Free JF04 - The Carnival Master by Craig Russell Page A

agency called
À la Carte
?
9
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    What struck Fabel right away was that the file wasn’t just about murders that had already occurred: it was also about a murder that was expected. That was of course true of any suspected serial killer, but in this case the Cologne police were not just expectinganother murder, they even had a pretty clear idea about the day when it would take place.
    Cologne’s big thing was Karneval, the riotous celebration that took place before Lent every year. As a Protestant North German, Fabel found Karneval alien. He was aware of it, obviously, but he had never experienced it other than through the coverage he had seen on television. Even Cologne was a relatively unknown quantity to him: he had been there only a couple of times and never for very long. As he sank deeper into the case in the file, he found himself lost in an environment of unfamiliar landmarks. It struck him how difficult it would be for a unit such as the one proposed by van Heiden and Wagner to function effectively across the whole of Germany. One land, a score of different cultures. And if you considered East and West, two different histories.
    Cologne’s Karneval was unique. Further south there were the more traditional forms of Fasching and Fastnacht. In Düsseldorf, Cologne’s great rival, or in Mainz, Karneval took a similar form but never quite matched the anarchic exuberance of the Cologne event. And Karneval in Cologne was much more than a date in the diary: it was part of the Cologne psyche. It defined what it meant to be to be a Cologner.
    Fabel had already known about the case. Like all killings of their type, the two murders had all the ingredients of a good and lurid headline. The killer that the Cologne police were hunting struck only during Karneval. There had only been two victims: one the previous year, the first the year before that. But the investigating officer – Senior Commissar Benni Scholz – had recognised the modus of thekiller as soon as he had arrived at the second murder scene. He had warned his superiors that another homicide could follow within the same Karneval season, fearing that the killer’s serial offending might escalate. There hadn’t been another murder, but Fabel agreed with the faceless Commissar behind the report that the killer would strike again. This year, during the coming Karneval.
    Fabel laid the case files out on the coffee table. Both victims had been in their late twenties, female, single. Their backgrounds showed little commonality. Sabine Jordanski had been a hairdresser. Melissa Schenker had worked from home: some kind of software designer. Where Jordanski had been the life and soul of the party, Schenker had been quiet, reserved and almost reclusive. Jordanski had been native
Kölsch
, born and bred in the city; Schenker had been an outsider from Kassel who had settled in Cologne three years before. The investigation had revealed no shared friends or acquaintances. No links. Other than the way they had met their deaths.
    Both women had been strangled. There was evidence of manual strangulation and then the use of a ligature: the male neckties that had been left around their throats as a signature by the killer. Scholz had explained the possible significance of this signature:
Weiberfastnacht
was a key date in the Cologne Karneval calendar. Always held on the last Thursday before Lent,
Weiberfastnacht
was Women’s Karneval Day, when women ruled. Every woman in Cologne had, on Women’s Karneval Day, the right to demand a kiss from any man. It was also a custom that women had the right, if they saw a man wearing a necktie, to cut it in half. It was intended as a symbol of overturning the traditional authority ofmen over women. In a more enlightened and equal cultural environment, the custom had become a bit of fun and nothing more. But Commissar Scholz expressed his belief that it meant a great deal more to the killer. He suspected that the killer was motivated either by a