JF04 - The Carnival Master Read Online Free PDF Page B

had information that Vitrenko was back in Ukraine and we had equally sound intelligence that he is still in Germany.’
    ‘Well,’ said Buslenko, turning to face the beautiful Captain Olga Sarapenko of the Kiev police militia, who had made such a convincing nightclub hostess. ‘That was what my grandmother always said about the Devil: he has the craft to be in two places at the same time.’
5
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    Fabel waited to be shown into Criminal Director van Heiden’s office and thought about how he would soon become someone else. And how everyone except Susanne seemed to be doing their best to talk him out of it. He guessed that van Heiden might be about to try again.
    The whole idea of resigning from the Polizei Hamburg had been to get away from death. His entire career as a policeman had been founded on its violent intrusion into his life. The young Fabel had never considered being a police officer; with the absolute certainty of youth, Fabel had had his entire career as a historian planned out for himself. But then death, in its most sudden and violent form, had shouldered its way, unbidden, into Jan Fabel’s path.
    It had happened while Fabel was still a student at the Universität Hamburg. Fabel had only been dating Hanna Dorn, the daughter of his history professor, for a few weeks when she had been randomly selected by a psychopath as his next victim. He knew that Hanna Dorn, in her own right, wouldnot have made that much of an impression on his life. Without the trauma of her murder, she would have faded from his consciousness long ago. They would, no doubt, have had a relationship that would have lasted a while: they would have gone to parties, eaten out when they could have afforded it, met with friends. But every time Fabel thought back to her, he knew that they would not have stayed together and that Hanna Dorn would have diminished into the far distance of his memory. A name that would have to be prompted into his recall. It had not been Hanna’s presence in his life that had marked Fabel for ever. It had been her sudden absence.
    Fabel had moved on from trying to make sense of Hanna’s death to trying to make sense of the death of strangers. Fabel had come to know so many names, so many faces of the dead. As head of the Polizei Hamburg’s Murder Commission, Jan Fabel had spent his career getting to know people who were no longer capable of knowing him. He had become a master at reconstructing a life and a personality that was lost to everyone else; to walking in the footsteps of the murdered and understanding the minds of those who had killed them.
    What had kept Fabel sane had been the fact that, throughout his career, he had always sought to keep death at arm’s length. He had never been entirely detached: it had always been his empathy for the victims that had given him that critical edge. But since Hanna’s murder, he had tried never to let death come too close to him. The last three cases had changed all that: one officer dead, one seriously wounded and mentally scarred. And twice more he had seen his officers placed in serious peril.
    It was time to go. A chance encounter with an old schoolfriend had resulted in an offer of a job. More than a job. An escape into a normal life, whatever that was. To become someone else. It had been a monumental decision for Fabel. And now everyone was trying to talk him out of it. Everyone except Susanne. Susanne saw it as more than a change in Fabel’s career; she saw the opportunity to change the basis of their relationship.
    Fabel’s superiors had, with great reluctance, agreed that he would leave the Polizei Hamburg’s Murder Commission at the end of the so-called ‘Hamburg Hairdresser’ case. It had been this case, piled onto the three other serial-killer investigations he had undertaken, that had led Fabel to the final decision to quit. There was, he had decided, just so much horror and fear that one could experience, only so much bearing witness as foul, corrupted