Whisper For The Reaper

by Jack Gatland

  She would have been here the same time that his father died.

  ‘Why did she visit you?’ Declan asked. ‘What did she want?’

  But it was too late. The sedatives had performed their task, and Karl Schnitter was now snoring gently in the hospital bed. Declan leaned back, annoyed. If Karl had been telling the truth, then Rolfe and Ilse Müller could have been the ones that stole his father’s computer. But more importantly, why had Ilse Müller visited Karl months before this arrival?

  Declan rose from the chair and left the ward. Karl wasn’t going anywhere, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to be awake for a while. There were other places to go, and other people to interview.

  But first he had to go visit some grieving parents.

  16

  New Leads

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ Declan said as he sat on the Wing family sofa. ‘But I needed to ask questions.’

  Nathanial Wing’s parents looked uncomfortable as they sat opposite him. They’d been like that for five minutes now, since Declan turned up on their door, waving his warrant card and demanding to speak to them, informing them he didn’t really care about public personas, and that hiding wouldn’t solve anything.

  ‘What sort of questions?’ Wing senior, a Chinese man in his late thirties, his hair already thinning and shaved down to a two-length asked as he wrung his hands. Declan knew that they would have been worried about their son’s shame getting out; that he’d killed himself over debt.

  ‘Look,’ he said, leaning forward. ‘I’m not supposed to talk about active crime investigations, but you deserve the right to know. Your son didn’t kill himself. That is, he committed suicide, but someone forced him to.’

  ‘What?’ Nathanial’s mother, a slim, petite woman in a flowery dress looked horrified. ‘Who did this to him?’

  ’That’s what we’re looking into,’ Declan continued. ‘We believe it’s a killer who has struck before and has a long history of attacks across Europe.’

  ‘But why our son?’

  Declan shrugged. ‘It could have simply been that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ he said. ‘But, our investigations have brought up two lines of enquiry. The first is that your son was in extreme debt.’

  The Wing parents looked at each other at this, and Wing senior started wringing his hands again. Declan continued on.

  ‘The second line is that before he died, he was talking with a German, someone who was pressuring him.’

  ‘The police officer,’ Wing senior replied. ‘He was here several times, talking with our son.’

  ‘Müller?’ Declan asked, surprised. ‘He was here?’

  Mrs Wing nodded. ‘He would visit Nathanial in his room,’ she explained. ‘Nathanial was trying to open a hard drive for him.’

  ‘Do you know what the hard drive had on it?’

  Wing senior shook his head. ‘Nathanial would never talk to us about it. He just sat in his room, working on it.’

  ‘I’ll need to see this,’ Declan insisted, and Mrs Wing rose, indicating for him to follow, leading him up the stairs and to Nathanial Wing’s room.

  It wasn’t a traditional teenager’s room; Declan remembered his own bedroom from his youth, and his walls were covered with pop star and footballer posters, and shelves of videos and books over a homework desk. Declan knew video cassettes were mainly a thing of the past, but the scarcity of the bedroom surprised him.

  The walls were white, the bedclothes pale grey. The desk was pine, with a PC gaming tower under the right-hand side. There was a large monitor on the desk, but not much else. There were no posters on the wall; instead there was a single framed print, a painting of a man, staring out over a foggy landscape. Declan recognised this. It was Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by the German artist Caspar David Friedrich. He’d owned a print of this himself when he was younger.

  On the desk was a keyboard, a hard drive connected to a wire, with a small soldering kit beside it. Declan assumed that this was the hard drive that Nathanial had been told to hack.

  ‘Do you know how far he went with this?’ he asked. Mrs Wing looked back down the stairs, as if scared her husband would hear.

  ‘He opened it,’ she replied softly, so as not to carry her voice downstairs. ‘He told me a couple of days before he…’ she broke off in a sob.

  ‘Then why did he tell Müller that he hadn’t?’ Declan asked, confused now.

  ‘Because the other German told him to keep quiet,’ Mrs Wing added. ‘Even paid him to keep silent.’

  ‘Other German? You mean Karl Schnitter?’

  Mrs Wing shook her head. ‘No, the woman.’

