The Carnival Master

6.

Having travelled down to Cologne from Hamburg by train, Maria didn’t have her own car with her. It was part of her strategy: her car was an older Jaguar XJS – in an uncharacteristic moment of flamboyance she had bought it deliberately to turn heads. And that made the XJS far too conspicuous for the type of surveillance work that she intended to carry out. Maria had therefore spent much of her first morning in the city looking for a rental car. Even the small economy models were too obviously new and shiny. Cologne had been sulking under a leaden sky that refused to unburden the snow it had been threatening all day. Maria’s mood matched the weather and her feet hurt. She could simply have phoned around from her hotel room but she knew she needed to see the car that she would use.

It was about three in the afternoon and the sky was already dimming from dull to dark when she left the last rental place. It wasn’t one of the main national or international rental companies and was attached to a servicing garage and second-hand car showroom. The girl behind the rental counter was confused when Maria asked her if she could rent the dark blue Citroen Saxo parked on the lot. A phone call brought to the office a salesman who looked to Maria as if he should still have been at school. He explained that the car could not be rented; it was for sale. Perhaps it was because Maria glanced out at the car through the rental office window that he decided to launch into his pitch, promising Maria that it was an exceptional car for its age. When Maria asked him the price he began his prepared build-up.

‘Never mind the crap. How much is the car?’ Maria fixed him with a withering gaze. The salesman blushed behind his freckles. After she had taken the Saxo for a test drive, she told him he’d take seven hundred Euros less than he’d asked. An hour and a half later, with all the documentation sorted out, Maria drove in the Saxo back to her hotel. She parked in the car park around the corner. The car was perfect: completely anonymous and ideal for surveillance. The paintwork was dark blue but had dulled and there were no dents or trims that would mark it out and Maria removed a colourful sticker from the rear window.

She left the Saxo in the car park and walked to the Karstadt store in Breite Strasse, where she sought out the clothing equivalent of the Citroen: grungy tops and jeans, a knitted hat and a couple of heavier jackets, one with a hood. All the clothes were in muted dark colours. As she ran the cheap clothes through the scanner the assistant at the till cast a surreptitious eye over Maria’s expensive lambswool coat and designer handbag.

‘A present for my niece.’ Maria smiled emptily.