The Carnival Master

by Craig Russell

  Fabel looked again at the place that just under a year ago had been a murder crime scene. It was a narrow alley between two four-storey apartment buildings. It was cobbled and swept clean. A row of recycling and waste bins lined one side, allowing room for only one person to pass. The bins had been there at the time of the murder. Fabel had seen the scene-of-crime pictures. Being there in person confirmed the instinct he had had when looking at the photographs.

  ‘It has always been assumed that the killer followed the victims. Picked them out from the Karneval crowds because of their physical forms fitting his agenda. But I think the selection has been made long before that. Weeks. Maybe months. Maybe he was on their trails during the evening, but my reckoning is that he knew exactly where they lived and overtook them or predicted their movements. I think he was waiting here for Melissa Schenker when she came home. In the dark, in this confined space, like a trapdoor spider.’

  ‘So he selected the locus well in advance? Not just the victim?’

  ‘Yep … and that makes him a whole different proposition,’ said Fabel. ‘Serial killers come in two types: the impulsive and the organised. The impulsive types simply respond to their appetites. They scratch when they itch. Cannibalistic serial killers tend always to be impulsive and that is what I thought we were perhaps dealing with here.’

  ‘Does it make that much of a difference?’ Kris Feilke’s acne stood out even more vividly against the blue-white of his chilled skin.

  ‘Yes, it does,’ said Fabel. ‘Both types commit a series of murders, both often take trophies, both have borderline personality disorders, both tend to be loser types … but there is a huge difference between them. Impulsive serial killers have below average IQs. Often significantly below.’

  ‘Like Joachim Kroll …’ Scholz referred back to their discussion in the restaurant.

  ‘Like Joachim Kroll. But organised serial killers usually have IQs way above average. And they know it. They are smart, but they’re never quite as smart as they think they are. Anyway, I’m beginning to think that our Karneval Killer is an organised type. A planner. Especially in this case. Melissa Schenker was an almost total recluse. That was something else that I noticed in the files you sent me. Schenker had practically no social life other than the two friends who were always trying to draw her out of her shell.’

  ‘That’s right. They were the ones who persuaded her to come out with them on Weiberfastnacht. Poor girls. I interviewed them. They were completely distraught and riddled with guilt. They felt that if they hadn’t cajoled Melissa to come out she would still be alive.’

  ‘They’re probably right. But what I don’t get is the selection of Melissa. Our killer is a tracker and hunter. He must have seen her somewhere outside her apartment.’

  Scholz shrugged, as much against the cold as anything. ‘We checked. She was a very regulated person. She worked with computers. Designed games, apparently. Made a small fortune from it, not that you would have guessed that from her apartment. It’s the big thing these days, apparently. Everybody wants to get into it.’

  Fabel looked down the street along the top storeys of the buildings. Melissa Schenker had lived on the top floor. The sky glowered back at him.

  ‘Is her home occupied?’

  ‘No. It lay empty for more than six months and then was sold. A property company bought it and they want to rent it out. Word gets around, though. People around here can be a superstitious bunch.’

  ‘Have they renovated or redecorated it?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Scholz grinned.

  ‘I’d like to see it,’ said Fabel.

  The grin stayed in place as Scholz’s glove dipped into his leather jacket. He raised a bunch of keys and dangled them as if ringing a bell. ‘I thought you might …’

  The apartment was pleasant and bright even on a day like this, but without furniture it was impossible for Fabel to place in it the personality he had got to know through reading Scholz’s file. The walls were white. The ceiling was high and dotted with downlighters which cast bright pools on the highly polished light wood of the floor, the gloomy blue-grey day outside pressing itself against the arch-topped windows. The main living area was a good size: open plan with a wide step up to a raised area.

  ‘That’s where she worked,’ said Scholz, who had followed Fabel’s gaze. Fabel nodded. There was a bank of power and data points along the wall of the raised area.

  ‘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 ha
ndled 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.

  Maria had had no idea how long she’d been in the trunk, or even that the car had stopped moving, until she felt hands on her body, lifting her from the van. She was placed on a hard chair and left for a few minutes, a new bond tight around her chest and binding her to the chair. The tightness of the rope around her wrists had numbed her hands and the ear-defenders and the blindfold and hood deprived her of any sense of whether she was indoors or outdoors. She thought of how people were executed like this. Deprived of sight and hearing, she wouldn’t even hear the cocking of the gun or sense the presence of her executioner. It would be sudden and immediate: her existence snuffed out in an instant. Probably not the worst way to go, she had thought, but still her heart pounded. Only a few days ago Maria had been surprised at how little she feared death. But she had learned to live again by being someone else; her life had regained some value for her. She wondered if they would ever find her body. She imagined Fabel frowning as he looked down on her corpse, her hair bizarrely dyed.