  Declan stared down at the hard drive. ‘Did she take a copy of what was on the drive?’ he asked. Mrs Wing nodded. ‘In that case I’ll need to take that with me.’

  Carefully, he pulled the hard drive from the connecting cable, holding it gingerly in his hand. He didn’t know if shaking it or even moving it would cause damage, so until he passed it to Billy, he would hold it with kid gloves.

  ‘Did the woman visit often?’ he asked as they walked down the stairs. Mrs Wing shook her head.

  ‘Just the once,’ she replied. ‘The day before he disappeared.’

  So, the same day that Rolfe shouted at him.

  ‘Thank you for all your help,’ he said to the grieving parents as he stood in the doorway. ‘We will find who did this, and we will bring them to justice.’

  ‘It won’t bring back Nathanial,’ Wing senior muttered, and Declan nodded. He understood the anger. The Red Reaper had taken their son, just like they’d taken his parents.

  But now he had even less of a clue who the Red Reaper was.

  Billy had taken the hard drive from Declan and placed it onto the table, pulling some cables from a bag beside his chair and connecting it to the laptop. As he did this, lines of numbers ran up the screen in the terminal app as he typed furiously. Declan felt he was in The Matrix.

  ‘The drive is wiped,’ Billy said as he worked through the boot drive. ‘It’s an iMac OSX, but I can’t find any personal information on it. It might have been your father’s, it might not. We can compare it to the iMac, see if that gives us any more information, and I can check with Apple whether the serials are marked down anywhere, but that could take days.’

  ‘Why wipe the drive?’ Declan sat in the chair beside Billy, frowning. ‘Did Ilse order it done after gaining a copy, or was it wiped beforehand?’

  ‘Your father could have factory reset it,’ Billy suggested. ‘I mean, he has a secret room and USBs hidden in books, so he was quite security conscious.’

  The door opened and Monroe walked in.

  ‘I just had an enlightening meeting with our German friend,’ he announced as he placed a notebook on the table. ‘Seems that brother and sister aren’t quite brother and sister.’

  “We need to call everyone in,’ Declan suggested. ‘I think our list of suspects has increased.’

  Billy checked his screen. ‘Doctor Marcos and PC Davey are on their way back right now, so they’ll be here in a few minutes,’ he said. ‘Anjli, De’Geer and Jess are in the bar.’

  ‘Drinking?’

  ‘Going over every minute of CCTV that The Olde Bell has,’ Billy smiled. ‘They’re hoping that something new might turn up.’

  ‘Call them in,’ Monroe added. ‘It’s time for a catch up.’

  It was a few minutes before everyone returned to the Library. Anjli and De’Geer had come up with nothing when visiting the Brunel family; all they had was confusion why Dotty Brunel would kill herself. They couldn’t even fathom how this was a murder case, and so Anjli and De’Geer had quietly diverted the questioning, making it sound more like a simple follow up.

  Doctor Marcos also had a similar lack of news; there were no fingerprints on the ratchet, the strap, the buttons to raise the ramp or on the large spanner that had been cast to the floor, and most likely struck the unsuspecting Karl Schnitter. It was as if nobody else outside of Karl had been
in there which was exactly as previous victims had been found.

  Monroe had explained about his conversation with Rolfe Müller, while Declan had explained about his finding of the empty iMac in Karl’s garage, the conversation with the drugged Karl, and the appearance of the hard drive at Nathanial Wing’s house. This done, Declan walked over to the portable whiteboard that was usually provided for workshops, and had now been converted into a makeshift crime board.

  ‘I think we need to add a new suspect to the list,’ Declan explained. ‘We have two timelines we need to think about, and we’ve been using data from the first for the second.’ He drew a vertical line down the middle of the board. ‘On the left, we have Red Reaper cases until 2012, and my mum’s death five years ago.’ He started writing on the left-hand side.

  ‘We know that the killer, or at least the believed killer was male, German, brown haired. He flipped a coin before the murders happened, and that he forced the victims to kill themselves, before placing a calling card on their person, and usually removing the item that caused the death.’

  ‘We also know that Wilhelm Müller did a similar thing with a coin in East Berlin,’ Anjli nodded. Declan now moved to the right-hand side.

  ‘Now here, we have murders after my mum’s death.’

