Whisper For The Reaper, Jack Gatland [good books for high schoolers txt] 📗

loosened, the carving knife tumbling to the floor. ‘Why are you doing this? Your brother just died…’

‘I know,’ Ilse nodded. ‘I helped kill him. Now please, sit on the sofa before I do the same to you, Miss Walsh.’

Jess went to reply, but found that her vocal cords weren’t working. The room was spinning slightly, fading away into blackness, as she stumbled around the room, knocking items to the floor with her flailing arms, unable to control them as she sunk deeper into darkness…

Ilse stared at the unconscious girl on the floor of the living room and smiled.

There was one last Red Reaper card in the deck.

And tonight, one last person would face the coin as it flipped.

24

I Can See Clearer Now

Declan stared at the phone in his hand as the call ended. He couldn’t connect the dots that he’d just heard; he couldn’t fathom the news that he’d just been told, the revelation that the entire room had just heard through the speaker. Slowly, he disconnected the call and stared out across the table at Anjli and Billy.

‘Did you hear that?’ he asked, his voice cold and emotionless. Anjli nodded. They’d all listened to the call from Monroe. And the information he’d gathered from Johann Hoffman actually helped them understand what had happened that day.

Karl Schnitter wasn’t Karl Meier, for he was dead.

Karl Schnitter was Wilhelm Müller.

‘Well, at least that clears up the issue we had with Rolfe and Ilse,’ Billy muttered. ‘Ilse was Müller’s kid. Rolfe was the bastard child.’

‘Which means that technically she didn’t lie, because if he is Müller, then she was correct when she told us that Karl was her dad.’

‘Bullshit. We’ve been bloody well lied to every step of the way,’ Declan stated. ‘They used us, Anjli. They played us. We were even set up for their bloody alibi, knowing that we were watching them. Her entire conversation with you, last night? Purely aimed at placing us in the line of fire. She knew you were a detective,’ Declan now said to Billy. ‘Karl knew you were part of the Last Chance Saloon team, so I think we can assume that Ilse did.’

‘Does this mean that I never have to be undercover again?’ Billy asked hopefully. ‘I can live with that. What I can’t live with is the two of them using us to kill a police officer.’

Declan nodded. Rolfe might have been a right royal pain in the behind, but he was a police detective, and in the end was killed by the murderer he was hunting. And that was a debt that needed to be paid.

‘So what now?’ Anjli asked. ‘We bring them in? How do we convince Freeman to reopen this? All we have is a border guard who changed his name. If there’s no evidence at the crime scene, then Karl, or Wilhelm, or whatever his bloody name is will just walk away again.’

‘Nobody’s walking away from this,’ Declan hissed. Anjli walked over to him, turning him to face her.

‘I know he killed your parents, and that alone deserves vengeance, but you need to back down here. We need to find a way to arrest him. It’s the right thing.’

‘Why?’ Declan snapped back. ‘Just under two weeks ago you were saying the same about Malcolm Gladwell for killing Kendis. And what happened there? Nothing. His solicitors are trying to arrange a deal for him. He’ll be in the cushiest cell possible, he’ll write his memoirs, and then he’ll sell them for a seven-figure deal, and do a bloody TV redemption tour when he’s released. Karl’s killed sixteen people—‘

‘Seventeen,’ Billy interrupted. ‘He most likely killed Meier too.’ His face brightened.

‘Hey!’ he exclaimed. ‘That’s why Nathanial Wing was on the sixteenth green! Meier’s death makes it correct!’

‘Read the room, Billy,’ Anjli snapped.

There was a moment of awkward silence in the room, interrupted when the door opened and De’Geer entered.

‘Something I missed?’ he asked as he looked at the faces that turned to him. As succinctly as he could, Declan explained how Karl Schnitter had used an ancient tunnel under the pub to kill Rolfe Müller, how he wasn’t Karl Meier but was instead Wilhelm Müller, and how this meant that not only did Patrick Walsh not kill him five years earlier, but that the whole story that Karl had told them, a story that they’d been led to believe as gospel, was likely to be nothing but lies and stories invented to keep Declan away from the truth. And that the moment he was arrested, there was a whole legal can of worms that opened on whether Karl, once outed as Wilhelm Müller could be charged with any crimes, or whether he’d simply be extracted from a police cell by whichever CIA department owed him the most and given a new identity, or extradited back into Europe by whichever German politicians he had blackmail information on.

‘So Ilse and Karl are working together on this,’ De’Geer muttered. ‘That concurs with the manager at the Dew Drop Inn, as he said that both met with Detective Chief Superintendent Walsh before he crashed.’

‘How long for, though?’ Declan asked, pacing around the table. ‘And what do we do about it?’

‘Go to DCI Freeman,’ De’Geer suggested. Anjli nodded.

‘Great idea,’ she said. ‘Small addition to that though, what exactly do we tell him? Everything Declan has just said is hearsay, told to a DCI on administrational leave by an old man in Berlin who’s angry at the world. Sure, we can state that Wilhelm Müller and Karl Schnitter are the same person, but we can’t conclusively confirm this. Müller disappeared thirty-plus years ago. They didn’t have DNA back then, and if the Stasi or the CIA gave him a new identity, they’d have fixed the fingerprints as well. And if he’s been giving information against the GDP, you can be damn sure that the Americans won’t be helping us here.’

‘There’s no way to prove any of this,’ Billy muttered. ‘Karl Schnitter can simply