The Carnival Master

4.

Fabel broke the four-hour journey to Cologne under a slate sky at a Raststatte on the A1 and filled up his BMW. A few unconvinced fluffs of snow drifted into his face as he did so. Instead of going into the service-station restaurant, Fabel bought a coffee and a salami roll to take out. He sat in the car with the heater on and consumed his lunch without tasting it, reading through the notes he had made on the information that Scholz had supplied. For Fabel, this process was not unlike reading a novel. It took him to a different time, a different place and a different life. He had all the details of the night when the first victim had died, two years ago. The strange thing was that Fabel found it difficult to place himself in the context of Karneval. The Cologners seemed obsessed with its forced jollity and irreverence. He read about the first victim’s movements on the night she had died. Sabine Jordanski had not officially been working that day, but had spent most of it doing exactly the same kind of thing that she would have done if she had been at work. As it was Women’s Karneval Night she and a group of female friends had planned to take part in a procession through the city before hitting a few of the bars where exuberant Kolsch bands would be playing. Sabine had spent the day colouring first her friends’ hair, then her own. The dyes differed from the ones she normally used: vivid pinks, reds, electric blues and yellows, and often more than one colour was used on a single head. There seemed to be an element of becoming someone else at Karneval, a belief that true release from everyday order only came with a mask, a costume or a radical change of look.

Sabine Jordanski seemed to be a typical Cologner: exuberant, friendly, fun-loving. She was twenty-six and had been working at the salon for four years. There was no boyfriend at the time of her death, or at least no permanent boyfriend who could be traced, but it would have appeared that this was a strictly temporary situation. Sabine had enjoyed the attentions of several young men. On the night of her death she had been seen talking earlier to three men, all of whom had been traced and eliminated from the police’s inquiries. The group of six girls had visited four bars that night. All had been drinking but none was drunk. The girls had walked together to Sabine’s apartment in Gereonswall at about two in the morning and had said goodnight to her outside. There had been several people milling around, but no one whom the girls particularly noticed. No one had seen Sabine go into her apartment, but all had assumed that was what she had done.

She was found the next morning in an alley only two hundred metres from her apartment building. She had been strangled with a red tie which had been left at the scene, partially stripped and 0.468 kilos of flesh had been removed from her right buttock. Time of death had been estimated at around the time her friends had said goodnight to her. Someone had been waiting for her, or had been following the group around the city, stalking them like a lion waiting for a straggler to become separated from the herd.

Sabine Jordanski had been a cheerful, uncomplicated girl who had not demanded much from life. Fabel bit into the salami roll and looked at the scene-of-crime photographs again. Sabine’s heavy, white buttocks lay exposed. The excised trench in the right buttock stood out with violent vividness against the paleness of the skin. Scholz had been right: the killer had executed his butchery with a swift precision. There was no raggedness, no tentative first cuts. This guy had known what he was doing. Fabel suddenly realised that he was chewing a mouthful of salami while looking at images of a mutilated corpse. In that moment the reasons he had sought escape from the Murder Commission crystallised. What had he become?

Fabel closed the file, finished his hurried lunch and headed back out onto the autobahn towards Cologne.