The Carnival Master

by Craig Russell

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You know damned well. You’ve dithered and fluttered about like some reluctant virgin. I don’t think you can go through with it. I think that’s what all this is about. You can’t commit to leaving the police.’

  ‘That’s crap, Susanne. I have committed to it. I’ve resigned. I even turned down an offer from van Heiden and the BKA today.’

  ‘What offer?’

  Fabel stared at Susanne for a moment. Her dark eyes burned in the soft light. He already regretted mentioning it.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘What offer?’

  ‘They want to create a new unit. A sort of Federal Murder Commission. A unit based here in Hamburg that could take on complex cases elsewhere in Germany. They asked me to set it up and head it.’

  Susanne laughed bitterly. ‘Great. Absolutely marvellous. I spend all my time worrying about your state of mind because of the crap you have to deal with here and you’re off discussing how to increase your workload by seeking out cases across Germany.’

  ‘I told you, I said no.’ Fabel had raised his voice. He took a breath and lowered it. ‘I said no.’

  ‘What’s the matter, Jan? Did you nearly lose your temper? Did you nearly lose control there?’

  ‘Susanne …’

  ‘Don’t you realise that that is your problem? You’re so buttoned up. You were never meant to be a policeman, don’t you see that? If it hadn’t been for the sainted Hanna Dorn being murdered it would never have occurred to you to become one. For the life of me I don’t know why you felt you owed it to her to throw away your future and choose a job that otherwise you would never have considered. Everybody goes on about what a great detective you are. About all the cases you’ve cleared up. But it’s screwed you up. I hear it, Jan. Every other night. The dreams. The nightmares. Don’t you see that you’re as bad as Maria Klee? You witness all of that horror and the crap that people inflict on each other and you screw it down deep inside. And if you don’t stop, you’re going to crack up. Big time.’

  ‘You see the same things. You delve into their minds, for God’s sake.’

  ‘But don’t you see that’s different? I chose to be a criminal psychologist. I trained for it. Prepared for it. I took every step towards my career deliberately. I chose it because it was the direction in which my interests and skills took me. Not because I was diverted into it by some northern bloody Lutheran sense of crusade.’ Susanne paused. ‘The difference between you and me is that I can deal with it. I can keep it out of my private life.’

  ‘I don’t know why we’re having this fight …’ Fabel sat down again. His voice was tired. ‘I keep telling you, I’m finished with the Murder Commission. With the Polizei Hamburg.’

  ‘We’re having this fight because you won’t commit to anything.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘You know what it means, Jan. It was your idea for us to move in together, but we’ve been looking at apartments for months. It doesn’t matter what part of town, what type of apartment, you just walk away shrugging your shoulders. You can’t commit to changing jobs and you can’t commit to me. Why don’t you just admit it?’

  ‘How many times have I got to say this, Susanne? I turned them down. Flat. And my resignation is final. In five weeks’ time I cease to be a policeman.’ Fabel stood up and placed his hands on Susanne’s shoulders. ‘And I can’t help it if we haven’t seen an apartment that I like. That doesn’t mean I’m not committed to you. You know I am.’

  ‘Are you?’ She pushed his hands away. ‘Then why have you been so distant? For the last couple of months. I don’t know what it is I’ve said or done, but you’ve been strange with me. Cold.’

  ‘That’s nonsense …’ said Fabel.

  ‘Is it?’ Susanne gestured to the case material on the coffee table. ‘And what about this? Is it nonsense that you’re taking on a new case when you’re supposed to be finishing up?’

  ‘Yes, it is. I told you. I’ve been asked to offer an opinion. That’s all.’

  ‘And of course you couldn’t say no.’

  ‘No, I couldn’t. Whether you like it or not, Susanne, I’m a policeman for the next five weeks.’

  Susanne turned and went back to bed and Fabel stood silently for a moment, looking at the closed bedroom door. Then he sat down and turned his mind again to a distant city and the deaths of two young women in it.

  Fabel suddenly became aware that daylight was beginning to fill his flat and a leaden tiredness his body. He had been reading, comparing, taking notes for over three hours. It remained the assumption of the investigating officer, Scholz, that the two victims had been chosen entirely at random. But Fabel had noticed something as he had examined the morgue photographs of the victims: despite the difference in their heights, both women had slightly pear-shaped figures, with a fleshiness around their bottoms, lower belly and thighs.