  ‘Why start there?’ Jess asked. Declan showed the line.

  ‘Because this is possibly where your granddad killed Wilhelm Müller,’ he said. ‘And if Müller was the Red Reaper, then this is where the murders by him would have stopped.’

  ‘You’ve got a subdivision there, then,’ Monroe added. ‘Because we can’t for certain say that Wilhelm Müller is dead.’

  ‘True,’ Declan wrote WILHELM on the board. ‘There’s every chance that my dad didn’t execute him, and that he was set free, given another chance. I don’t think this is that likely, though. I would have thought that he would have contacted his kids within the years between.’

  ‘Maybe he has,’ De’Geer offered. ‘Maybe they’re keeping that quiet.’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Monroe said. ‘Rolfe Müller seemed quite adamant that daddy hadn’t been around for a while.’

  ‘Wilhelm aside, we have two other suspects, both under the copycat heading,’ Declan continued, writing both ROLFE and KARL on the board. ‘Rolfe could be continuing the mission, as he was in contact with Nathanial Wing and had every opportunity to kill him. He also, as Wilhelm’s son may have known about his father’s hobby, and even knew where the calling cards were kept.’

  ‘The reaper in Karl’s pocket was the same cardstock as Wing’s,’ Doctor Marcos added. ‘Which means it’s the same as the earlier murders.’

  ‘The problem with Rolfe, though, is that he wasn’t around a couple of months back when my father died,’ Declan added. ‘Which means we have a discrepancy there.’

  ‘I’m checking his passport right now to see if he hadn’t popped across with his sister,’ Billy was typing as he spoke.

  ‘Sister?’ Anjli asked, Declan nodded.

  ‘We’ll get to that in a minute,’ he replied, tapping at the KARL written on the board. ‘The other suspect is Karl Schnitter. Wintergreen fancied him for the original Red Reaper but wouldn’t say why, and he has his own supply of secrets. He could easily have been the killer, and could have been the person who met with my dad and arranged for his crash.’

  ‘Apart from the fact that someone tried to kill him today,’ Billy said.

  ‘True, but there’s still something going on here,’ Declan said. ‘For a start, he had what looks like my dad’s stolen iMac in his garage. And second, he met with Ilse Müller a couple of months back.’

  ‘Ilse was in the village before?’ Jess rested an arm on the table as she turned to look at her dad. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, that’s where the soap opera aspect of this tale starts,’ Monroe smiled. ‘Seems that Rolfe and Ilse are only half siblings. One of them results from an affair between Mrs Müller and A N Other, a few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.’

  ‘When Karl Meier worked under Hauptmann Müller,’ Anjli noted. ‘Christ, is he the daddy?’

  ‘Possibly,’ Monroe replied. ‘Now, Rolfe reckons they decided to not test themselves, as that way they’d never have to face who wasn’t the legitimate Müller, but to be honest they don’t seem to be best friends, and there’s every reason to suspect that Ilse might not have kept to the same memo there.’

  ‘Ilse visited Karl Schnitter a couple of months ago,’ Declan said to Anjli now. ‘He told me while in hospital. He didn’t say why, but it gives us two possible leads. First, that Karl might be Ilse’s dad, and we need to know how that works into things. But it means that she was around Hurley the night my father died.’

  ‘Ilse worked for a pharmaceutical company before she joined Rolfe,’ Doctor Marcos was writing on a sheet of paper as she spoke, working through a list of compounds. ‘She would have been working for them two months ago. We don’t know why she was fired, but it could be because of stolen supplies.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Potassium chloride is a possible,’ PC Davey suggested. ‘It causes heart attacks.’

  ‘That’s on my list too, but you’d need about half a kilo,’ Doctor Marcos agreed. ‘There are ways to concentrate it though, and if she met with Patrick at the Dew Drop Inn, she could have spiked his drink. Add the rain, the roads…’

  ‘But surely the Red Reaper is a man?’ Jess asked now. ‘The witnesses—‘

  ‘Are all before Wilhelm’s possible death,’ Declan replied. ‘You said they heard a German speaking to Nathanial Wing, and we assumed it was the same person, but that could have been a call related to Rolfe’s hiring of him to hack the hard drive. There're no witnesses for any of the murders after your grandmother.’

