Craig Russell - The Carnival Master

Their situation, Buslenko explained, was like two hunters in the forest at the same time. It was up to Buslenko, Sarapenko and Maria to make sure they got to the game before the BKA Federal Crime Bureau, and without detection. All he wanted the access codes for was to pinpoint where the other hunter lay hidden in the forest. Maria knew it was only a matter of time before Buslenko became more insistent.

It was on the third day of sitting at the monitors that Maria noticed a huge black Lexus pull up at the villa’s gates. It was admitted immediately. Buslenko’s surveillance camera was set up so far from the house that it was difficult to see clearly the men who got out of the vehicle. But the final figure sent a chill through Maria.

‘Olga!’

Sarapenko ran over. ‘What is it?’

‘Him…’ Maria felt her throat tighten, as if the name would choke her if she said it out loud. ‘It’s him.’

‘How can you tell? It’s just a shape from this distance.’

‘That’s him, I know it. The last time I saw him he was just a shape in the distance, like now, only then he was running across a field. Where’s Buslenko?’

‘He’s collecting some stuff. Our contact here… it’s best if you don’t know.’

‘Get hold of him on his cellphone. Tell him we’ve found our target and he is in Molokov’s place right now.’ Maria watched the figure on the monitor. At last. At last she had him in her sights. It gave her an enormous sense of power to know that she was watching him and he was unaware of her observation. The dark, indistinct figure whose identity Maria knew with absolute certainty turned to speak to one of his heavies, then disappeared into the villa.

Maria watched with a cold, hard expression of violent hatred as Vasyl Vitrenko disappeared from view.

‘Now,’ she said in a voice not much louder than a whisper. ‘Now I’ve got you.’

The television flickered mutely in the corner of the hotel room. A row of Funkenmariechen dancing girls in red-and-white microskirted versions of eighteenth-century Prussian military uniforms, complete with tri-cornered hats, performed a clumpily synchronised chorus-line high kick to unheard music. In the background the Elferrat, the Karneval Council of Eleven, presided with forced jollity over the proceedings. Karneval was beginning to build up to its Rose Monday climax. Fabel lay on his hotel bed, gazed blankly at the screen and reflected on the fact that the Karneval Cannibal too was probably building up for showtime on Women’s Karneval Night. Fabel had just finished talking to Susanne on the phone; it hadn’t gone well. After he had been unable to give her a clear idea about when he’d be back in Hamburg, they had fallen into a silence. Susanne had ended it by saying she would talk to him whenever he got back and had then hung up.

He stared at the silent TV, not taking in the grinning dancing girls who sidestepped their way in unison off the stage and were replaced by a man dressed in a barrel who delivered a comic monologue.

Fabel switched on his bedside lamp and picked up the file on Vera Reinartz, the girl who had been beaten and raped on Women’s Karneval Night in 1999. There was a photograph of Vera, taken with a couple of fellow medical students. She was a smallish, mousy-haired girl but pretty. She stood uncertainly at the edge of the group, clearly uncomfortable at having her photograph taken. The second photograph had been taken on a sunny day in a park or garden. Her light-coloured summer dress revealed her figure: slim but slightly pear-shaped with a fleshiness around the hips. Just like the Karneval Cannibal’s victims. Again, she had the look of someone who didn’t like to be the focus of attention.

Fabel went through Vera’s statement, doctors’ reports and the stark hospital photographs, the vividness of her bruises and the rawness of the abrasions and cuts on her face and neck emphasised by the severe lighting. Fabel couldn’t recognise the swollen mass of bruised flesh as the girl in the earlier photographs. There were images of the wounds on her body. Including bite marks. Bite marks were by no mean unusual in rape cases, but Fabel felt that Scholz had been far too dismissive of a potential link with the murders. Tansu Bakrac clearly struggled to assert herself in the shadow of Scholz’s seemingly relaxed but highly personal leadership.

Again Fabel reflected on the unknown city outside his hotel window, with its strange customs, its Karneval, its dancing girls and costumed clowns. Its killer stalking women on the one night of the year when they were supposed to be free of male tyranny. And Maria, putting herself in mortal danger by stumbling around in the dark. And that made him think about his appointment. The one he had made for the next day. The one Scholz mustn’t know about.

Tansu had added a lot of background information on Vera Reinartz. She had been bright; brighter than her peers and destined for a significant career in medicine. She had the kind of intellect that tended to be steered into specialism or research. She had had boyfriends but the medical examination had confirmed her own statement that she had been a virgin. Where are you now, Vera? Fabel thought to himself as he read. How could you just disappear?

Fabel breakfasted well. He had muesli with fruit and yoghurt, a couple of bread rolls with Leberwurst and a soft-boiled egg with fruit juice and coffee. He left the hotel early but did not head for the Police Presidium. It was the first opportunity Fabel had had since he had arrived in Cologne: Scholz had to go to a Karneval police committee meeting that would go on all morning. To start with, Fabel had assumed it was a strategy meeting to discuss the massive but delicate task of policing Cologne’s Karneval.

‘No such luck,’ Scholz had said gloomily. ‘It’s about our Karneval float for Rose Monday. They’re after my head because the finishing of the float and costumes is so far behind schedule.’

Fabel walked into town from his hotel and climbed the cathedral steps above the Bahnhofsvorplatz, the main square that sat between Cologne Cathedral and the city’s central railway station. Ahead of him was the Collonaden shopping mall attached to the station. The winter sun was knife-sharp in the cold air and scarf-muffled crowds milled around the square. This was the heart of the city. It had been for nearly two thousand years and the concentric circles of Cologne’s main thoroughfares radiated from it like ripples in a pond. Maria was out there somewhere on some half-baked revenge mission. She was here to catch up with Vitrenko. The chances were that she would. And that he would kill her.

He had only been waiting for ten minutes when a tall man with greying hair approached him. Fabel noticed that Ullrich Wagner was much more casually dressed than he had been the last time they had met, in van Heiden’s office in Hamburg.

‘I see you got my message,’ said Fabel. ‘I’m glad you could come.’

‘After what you told me on the phone the other day, I could hardly not come.’ Wagner looked up at the dark mass of the cathedral. One of the spires was encased in scaffolding that looked toothpick-fragile compared to the spire’s mass. ‘There’s always scaffolding somewhere on it… it took three hundred years to build and it looks like it’ll take an eternity to repair.’ He smiled. ‘I must say it’s very Graham Greene

… meeting at the cathedral and everything.’

‘I didn’t want to meet at the Police Presidium. I’m working this Karneval case with Benni Scholz. I didn’t want, well… to confuse things. I didn’t have time to head out to BKA headquarters, and you said you would be in Cologne…’

‘Listen, it’s not a problem. By the way, I just wanted to ask you