stuff we were able to access on her computers revealed a lot. She reviewed other games on forums, online stores, that kind of thing. Most reviews were a hundred to a hundred and fifty words long.’
‘Well, she was in the business…’
Tansu laughed. ‘We counted two thousand reviews over a period of two years. That’s about three hundred thousand words. And there was a lot of venom in some of them. Sarcasm and trying to sound smart. I can imagine she pissed off a few people.’
‘Oh?’
‘No… that’s a dead end. All her reviews were done through aliases. And anyway, it was easy to read between the lines. Her stuff had the mark of someone with no life venting their fury anonymously. And on top of that were the hours she spent playing games. We still have her stuff in the evidence room. You name the gadget, she had it. Like you said, anything she could use to avoid the real world. I didn’t think there was a name for it, though… I thought it was just a case of her being a saddo…’
‘But I don’t see a connection between that and what happened to her,’ said Scholz.
‘Maybe not. What happened to her computer equipment?’
‘We’ve still got it in evidence storage,’ answered Kris Feilke. ‘We thought we should hang onto it just in case she had met someone online. You know, given the kind of life she led.’
‘Had she?’
‘No. Not that we could see. I had one of our technical guys go through her computer files. I had to take him off it. It was eating up too much time and looked like a dead end. The main problem was that a lot of her stuff was protected by secure encryption which we couldn’t break. But from what we could see of her Internet history there was no hint of her meeting someone online.’
‘With someone as techno-savvy as Melissa, that means nothing. You would be amazed at what goes on. It’s my guess that if we could break her password security, I would bet that we would discover that Melissa had a very active social and sex life. Online. What about family?’
‘One sister. I don’t think they had much to do with each other. The sale of the flat was all handled through lawyers. No surviving parents.’
‘Current and former boyfriends?’
‘Nothing here. Melissa wasn’t from Cologne. She was brought up in Hessen. Very few boyfriends in her history. We had them all checked out. Nothing.’
‘I’d like to see her stuff. Later, I mean.’ Fabel looked around the flat again. This had been Melissa’s safety zone. Her secure space where she could live out her life by proxy in some digitised version of reality. Nothing bad could happen to her in here. Danger and fear were outside.
As they left the flat and headed back down to the street from which Melissa Schenker had been snatched and murdered, Fabel dwelt on how right she had been.
4.
Andrea waited. Her head thudded with a headache brought on by deliberate dehydration: she had slashed her fluid intake over the last week to a cupful of water a day so that her body would burn the slightest reserve of fat to keep hydrated. There were half a dozen chairs in the dressing room but she sat on none. This was not the time to rest. It was the time to switch on every cubic millimetre of her body; to hard-wire her will into her flesh. Her heart hammered and electricity coursed through every sinew, every nerve, every swollen fibre. Andrea had pumped up with dumbbells five minutes ago, but now she ran through her routine, the poses she would strike on the stage, each an exposition of a specific muscle set. It wasn’t that Andrea needed to rehearse to get it right: it was that running through them ensured the optimal muscle tone.
First the mandatory poses: Double Front Bicep, Front Lat Spread, Abdominals and Thighs – one of Andrea’s best, because of the definition of her serratus anterior and obliques – Side Chest, Side Triceps, Rear Double Bicep. Then was the weak spot in Andrea’s routine, when she had to turn her back on the judges to do her Rear Lat Spread. It was then that the lack of definition on her glutes let her down. But she had put a lot of thought into the outfit she was performing in: it made the most of the lateral sweep of her shoulder-to-hip taper, drawing focus from her glutes. Her last mandatory would be the Most Muscular. From that she would segue straight into Crab Most Muscular, her first optional pose.
She heard the cheers of the crowd. The British Bitch had finished her set and it sounded like it had been a good one. Whistling. Stamping. The crowd bellowing. Calling Maxine the British Bitch wasn’t an insult, it was Maxine’s professional nickname, just as Andrea’s was Andrea the Amazon. Andrea and Maxine had taken part in a number of competitions together. When Andrea had done a tour of England, Maxine had put her up in Nottingham and Maxine would be staying at Andrea’s flat tonight. They had trained together. They had put on non-competitive exhibitions together. They were friends.
Except on the competition podium. On the podium you had no friends. Out there you needed no one and nothing except raw adrenalin and aggression. Anger, even. All hidden behind the broadest, brightest, most brainless grin. Out there, Andrea’s friend Maxine became simply the British Bitch. The one to beat.
Andrea heard more cheers as the next competitor was up. She would follow her. She needed the aggression. The anger. Andrea knew where to find the anger: it was a switch she could turn on at will. All she had to do was remember. As Andrea waited to be called to do her routine she allowed the raw fire of her hate and anger to fill her body in huge surges.
The knock came and one of the exhibition-hall staff swung wide the door for Andrea to exit. It was like a lion being released into the Colosseum. As Andrea the Amazon took long powerful strides past the attendant she heard a defiant, animal roar. And realised she was hearing her own voice.
5.
Maria guessed she had been bundled into the trunk of a car. Or a van. But even that idea had seemed to drift away from her. The fact was that they had tied her wrists and ankles, gagged and blindfolded her, then put some kind of bag over her head. Finally, they had placed what she reckoned to be a set of industrial ear-defenders over her ears. It was all classic special forces stuff: total sensory deprivation to befuddle the victim. Time ceased to exist. Maria was aware that her mind had been cut adrift from her body; she was losing the concept of arms, of legs, of being connected to her nervous system. She wriggled and strained against the bonds so that the rope would burn at the skin of her ankles and wrists. It worked for an instant and the connection to her flesh was reestablished, then faded and the pain became a vague ache lingering on the periphery of her being.
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