  ‘Also,’ Anjli mused, ‘there’s no reason the killer couldn’t be a woman. Ilse’s not exactly a wilting flower, and the deaths have been psychological. No struggle, no fight, and Wing killed himself.’

  ‘And they struck Schnitter from behind,’ Monroe sat back in his chair. ‘Unconscious, it’s very easy for a victim to be dragged to a ramp, have the ratchet wrapped around his neck and then a button pressed. Could easily have been a woman.’

  Declan took the pen and wrote ILSE under the other two names.

  ‘We need to find out what Ilse’s game is here,’ he ordered. ‘She told Wing to delay telling her brother about this hard drive. Why? She visited Karl a couple of months ago, without Rolfe knowing. Why?’

  ‘Reconnect with her real dad?’ Billy offered.

  ‘Then why try to kill him?’ Anjli countered. Billy smiled.

  ‘Looking at my family, I can totally feel her vibe there,’ he said.

  ‘Tonight we’ll consider this.’ Declan finished. ‘Go home, or to your rooms, whatever. Take a break, we’ve done some outstanding work here today. Tomorrow DCI Monroe goes to Berlin—’ he looked to Monroe as he continued ‘—and I think we need to know why Ilse was fired, whether Rolfe is AWOL from the force, and whether we can find out anything about an extra murder before the wall fell.’

  ‘Another murder?’ PC Davey asked.

  ‘We’re still missing a murder, I’m sure about it,’ Declan explained. ‘Nathanial Wing wasn’t placed on the sixteenth green for convenience, as he could have walked to any of them without a problem. Sixteen is a message, and we just have to decipher it.’

  ‘I’ll work with Joanna to see if we can deduce which of the kiddies is the bastard,’ Doctor Marcos said. ‘We can’t use DNA of Wilhelm, but we now have a lot of Karl’s. If both don’t match, we’ll know that’s a dead end.’

  ‘Good plan,’ Declan nodded. ‘Let’s get as much as we can before we start the next wave of enquiries. Until then, stand down.’

  ‘You heard the man,’ Monroe rose from his chair. ‘Let’s go grab a drink. I have a flight tomorrow and there’s no way I’m flying completely sober.’

  17

  Dark Before Dawn

  It was late by
the time Declan and Jess returned to the house. They’d stayed at the pub for dinner, but it had been a long day and so they’d left the others and walked back through Hurley. It was a quiet, cool night, but the sky was clear and the wind was light as they walked down the half-lit streets.

  ‘Dad,’ Jess asked after a few minutes of silence. ‘How do you do it?’

  ‘Do what?’ Declan asked, looking at her.

  ‘Compartmentalise this,’ Jess answered. ‘I mean, I’ve seen crime photos. I’ve watched films with gory scenes—‘

  ‘And how have you done that, considering you’re not eighteen?’

  ‘Look, I’m being serious. I’ve seen terrible things out there, but this afternoon I had a tightness in my chest, like I was having a panic attack.’ Jess looked at Declan, and he could see the trouble etched deep into her face. ‘I had to get some air outside. When I calmed down, I realised it was connected to the case. To Nate.’

  ‘That’s why you’re feeling this,’ Declan said as he opened the door to the house, allowing Jess to enter first. ‘He’s not Nathanial Wing to you anymore. He’s ‘Nate’. The friends that you spoke to humanised him, gave him a personality, a past. He’s not just a statistic now.’

  He walked into the kitchen, flicking the kettle on as Jess followed.

  ‘Yeah, but you do the same,’ she said. ‘You speak to the parents, you gain an idea about how the victim lived, you enter their head when working out what happened. I mean God, dad, look at Kendis Taylor. She was your first love!’

  Declan paused as he placed tea bags into mugs. One normal bag for him, one herbal for Jess.

  ‘Yeah, Kendis and I were close,’ he replied, not looking at Jess as he spoke, forcing his emotions back down. ‘And that was hard. I was ill, violently ill when I saw her body. I had an anger; when I knew that Malcolm Gladwell was her killer, it took every piece of self restraint that I could muster to stop myself killing him.’