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

correct, then that’s fourteen. So this should be the fifteenth.’

‘Maybe the sixteenth was an easier hole to get to?’ For the first time, Marlowe spoke. Declan shook his head.

‘It’s not,’ he replied. ‘It’s right next to the road, which means although it can be reached easily, it’s also more visible. Fifteenth is far easier, if you want privacy. They’ve gone out of their way to do this. Which means…’

‘Which means that there’s a body out there that nobody’s considered,’ Wintergreen leaned back in her chair. ‘Your father was right about you.’

Declan went to reply to this, but stopped. A moment from a couple of weeks earlier came to mind now. When he’d sat in the local pub with Karl, they’d toasted to his parents.

‘He never got over her loss. He was never the same after her murder.’

‘What?’

‘Her death. He was never the same after her death.’

‘You said murder.’

‘Apologies, sometimes words for me merge when speaking in another tongue. Death and murder, they are very similar in German.’

No. This couldn’t be. Karl couldn’t have done this.

Karl was a mechanic. He serviced Patrick Walsh’s car. What if that was why the car had run off the road? He could have placed the card in the glove compartment way before the drive.

‘I know you’re working this through,’ Wintergreen continued. ‘I can see that in your eyes. You’re wondering whether Karl Schnitter could have done such a thing. Could do it again, even. Do you know DCI Mark Freeman?’

‘I knew him briefly when he was a DI under dad,’ Declan replied. ‘Why?’

‘He’s running the case in Maidenhead,’ Wintergreen gathered her folders together now, rising from the chair as she did so. ‘You should reach out to him. Offer your services.’

She stopped, as if deciding whether to add anything to this. Eventually she looked back.

‘There was no Karl Schnitter before the fall of the Berlin Wall, by the way,’ she ended. ‘We looked. There was a Karl Meier, who worked as a guard on the wall near Bernauer Street, who disappears from history the day that Karl Schnitter arrives in 1990. Two weeks after that? The first Red Reaper body is found in Potzdamer Platz.’

‘Possibly coincidence,’ Declan replied. ‘And we can’t prove that they’re connected.’

‘Bar one thing,’ Wintergreen walked to the door. ‘Schnitter is a German word. It translates in English as Reaper. Mister Marlowe will drive you home. And we’ll be in touch once we decrypt your father’s USB drive.’

Declan sat silently in the boardroom, trying to take in everything that had been thrown at him. His parents were both killed? Karl Schnitter, the mechanic who’d not only been a friend of theirs for years, was an East German guard who not only changed his identity but also picked a name to match the image on these cards? And there was something about the image too, a memory from years earlier, but Declan just couldn’t picture it yet…

‘She’s a piece of work, isn’t she?’ Marlowe smiled. ‘Come on, let’s get you home.’

Rising from the chair, Declan followed Tom Marlowe out of the boardroom and back to the car park. It’d be late by the time he arrived back home, but he didn’t see himself sleeping anytime soon.

3

Disciplinary Dates

DS Anjli Kapoor was already waiting in Temple Inn when DC Billy Fitzwarren phoned.

‘Where are you?’ he asked.

‘Where do you think?’ she replied irritably.

‘I’m entering from Fleet Street,’ Billy said, the sounds of traffic heard behind him as he walked through the north entrance into Temple Inn. ‘Give me a moment.’

Anjli disconnected the call and looked up at the red brick building that she faced. Four storeys high, it was once the offices of the Temple Inn Crime Unit, otherwise known as the Last Chance Saloon. Now, however, it was a building site; Bright yellow tubes ran down the frontage, held in place by scaffolding that ran across it and ending in large orange rubble tips, where contractors on the upper floor could throw pieces of broken and ripped apart plasterboard and brickwork, saving them from having to carry the pieces downstairs.

Anjli didn’t really know what was going on here; they’d told her it was a renovation of the offices, but the Temple Inn offices had only operated on the lower two levels of the building. This was a full scale build of the entire thing.

This was a plausible way to remove the Last Chance Saloon quietly.

She’d expected this, if she was brutally honest. After the problems with Declan going on the run and Monroe hiding for his life, there had been rumours of the unit being too autonomous. Most units like this had uniformed officers, cells and even a Detective Superintendent in charge of everything. And although Chief Superintendent David Bradbury had helped the Last Chance Saloon in their last case, he controlled the City of London’s police force and was technically Anjli’s boss’s boss’s boss.

Maybe they’ll promote Monroe, she thought to herself. That would be a good thing in her books; promote everyone up. Declan could become DCI, she’d become DI… But she knew that this wouldn’t happen. They’d painted too many targets on their backs, actively shaken too many wasps’ nests to expect a simpler life. After the fallout, when the unit was temporarily disbanded considering an enquiry, they relieved both Declan and Monroe of duty on injury-related accommodations. That one had been recently branded a terrorist and had gone rogue, while the other had gained help from organised crime were ignored publicly, but Anjli knew these were tallies that were about to be counted. There was still every chance that Monroe could be invalided out of the force altogether, while Declan would be quietly dumped somewhere rural to finish out his years. Meanwhile, Doctor Marcos had gone on sabbatical, DC Davey was working in Tottenham for DCI Farrow, Billy was dumped into the central Cybercrime Unit and Anjli was back in Mile End, working in the same unit that had fired her almost a year earlier. Granted, there wasn’t a