The Carnival Master

7.

Once more Fabel dreamed of the dead.

Fabel had had the dreams throughout his career. He had learned to resign himself to the sudden waking, the thunder of his pulse in his ears, the cold sweats in the night as part of his mental processes. He accepted that the dreams were the natural byproduct of so many surplus thoughts and emotions circulating in his mind: those that he had learned to suppress as he dealt with the brutality of killers and, most of all, with the pain and misery of their victims. It was something he saw at every murder scene. The story. The history, usually written out in blood, of those last violent, sad moments. Someone had once said to him that we all die alone; that we can leave this world surrounded by people, but death was still the most solitary of acts. Fabel didn’t believe this. The one element of each murder scene that burrowed its way into his brain, malevolently lurking there until he dreamed, had always been the cruelty of a murder victim having to share their last, most intimate moment with their killer. He remembered how he had once come close to smashing his fist into the grinning face of a murder suspect when he had boasted of how his victim, as she had died from the stab wounds he had inflicted, had tried to hold his hand, seeking the only human comfort available to her. The bastard had actually laughed as he talked about it. And Fabel had dreamt of the victim the same night.

Now Fabel dreamed he waited outside a huge hall. For some reason he thought he was perhaps in the Rathaus, Hamburg’s government building. He knew he was being kept waiting for some reason, but that he would soon gain admittance. The heavy doors were swung open by two faceless attendants and he walked into a vast banqueting hall. The table stretched impossibly long and was lined with diners who stood and cheered as he entered. There was a seat for him at the distant end of the table and, as he walked past the other guests, he recognised almost all of them.

Fabel felt a vague sense of surprise that they recognised him. Each of them had, of course, already been dead before he had made their acquaintance. Fabel walked past the applauding victims whose murders he had investigated and took his place at the top of the table. To one side sat Ursula Kastner, who had been murdered four years before and who had visited previous dreams. She smiled with pale, bloodless lips.

‘What is this feast in aid of?’ asked Fabel.

‘It’s your farewell dinner,’ she said, still smiling but using her napkin to dab a thick droplet of blood from the corner of her mouth. ‘You’re leaving us, aren’t you? So we came to say goodbye.’

Fabel nodded. He noticed that the chair to his other side was empty, but he knew that the space was for Hanna Dorn, his murdered girlfriend from his student days. He turned to speak to Ursula Kastner again.

‘I kept my promise,’ he said. ‘I got him.’

‘You got him,’ she repeated. ‘But not the other.’

He turned back to see that the vacant chair had been filled. Fabel, in his dream-dulled mind, felt an attenuated shock to see it wasn’t Hanna Dorn at all, but Maria Klee sitting there. Her face was gaunt and bloodless, her smile weak.

‘What are you doing here? You shouldn’t be here,’ he protested. ‘These are all-’

‘I know, Jan… but I was invited.’ She was about to say something else when another hollow cheer rose from the assembled guests. The chef had entered carrying an impossibly enormous silver platter capped with a huge silver dome. The chef’s face was hidden, but he was massive, and his huge arms bulged. Nevertheless, it was only the eccentric physics of Fabel’s dream that allowed the chef to carry the dish.

Setting it down as the centrepiece of the table, the chef pulled the dome from the platter. As he did so, Fabel saw a flash of bright emerald eyes and knew that the cook was Vasyl Vitrenko. Maria screamed. Fabel thought he heard Ursula Kastner beside him say: ‘He is the other.’ Fabel gazed mesmerised at the revealed corpse of a young woman lying on her back on the platter, her chest ripped open and the white picket of her ribs prised open and exposed. Her lungs had been torn from the body cavity and thrown over her shoulders. The wings of the Blood Eagle. The ancient Viking sacrificial ritual that had been Vitrenko’s signature. Fabel, like Maria, was now screaming in terror but also found himself applauding with all the other guests. Maria turned to him.

‘I knew he would come,’ she said, suddenly halting her scream. ‘We’ve waited for him to come for so long. But I knew he’d want to say goodbye to you.’

Vitrenko walked around to where Maria was sitting. He held out his hand as if inviting her to dance. Fabel wanted to get up to protest, to defend Maria, but found that he had lost the power of movement. He watched helplessly as Vitrenko led Maria into a shadowy part of the hall. The woman next to Ursula Kastner was bending down and searching for something beneath the table. She sat up, frowning.

‘Lost something?’ asked Fabel. He recognised her as Ingrid Fischmann, the journalist who had been killed by a bomb the year before. She laughed and made a ‘silly me’ face.

‘My foot…’ she said. ‘I had it here a minute ago…’

Fabel woke up.

He lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling. He shifted his legs beneath the covers, just to prove that he could move. He heard Susanne breathing, slow and regular in her dreamless sleep. He heard the late-night sounds of Poseldorf. The occasional car. A group of people exchanging noisy farewells. He swung his legs round and sat up on the edge of the bed, moving slowly so as not to disturb Susanne. His feet brushed against something. He looked down and saw another pair of feet. Black-booted. Massive. He looked up and saw Vasyl Vitrenko standing before him, his emerald eyes sparkling in the dark.

‘Look what I found,’ said Vitrenko, and held out a woman’s dismembered foot.

Fabel woke up. He sat bolt upright, his face, chest and shoulders cold-damp with sweat. His heart pounded. It took him a moment to satisfy himself that this time he was truly awake. Susanne moaned and turned in the bed but did not waken.

He sat still for a long time but found that, when he laid his head back on the pillow, he couldn’t sleep. So many things now buzzed around his head that he could not pin down what was pushing sleep away from his tired brain. He left Susanne in bed, went through to the kitchen and made himself a cup of Friesian tea. He took his cup through to the living room and sat on the sofa.

He had known as soon as he had got out of bed that he was going to read the file. He had known it all evening but had pretended to himself that he could leave it alone. He picked it up. He started to read.