The Carnival Master

3.

‘This is where Melissa Schenker, the second victim, was found. Weiberfastnacht, last year,’ said Scholz. He, Fabel, Kris and Tansu stood at the alley mouth, hunched against the cold and drizzly sleet.

Fabel looked along the street. It swept around at the end but he could see a spire puncture the sky above the rooftops. He pointed in its direction. ‘What’s that?’

‘St Ursula’s Church.’

‘But the first victim, Sabine Jordanski was found near there.’

‘Yep. On the other side. Her apartment was on Gereonswall. But as I said, the significance is difficult to read. There are tons of churches throughout Cologne. And standing here we’re within range of at least four of the city’s twelve Romanesque churches – St Ursula’s, St Kunibert’s, St Gereon’s, St Andreas’s and, of course there’s…’ Scholz turned to indicate the other direction and held his arm out as if announcing a cabaret act. Fabel saw the massive, domineering twin spires of Cologne Cathedral soar menacingly grey-black above the city.

Fabel looked again at the place that just under a year ago had been a murder crime scene. It was a narrow alley between two four-storey apartment buildings. It was cobbled and swept clean. A row of recycling and waste bins lined one side, allowing room for only one person to pass. The bins had been there at the time of the murder. Fabel had seen the scene-of-crime pictures. Being there in person confirmed the instinct he had had when looking at the photographs.

‘It has always been assumed that the killer followed the victims. Picked them out from the Karneval crowds because of their physical forms fitting his agenda. But I think the selection has been made long before that. Weeks. Maybe months. Maybe he was on their trails during the evening, but my reckoning is that he knew exactly where they lived and overtook them or predicted their movements. I think he was waiting here for Melissa Schenker when she came home. In the dark, in this confined space, like a trapdoor spider.’

‘So he selected the locus well in advance? Not just the victim?’

‘Yep… and that makes him a whole different proposition,’ said Fabel. ‘Serial killers come in two types: the impulsive and the organised. The impulsive types simply respond to their appetites. They scratch when they itch. Cannibalistic serial killers tend always to be impulsive and that is what I thought we were perhaps dealing with here.’

‘Does it make that much of a difference?’ Kris Feilke’s acne stood out even more vividly against the blue-white of his chilled skin.

‘Yes, it does,’ said Fabel. ‘Both types commit a series of murders, both often take trophies, both have borderline personality disorders, both tend to be loser types… but there is a huge difference between them. Impulsive serial killers have below average IQs. Often significantly below.’

‘Like Joachim Kroll…’ Scholz referred back to their discussion in the restaurant.

‘Like Joachim Kroll. But organised serial killers usually have IQs way above average. And they know it. They are smart, but they’re never quite as smart as they think they are. Anyway, I’m beginning to think that our Karneval Killer is an organised type. A planner. Especially in this case. Melissa Schenker was an almost total recluse. That was something else that I noticed in the files you sent me. Schenker had practically no social life other than the two friends who were always trying to draw her out of her shell.’

‘That’s right. They were the ones who persuaded her to come out with them on Weiberfastnacht. Poor girls. I interviewed them. They were completely distraught and riddled with guilt. They felt that if they hadn’t cajoled Melissa to come out she would still be alive.’

‘They’re probably right. But what I don’t get is the selection of Melissa. Our killer is a tracker and hunter. He must have seen her somewhere outside her apartment.’

Scholz shrugged, as much against the cold as anything. ‘We checked. She was a very regulated person. She worked with computers. Designed games, apparently. Made a small fortune from it, not that you would have guessed that from her apartment. It’s the big thing these days, apparently. Everybody wants to get into it.’

Fabel looked down the street along the top storeys of the buildings. Melissa Schenker had lived on the top floor. The sky glowered back at him.

‘Is her home occupied?’

‘No. It lay empty for more than six months and then was sold. A property company bought it and they want to rent it out. Word gets around, though. People around here can be a superstitious bunch.’

‘Have they renovated or redecorated it?’

‘Not yet.’ Scholz grinned.

‘I’d like to see it,’ said Fabel.

