The Carnival Master

2.

Fabel’s mother was delighted to see her son. She embraced him warmly at the door and steered him into the parlour, taking his raincoat from him first. Fabel’s mother was British, a Scotswoman, and he smiled as he heard her richly accented German, influenced as much by local Frisian as by her native English. It was an odd combination, and Fabel had grown up continually aware of another dimension to his identity. She left him by the tiled Kamin to warm up while she went to make tea. Fabel had seldom drunk coffee while at home. East Frisians are the world’s heaviest consumers of tea, leaving the English and the Irish in their tannin-hued wake.

Fabel had spent so little time in this room during the last twenty-five years, but he could still close his eyes and picture everything exactly where it was: the sofa and chairs were new, but they were in exactly the same positions as their predecessors; the reproduction of The Nightwatch by Rembrandt; the bookcase that was too big for the room and was crammed with books and magazines; the small writing table that his mother still used for all her correspondence, having let the world of e-mails and electronic communication pass her by. As well as its contents, the very fabric of the house was still so familiar to Fabel. The thick walls and heavy wooden doors and window frames always seemed to embrace him. He had a strange relationship with Norddeich: he came back to it only to visit his mother, and he felt no real affinity with the place. Yet this was the only world he had known as a child. It had formed him. Defined him. He had left East Friesland in stages: first studying at the Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg, then at the Universitat Hamburg.

When she came back into the parlour with a tray set out with the tea things, he shared the thought with his mother. ‘I never thought I’d end up being a policeman. I mean when I was growing up here.’

She looked surprised and a little confused.

‘It’s funny that now, at my age, I’m giving it up and going to work for someone who grew up right here in Norddeich.’

‘That’s not strictly true,’ said his mother. She poured some tea, added milk and dropped a Kluntje into the cup before handing it to Fabel, despite the fact that he hadn’t taken sugar in his tea for nearly thirty years. ‘You were always such a serious little boy. You always wanted to look after everybody. Even Lex. Goodness knows he got into so many scrapes and it was always you who got him out of them.’

Fabel smiled. His brother’s name was short for ‘Alexander’. Fabel himself only narrowly missed being called ‘Iain’, his Scottish mother finally compromising with his German father and calling him ‘Jan’, which had been ‘close enough’. Lex was the older of the two, but Fabel had always been the wiser, more mature one. Back then, Lex’s carefree attitude to life had annoyed the young Fabel. Now he envied it.

‘And that painting…’ His mother pointed to The Nightwatch. ‘When you were tiny you used to stare at that for hours. You asked me about the men in it, and I explained that they were patrolling the streets at night to protect people from criminals. I remember you said, “That’s what I’m going to be when I grow up. I want to protect people.” So you’re wrong. You did think about being a policeman when you were young.’ She laughed.

Fabel stared at the picture. He had no recollection of expressing any interest in the painting, or in the occupation of the people featured within it. It had become just an unnoticed, taken-for-granted element in his childhood environment.

‘It’s all wrong, anyway,’ he said and sipped his tea without stirring it, letting the sugar dissolve and settle on the bottom of the cup. ‘It’s not even a night scene. It was the varnish that made it too dark. And they’re nothing to do with a nightwatch. They’re civil militiamen under the command of an aristocrat. It was just that the original painting had been stored next to another titled de Nachtwacht and the titles were confused.’

Margaret Fabel shook her head, smiling reproachfully. ‘Sometimes, Jan, knowledge isn’t the answer to everything. That painting is what you think it is when you look at it. Not what its history makes it. That was another thing about you. You always had to know things. Find things out. You becoming a policeman isn’t really the great mystery you think it is.’

Fabel looked again at the painting. Not night, day. Not police, an armed militia. A few days ago he would have said that it had more to do with Breidenbach, the young MEK trooper, than with Fabel. But Breidenbach had died defining what it meant to be a policeman: placing himself in harm’s way to protect the ordinary citizen. They changed the subject and talked about Fabel’s brother Lex for a while, and how his restaurant on the island of Sylt was doing its best business for years. Then Fabel’s mother asked about Susanne.

‘She’s fine,’ said Fabel.

‘Is everything all right between you two?’

‘Why shouldn’t it be?’

‘I don’t know…’ She frowned. Fabel noticed the deepening creases in her brow. Age had crept up on his mother without him noticing. ‘It’s just that you don’t talk about Susanne so much these days. I do hope everything is all right. She’s a lovely person, Jan. You’re lucky to have found her.’

Fabel put his cup down. ‘Do you remember that case I was involved with last year? The one that took such a terrible toll on Maria Klee?’

Margaret Fabel nodded.

‘There was a terrorist connection to the case. I got involved in investigating anarchist and radical groups that had kind of faded into the background. Raking up the past, I suppose you’d call it.’

‘But what has this to do with Susanne?’

‘I was sent a file. Background information more than anything. One of the photographs was of a guy called Christian Wohlmut. It was taken about nineteen-ninety, when German domestic terrorism was on its last legs. Wohlmut wanted to breathe new life into it. He sent parcel and letter bombs to US interests in Germany. Amateur stuff and most were intercepted or failed to go off. But one was professional enough to maim a young secretarial worker in an American oil company’s office in Munich. That’s where Wohlmut was based. Munich. And that’s where Susanne studied.’

‘It’s a big city, Jan,’ said his mother. But her frown indicated that she was already ahead of him.

‘There was a girl in the photograph with Wohlmut. It was blurred and she was only ever described as “unknown female”.’

‘Susanne?’ Fabel’s mother put her cup back in the saucer. ‘No! You can’t believe that Susanne could ever have been involved with terrorism?’

Fabel shrugged and took another sip of tea. He had forgotten the sugar at the bottom and got a mouthful of nauseous sweetness. ‘I don’t know what her involvement with Wohlmut was. But I do know she’s very defensive, almost secretive, about her student days. And there was some guy in her past who she says was manipulative and domineering. It was I who suggested we should move in together… Susanne was wary at first because of some bad experience she’d had.’

‘And you think it was this terrorist, Wohlmut?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘So what if it was? What does that matter now? If she didn’t actually do anything wrong – I mean, break the law?’

‘But that’s exactly it, Mutti… I’ll never know for sure that she wasn’t actively involved.’

‘You’re not seriously thinking about confronting her with this?’

‘She knows something’s wrong. She keeps on at me to find out what it is. Things aren’t so good between us and she knows I’m stalling over moving in together.’

‘Susanne works with the police, Jan. If her political views in the past were so radical, I don’t see her doing that.’

‘People change, Mutti.’

‘Then accept her for who she is now Jan. Unless…’

‘Unless what?’

‘Unless you are simply using this as an excuse for you to get out of the relationship.’

‘It’s not that. It’s just that I’ve got to know. I have to know what the truth is.’

‘Like I said, Jan,’ his mother smiled at him in the same way she had when he had been ‘such a serious little boy’ and she had sought to reassure him about something, ‘knowledge isn’t always the answer to everything.’