The Carnival Master

9.

It took nearly four hours for Fabel to drive from Hamburg to Norddeich, slightly longer than usual. It was not a journey that he liked to make much in the winter, unless he took the train. But his mother’s recent heart attack and advancing age meant he felt the need to make the trip more often; and the idea of six hours of solitude in the car there and back had appealed to him. Time to think. However, as the skies grew darker, that appeal started to fade. Friesland is flat; it is hill-less and lies defenceless against the temperaments of the North Sea. As Fabel crossed the landscape he had grown up in, a wind from the west, unopposed by anything resembling a hill, tugged at his steering wheel and the rods of rain against his windscreen became beaded with sleet.

Fabel drove without the radio or the CD-player on, frowning through the rain at the grey ribbon of the A28. He needed the thinking time. He had decided to spend the journey imagining two futures for himself: the one that Bartz had offered, where Fabel’s expensive tastes could more easily be met and where he would be free from a world of horror and violence; but the other offer, made by van Heiden and the BKA, was a lot more attractive than he liked to admit. It was flattering, no matter how much he tried to deny it, to be considered the leading expert in his professional field. Fabel tried hard to view each future objectively. As he did so, he fought to keep something else from his mind: the Cologne file. A distraction he didn’t need. But it kept creeping back into his thoughts.

Fabel got a shock when he realised that he had no recollection of the last half-hour of driving, as if he had been on some kind of autopilot while his mind had wandered over his future, his relationship with Susanne, and a faceless killer in a city he hardly knew. Suddenly he realised that Norden had taken a monochrome form around him. He continued along Norddeicher Strasse towards the North Sea and his mother’s home.