  Fabel read Scholz’s notes:

  There is no evidence of pre-mortem disfigurement. The comparative lack of blood loss from the site suggests that the victims were first strangled with a ligature, and fibres found embedded in the abraded skin on the necks confirm that the ties left at the scenes were the murder weapons. Inconsistent fibres were found on the tie used in the first murder. These fibres were unusual in colour and composition: blue felt. Once the victims were dead, the perpetrator partially stripped them, turned them face down in the pose in which they were found, and then, post-mortem, excised a quantity of flesh from the buttock or upper thigh of the victims. There is clearly a significance in this disfigurement. The perpetrator removes the flesh symbolically. A point of interest is the quantity of flesh removed. It is possible by exact measurement of the excised area to calculate accurately the weight of flesh removed. In the first case, 0.47 kilos were taken, and 0.4 kilos were cut from the second victim. The similarity in weight seems too close to be coincidental and would suggest that the killer has some expertise in measuring quantities. There is also no deviation from or correction of his incisions. These two facts would suggest that he may be someone used to working with quantities of meat and could be involved in butchery or meat rendering as a career. Similarly, he may be a surgeon or otherwise medically qualified.

  The quantity of flesh removed may be significant in itself. In each case it has been extremely close to the 0.45 kilogram measure. This equates to one Imperial pound in weight, as used by the British. This is not to say that the killer is a foreign national, more that ‘a pound of flesh’ is intended (as in the Shakespeare play The Merchant of Venice) and therefore is a metaphor for recovering justice from the victims. This could suggest that the killer was known to his victims.

  It is clear from the consistency of modus that the perpetrator of the first murder also carried out the second homicide. This, added to the symbolism of the tie left at each scene and the significance of Karneval, and the implied expression of psychosexual hatred of women all point to a serial offender.

  Fabel leafed through the file. Weiberfastnacht had another name. Fetter Donnerstag. Fat Thursday. A day devoted to gluttony.

  ‘No, Herr colleague,’ Fabel said under his breath as he re-examined the scene-of-crime images. ‘Our friend isn’t interested in collecting mementos. He’s hungry. His pound of flesh isn’t a trophy: it’s a meal.’

  The phone rang.

  10.

  They stood and stared at the three clear plastic packages on Anna’s desk: one containing an ancient-looking Walther P4 handgun, the other holding a carrier bag with cash and the third with a large dog-eared book in it. Each of them was sealed and labelled with a blue evidence tag.

  ‘We found it outside the store,’ said Anna Wolff, indicating the book. She was in charge of the case. ‘Philosophy. That’s what Tschorba studied – at one time, anyway.’

  Fabel continued to stare silently at the evidence bags.

  Anna ran through what had happened in the convenience store. The Turkish owner ha
d said in his statement that Breidenbach had died bravely; that the young policeman had been determined that the robber would not go out into the street with a handgun. He also stated that he had got the idea to jump Tschorba from Breidenbach, who had told the gunman that he couldn’t take them both. As Timo Tschorba had fired the fatal shots into Breidenbach’s body, the shopkeeper had thrown himself at him. Tschorba was now in the cells, his swollen and bruised face bearing the marks of the encounter with the Turk. Once the shopkeeper had disarmed the junkie, he had rushed over to Breidenbach, but the young policeman was already dead. He admitted that when he had seen that, he had gone back and pistol-whipped Tschorba, who had cried like a child.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ said Fabel at last. ‘He was there. I mean Breidenbach. He was there at the Aichinger incident. He was the MEK trooper who came up to the apartment with me.’ He shook his head mournfully. ‘I behaved like an arsehole … I treated Breidenbach as if he were less of a policeman than me. Just because he was a tactical weapons specialist. I was wrong. He was a police officer first and foremost.’

  Anna went through the statement, including Tschorba’s confession, the ballistics and forensics report and the initial observations from Möller, the pathologist. Fabel took in very little. It was the Murder Commission mantra of dry facts and figures, of times and causes of death, of wounded flesh and rendered fabric. He had heard it so, so many times before. His thoughts still held him on a landing of a block of flats in Jenfeld with a young MEK trooper just starting his career as Fabel was ending his. He found he could not forgive himself for making sweeping judgements about Breidenbach’s motivations and ambitions. Fabel thought about Breidenbach’s youth, about how fit he had been, and then imagined him lying grey and blood-drained on Möller’s stainless steel autopsy table, sliced open, the vestigial warmth from his inner organs dissipating into the cool autopsy-room air.