  The ear-defenders were suddenly gone. The hood was snatched from her head. Someone behind her untied the gag. Maria’s pulse quickened even more. Maybe torture would come before death. The blindfold was removed. The sudden restoration of her senses disoriented her and she sat, her head tilted down, blinking in the harsh light.

  Her eyes adjusted. A man and a woman sat opposite her.

  She appeared to be in a small empty warehouse or industrial unit. The whitewashed walls were naked and broken by a double door at the far end and a large thick sliding metal door to Maria’s right. There was a track system suspended from the ceiling, punctuated by pendant metal hooks. She guessed it was some kind of disused meat-packing factory.

  The woman stood up and snapped a glass vial under Maria’s nose. Something powerful hit her system and she was suddenly and painfully alert.

  ‘I want you to listen to me.’ The man spoke first. His German was thick with a Ukrainian accent. ‘I need you to concentrate. Do you understand?’

  Maria nodded.

  ‘We know who you are, Frau Klee. We also know why you’re here – and that you are acting on your own and without the knowledge, support or sanction of your superiors. You’re completely isolated.’

  Maria said nothing.

  ‘You may be an accomplished police officer, Frau Klee, but when it comes to this line of work you’re a complete amateur. It takes more than a cheap hair-colour job to turn you into a surveillance expert.’

  Maria looked at the woman. She was young and remarkably beautiful with bright, pale blue eyes. She wasn’t someone who could merge easily into a crowd. The man frightened Maria. He had the same kind of green eyes as Vitrenko, with that strange, penetrating brightness that so many Ukrainians seemed to have. His hair was almost black, and his pale skin was drawn particularly tight over the Slavic architecture of his face. He had an efficient, lean-muscled look, but Maria got the impression that he was tired.

  ‘So what happens to me now?’ said Maria. ‘Why have you brought me here instead of just dumping my body in the woods somewhere? Nothing I know is of any use to you.’

  The Ukrainian exchanged a smile with the woman next to him.

  ‘Frau Klee, we have absolutely no intention of doing you any harm whatsoever. As a matter of fact we intervened, to put it mildly, because you were going to get yourself killed. And very soon. Did you really think that Kushnier didn’t know you were on his tail within minutes of him leaving the bar?’

  ‘Kushnier,’ said the Ukrainian woman. ‘Maxim Kushnier. Former Ukrainian paratrooper. Low-level operative in Vitrenko’s organisation. T
hat was as far as you got … a street-level captain who has probably never met Vitrenko face to face. How the hell did you expect to have Kushnier lead you to Vitrenko?’

  ‘I didn’t. I thought it was a start.’

  ‘And it was very nearly the end,’ said the man. He stood up and nodded to the woman who came round behind Maria and cut through her bonds. ‘We were tailing you. Not that you or Kushnier would have noticed. You were both two busy performing that waltz on the Delhoven road.’

  ‘If we were dancing,’ said Maria massaging her now-free wrists, ‘then I was leading.’

  ‘Yes …’ said the Ukrainian, with a conciliatory nod. ‘That was impressive. But while you were wandering about lost in the Rhineland countryside, we tidied up your mess.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘You got him with three shots. Shoulder, neck and one through the kidney. The kidney shot would have caused him agony. Fortunately for him he bled to death from the neck wound.’

  Maria felt suddenly sick. She knew she must have hit him, but not finding the car had meant, until now, not confronting the fact that she had taken another human being’s life.

  ‘So, you see,’ the Ukrainian said, ‘you’re now officially working outside the law. As are we.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Maria took the glass of water offered by the woman.

  ‘We are your new partners.’

  ‘Ukrainian intelligence?’

  ‘No. We’re not SBU. Technically, we’re police officers. I am Captain Taras Buslenko of the Sokil. It means “Falcon” … we are an anti-organised-crime Spetsnaz. And this is Captain Olga Sarapenko of the Kiev city militia, similar to your Schutzpolizei. Captain Sarapenko is part of the Kiev police’s anti-mafia unit.’

  ‘You’re after Vitrenko?’ asked Maria.

  ‘Yes. And he’s after us. What you see here are the remains of a seven-strong special unit put together to come here and … deal with Vitrenko.’

  ‘You’re planning to carry out an illegal assassination on German soil?’