Fabel is on the point of leaving the police for good, but Carnival in Cologne is a time when the world goes crazy, and he is drawn into the hunt for the Carnival Cannibal. What he doesn’t know is that he is on a collision course with a crack special forces unit from Ukraine and a disturbed colleague with a score to settle.

Fabel finds himself on a trail of betrayal and vengeance, violence and death. And once more he faces his greatest enemy. The true Master of the Carnival.

About the Author

Craig Russell was born in 1956 in Fife, Scotland. He served as a police officer and worked in the advertising industry as a copywriter and creative director. In 2007, his second novel,
Brother Grimm
, was shortlisted for the CWA Duncan Lawrie Dagger, and in the same year he was presented with a
Polizeistern
(Police Star) award by the Polizei Hamburg for raising public awareness of the work of the Hamburg police.

For more information about Craig Russell and his books, please visit
www.craigrussell.com

Also by Craig Russell
The Jan Fabel Novels:
Blood Eagle
Brother Grimm
Eternal
A Fear of Dark Water
The Valkyrie Song
The Lennox Novels:
The Long Glasgow Kiss
The Deep Dark Sleep
For Holger and Lotte
Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following people for their help and support: Wendy, Jonathan and Sophie; my agent Carole Blake; from Hutchinson, my editor Paul Sidey, Tess Callaway and my copy-editor Nick Austin; Bernd Rullkötter; Erste Polizeihauptkommissarin Ulrike Sweden of the Polizei Hamburg; Dr. Jan Sperhake, chief pathologist of the Institut für Rechtsmedizin; Udo Röbel; and Anja Sieg.

I would also like to thank all of my publishers around the world for their enthusiasm and support.

Karneval in Cologne is a custom dating back to when the Romans founded the city. Its roots probably lie in the dark pagan past of the Celts who occupied the area before the arrival of Germanic and Roman invaders
.

Karneval is a time when order is replaced with chaos, when the abstinence of Lent is preceded by abandon and indulgence. A time when the world is turned on its head. When people can become, for a few hours, someone else
.

The Master of the Carnival is ‘Prinz Karneval’. He is also known as ‘seine Tollität’ – His Craziness. Prinz Karneval is protected by the Prinzengarde. His personal bodyguard
.

The German word ‘Karneval’ comes from the Latin ‘Carne Vale’:

‘Farewell to Flesh’
.

Prologue

Weiberfastnacht – Women’s Karneval Night. Cologne. January, 1999.

Madness. Everywhere she looked was insanity. She ran through crowds of the demented. She stared around wildly, seeking an asylum: somewhere she could find refuge amongst the sane. The music thudded and screamed mercilessly, filling the night with terrifying cheerfulness. The crowd was denser now. More people, more madness. She pushed through them. Always away from the two massive spires that thrust up from the mayhem of the streets, black and menacing into the night. Always away from the clown.

She stumbled as she ran down the steps. Past the main railway station. Through a square. On and on. Still surrounded by the shouting, grinning, laughing faces of the insane.

She collided with a knot of figures gathered in front of a stand selling
Currywurst
and beer. The former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl stood in a nappy stuffed with Deutschmarks, laughing and joking with three Elvis Presleys. A medieval knight struggled to eat his hot dog through a visor that would not stay up. There was a dinosaur. A cowboy. Louis the Fourteenth. But no clown.

She spun around. Scanned the throng of bodies that now closed in her wake. No clown. One of the
beer-stand Elvises staggered towards her. Blocked her path and circled her waist with his arm; said something lewd and latex-muffled. She pushed Elvis away and he collided with the dinosaur.

‘You’re mad!’ she screamed at them. ‘You’re all mad!’ They laughed. She ran on through a part of the city she didn’t know. Fewer people now. The streets narrowed and closed in on her. Then she was alone in a narrow cobbled street, dark and tightly lined with four-storey-high buildings with black windows. She pressed into a shadow and tried to get her breathing under control. The sound from the distant city centre was still loud: madly cheerful music mingled with the raucous cries of the deranged. She tried to listen through it for the sound of footsteps. Nothing. She stayed pressed into the shadow, the reassuring solidity of the apartment building at her back.

Still no clown. No nightmare clown from her childhood dreams. She had lost him.

She had no idea where she was: one direction looked the same as the other. But she would keep heading away from the maniac sounds of the city, from the looming black spires. Her heart continued to pound but her breathing was now under control. She hugged the wall as she moved along the street. The raucous music and laughter faded further but suddenly there was a new blast as a door opened and yellow light sliced across the street. She shrank back again into shadow. Three cavemen and a female flamenco dancer burst out of the apartment house, two of the Neanderthals carrying a crate of beer between them. They staggered off in the direction of the other lunatics. She started to cry. To sob. There was no escape from it.

She saw a church at the end of the street. A huge church, standing crammed into a cobbled square. It was a Romanesque building that at one time would have sat grandly with fields and gardens around it. But the city had closed in on it over the centuries: now it was squeezed on every side by apartment buildings, like a bishop jostled by beggars. A parochial house nudged into its flank. A bar-restaurant at the other end of its meagre square. She would avoid the bar. She would seek refuge in the parochial house. She walked towards it, suddenly startled by the image of a small, frail, frightened, broken-winged fairy in the black shield of a butcher’s shop display window. Her reflection. Her reflection hanging between pasted cardboard stars with special offers on beef and pork.

She reached the corner of the church. It loomed dark and austere into the cold night sky. She turned the heavy iron handle and leaned against the door but it would not give. She made her way towards the parochial house.

He stepped out in front of her from where he had been waiting, hidden, around the corner of the church. His face was blue-white in the dim street light, his over-wide painted smile dark crimson. Two flaps of green hair stood at a ridiculous angle from his otherwise bald head. She tried to scream but nothing came. She stared at his eyes: cold and dead and hard under the comical arches of his black-painted eyebrows. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t cry out. She couldn’t find the strength to break free and run. His hand, gloved in bright blue felt, snapped up and grabbed her throat. He pushed her against the wall and into the shadows. Lifted her onto tiptoe. In a single movement of his free hand he produced
a necktie from the huge patch pocket of his oversized coat and looped it around her neck.

Now she struggled. The necktie burned her skin, crushed the arteries in her neck, closed her windpipe. No breath came to her screaming lungs. Her head swam. Her world darkened. And as he tightened the ligature around her neck, all she could do was stare into his face.

His grotesque clown face.

Part One
CLOWN DIARY FIRST ENTRY. DATED: 11.11
A.M
. 11
^thNOVEMBER.