  After Anna’s briefing, he asked Werner to come into his office. This had become an almost daily ritual since Fabel’s resignation: the gradual transfer of responsibility to his friend. It had always been Maria that he had envisaged taking over, but that was simply not going to happen. He updated Werner on the caseload, confirming that Anna and Henk Hermann should see through the Breidenbach murder. When they were finished Fabel switched on his voicemail and took his jacket from behind the door.

  ‘I’m finishing for the afternoon. Got shopping to do,’ he explained to Werner. He indicated his desk, the files still lying on it from their meeting. ‘Why don’t you do your paperwork there? Might as well get used to it.’

  11.

  Ansgar busied himself in the kitchen. To an outsider, a restaurant kitchen would seem the definition of chaos: orders shouted over the sound of food sizzling or boiling, cookers and ventilators running at industrial noise levels, staff weaving between each other in a rushed ballet. But for Ansgar, his kitchen was the only place of true order that he knew. The dance of the kitchen staff, the rhythm of pan and oven: he orchestrated it all. No one ever had to wait too long for their order; no dish arrived under- or overcooked. His reputation was that of the artist tempered by the perfectionist.

  Ansgar had never married. He had never met anyone who would have understood his particular needs. And those needs would have eventually emerged. There had been women, but again he had kept his behaviour within the range of that which should be expected. For the other needs, for his true needs, there had been the women he had paid. And he had had to pay well. But Ansgar’s lack of a normal romantic life had meant he had no wife. The closest he had to a child was Adam, whom he was training. Adam was nineteen, eager and hardworking. Ansgar found in Adam someone to whom he could pass on the sacred knowledge of the chef de cuisine.

  Ansgar had set the machinery of the kitchen in motion for luncheon. Each member of staff undertaking their preparatory roles. He took Adam to one side, taking this time to induct his protégé in yet another level of the culinary arts.

  ‘I want you to prepare the Wildschweinschinken. It goes on the menu this lunchtime.’

  ‘Yes, Chef,’ said Adam eagerly. Ansgar had previously allowed him to prepare the leg of wild boar. He had carefully mixed the coating of herbs, spices and mustards, exactly to Ansgar’s otherwise secret recipe, and had rubbed them into the boar flesh. That had been a month ago, and the wild pig’s leg had been marinating and curing in the big storage refrigerator since then. Adam brought the boar ham from the fridge and placed it on the carving board.

  ‘We will carve this slice by slice only as and when an order comes in,’ said Ansgar. ‘But I want you to practise carving a couple of slices from it. Also, I intend to serve it with a salad. I want you to suggest something appropriate.’

  Adam frowned. ‘Well …’

  ‘No, not yet. First I want you to carve the meat. Examine its texture, its consistency.’

  Adam nodded and, holding the leg with the carving fork, placed his blade against it.

  ‘Wait,’ said Ansgar patiently. ‘I want you to think more about your cut. Not just how thick or thin to carve the slices. I want you to think about the beast this meat came from. Close your eyes and picture it.’

  Adam looked embarrassed for a moment, then closed his eyes.

  ‘Can you see it?’

  ‘Yes. A wild boar.’

  ‘Okay. Now I want you to think about where it foraged for food in the forest. About its shape, about the speed with which it could run. I want you to visualise that for a moment. Can you see it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okay. Now open your eyes and carve. Then, without thinking any more about it, I want you to tell me what salad I should serve it with.’

  Adam shaved a perfect flake of ham from the joint, placed it on a plate and looked at Ansgar, beaming. ‘It should be served with wild mushroom, fennel, orange and rocket salad.’

  ‘Do you see? Do you see what happens when you think beyond the food, beyond the meat … to the living flesh? Do that, and you will be a great cook, Adam. Do that, and you will always understand the true nature of the food that you serve.’

  With that, Ansgar stole a glance across the kitchen at Ekatherina.

  12.