The grin stayed in place as Scholz’s glove dipped into his leather jacket. He raised a bunch of keys and dangled them as if ringing a bell. ‘I thought you might…’

The apartment was pleasant and bright even on a day like this, but without furniture it was impossible for Fabel to place in it the personality he had got to know through reading Scholz’s file. The walls were white. The ceiling was high and dotted with downlighters which cast bright pools on the highly polished light wood of the floor, the gloomy blue-grey day outside pressing itself against the arch-topped windows. The main living area was a good size: open plan with a wide step up to a raised area.

‘That’s where she worked,’ said Scholz, who had followed Fabel’s gaze. Fabel nodded. There was a bank of power and data points along the wall of the raised area.

‘It looks expensive enough to me,’ said Fabel.

‘I didn’t say it wasn’t expensive,’ said Scholz. ‘It’s just that her earning bracket was way above this. She cleared over three hundred thousand Euros a year. It was her own business and even after she sold the games on to the big games producers she retained the copyright and earned a royalty for each game sold. Her friends said she loved her work. Too much.’

Fabel, who had been looking out of the window along towards the twin spires of the cathedral, turned to Scholz. ‘What do you mean?’

‘They were beginning to get worried about her state of mind. Melissa built alternative realities for her games. Invented worlds. Her friends said that she spent far too much time in this alternative existence. They were worried she was losing her grip on reality. When she wasn’t working on developing other worlds she was living in them, playing online games.’

Fabel nodded. ‘It’s called data addiction. Or hyper-connected disorder… Messing up your mind by spending too much time interfacing with technology and not enough interacting with reality and real people. It creates real mental problems. Interestingly, it is particularly rife amongst people with poor self-image, particularly poor body image. It’s their way of existing beyond the confines of their physical selves… the selves they are dissatisfied with.’

‘It would fit with what we know about Melissa…’ said Tansu Bakrac. She was standing under one of the downlighters and the copper in her hair burned redder. ‘The stuff we were able to access on her computers revealed a lot. She reviewed other games on forums, online stores, that kind of thing. Most reviews were a hundred to a hundred and fifty words long.’

‘Well, she was in the business…’

Tansu laughed. ‘We counted two thousand reviews over a period of two years. That’s about three hundred thousand words. And there was a lot of venom in some of them. Sarcasm and trying to sound smart. I can imagine she pissed off a few people.’

‘Oh?’

‘No… that’s a dead end. All her reviews were done through aliases. And anyway, it was easy to read between the lines. Her stuff had the mark of someone with no life venting their fury anonymously. And on top of that were the hours she spent playing games. We still have her stuff in the evidence room. You name the gadget, she had it. Like you said, anything she could use to avoid the real world. I didn’t think there was a name for it, though… I thought it was just a case of her being a saddo…’

‘But I don’t see a connection between that and what happened to her,’ said Scholz.

‘Maybe not. What happened to her computer equipment?’

‘We’ve still got it in evidence storage,’ answered Kris Feilke. ‘We thought we should hang onto it just in case she had met someone online. You know, given the kind of life she led.’

‘Had she?’

‘No. Not that we could see. I had one of our technical guys go through her computer files. I had to take him off it. It was eating up too much time and looked like a dead end. The main problem was that a lot of her stuff was protected by secure encryption which we couldn’t break. But from what we could see of her Internet history there was no hint of her meeting someone online.’

‘With someone as techno-savvy as Melissa, that means nothing. You would be amazed at what goes on. It’s my guess that if we could break her password security, I would bet that we would discover that Melissa had a very active social and sex life. Online. What about family?’

‘One sister. I don’t think they had much to do with each other. The sale of the flat was all handled through lawyers. No surviving parents.’

‘Current and former boyfriends?’

‘Nothing here. Melissa wasn’t from Cologne. She was brought up in Hessen. Very few boyfriends in her history. We had them all checked out. Nothing.’

‘I’d like to see her stuff. Later, I mean.’ Fabel looked around the flat again. This had been Melissa’s safety zone. Her secure space where she could live out her life by proxy in some digitised version of reality. Nothing bad could happen to her in here. Danger and fear were outside.

As they left the flat and headed back down to the street from which Melissa Schenker had been snatched and murdered, Fabel dwelt on how right she had been.