  Fabel wanted to buy a polo-neck sweater so he headed down to the Alsterhaus department store on Jungfernstieg, next to the Alster lake. Shopping in the Alsterhaus was a luxury he afforded himself perhaps a little too frequently, but he enjoyed browsing in its halls and treating himself to a morsel or two from the cheese bistro on the store’s top floor. He had decided to walk into town and the promise of a fine morning had been fulfilled: the blanket of grey had broken up and the sky was a cold, bright blue.

  As he approached Jungfernstieg, he heard music. Fabel noticed a group of about a dozen men and women harmonising in a language that you didn’t need to understand to know that this was a song about pain and sorrow. The choir stood on the wide pavement a few metres from the deco-arched entrance to the Alsterhaus. Three men of Slavic appearance, like fishermen in a stream, were trying to hook the attention of passers-by. One of them approached Fabel.

  ‘We’re collecting signatures, sir. I wonder if I might trouble you for a moment.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m—’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, I won’t keep you. But do you know anything about the Holodomor?’ The Slav held him with a steady, inquisitive gaze. Fabel noticed the man’s eyes. Piercing blue, and cold; like the winter-morning sky above them. He felt a lurch in his gut as he thought of another Slav he had known who had piercingly bright eyes.

  ‘Are you Ukrainian?’ Fabel asked.

  ‘Yes, I am.’ The Slav smiled. ‘The Holodomor was the deliberate genocide of my people, carried out by the Soviet Union and Stalin. Between seven and ten million Ukrainians died. One quarter of the Ukrainian population. Starved to death by the Soviets between nineteen thirty-two and thirty-three.’ He flicked open the folder he had been holding beneath his clipboard. It was filled with grainy black-and-white photographs of human misery: emaciated
children, bodies lying in the street, huge communal grave pits being filled with stick-like bodies. The images were redolent of those that Fabel had grown to associate with the Holocaust. ‘At one point, twenty-five thousand Ukrainians were dying every day. And practically no one outside Ukraine knows about the Holodomor. Even in Ukraine it was only after independence that we spoke about it openly. Russia still refuses to acknowledge that the Holodomor was an act of deliberate genocide. They say it was the result of incompetent collectivisation by Stalin’s commissars.’

  ‘And you dispute this?’ said Fabel. He looked at his watch to check how much time he had before he was due to meet Susanne on the top floor of the Alsterhaus.

  ‘It’s a downright lie,’ continued the Slav, undeterred. ‘People starved to death all over the Soviet Union because of Stalin’s insane collectivisation mania. That’s true. But in nineteen twenty-seven we had started to Ukrainianise our country. We made Ukrainian, not Russian, our official language. Stalin saw us as a threat, so he tried to exterminate us by starving us. More than twenty-five per cent of the Ukrainian population were wiped out. Please, your signature will help us have this crime recognised for what it is: genocide. We need the German and British and other governments to do what Spain has already done and formally recognise the Holodomor as a crime against humanity.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m not saying that I won’t support your claim, but I can’t sign this until I know more about what happened. I need to find out more about it for myself.’

  ‘I understand.’ The man handed Fabel a leaflet. ‘This tells you where you can get more information. Not just from our organisation. But please, sir, when you have read all of this, please visit our website and add your name to our list there.’

  When Fabel looked up from the leaflet the Ukrainian was already hooking another shopper from the stream on the pavement.

  Fabel made his way up to the top floor of the Alsterhaus. Susanne wasn’t there when he arrived, so he bought a coffee and sat in the café by the escalators and with a view of their agreed meeting place. He looked for a moment at the leaflet he had been handed by the Ukrainian. Fabel hadn’t come across the name ‘Holodomor’ before, but he had heard of the great starvation in the nineteen-thirties. In the nineteen-eighties, the Ukrainian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo had cited the Holodomor as part of the reason he had turned cannibal. Chikatilo’s brother had been murdered and eaten by starving villagers, but all that had been before Chikatilo’s birth. One detail that the campaigners, quite understandably, had chosen to omit from the leaflet was that the Holodomor had resulted in mass cannibalism. The Soviet authorities had set up special tribunals to try and execute people found to have consumed human flesh. Distraught parents had had to find secret burial places when a child died because it was so common for the corpse to be dug up as meat. Worse still, there had been many instances of parents killing and eating their own children. Even today in Ukraine, there was an unusually high number of serial murders involving cannibalism.