Whisper For The Reaper Jack Gatland (interesting books to read txt) 📖

Anjli went to ask what he meant by this, whether this was more of the argument they were having, but then saw Ilse Müller walking over to their table, a half pint of lager in her hand.

‘Would you mind if I joined you?’ she asked. ‘My brother’s working and it’s boring alone in my room.’ She looked at Billy as she said this. Anjli hid a smile.

So barking up the wrong tree, love.

‘Sure,’ Billy was all smiles now. ‘This is Detective Sergeant Kapoor. She’s one of the officers doing the case in the Library.’

‘Anjli, please,’ she held out a hand. Ilse shook it.

‘I’d give my own name, but I assume you already know it,’ she smiled.

‘As you probably knew mine.’

‘Actually, I didn’t,’ Ilse’s smile never slipped. ‘My brother’s the one for all of that.’

‘You work for him, right?’ Anjli asked. ‘I have a sister, a couple of years older than me. The thought of working for her breaks me out in hives. A rash.’

Ilse nodded. ‘It’s not the easiest of jobs,’ she replied. ‘But I was a PA before this, and I’ve dealt with worse.’

‘Police PA?’

‘Pharmaceutical firm,’ Ilse sipped from her lager. ‘I prefer this though. Less travelling.’

‘Ilse and her brother are hunting a war criminal,’ Billy said excitedly, as if never having mentioned this before. Anjli raised her eyebrows.

‘Really?’ she asked, but Ilse’s smile dropped.

‘Please, let’s not play these games,’ she asked. ‘You know why we’re in Hurley, and I know why you’re in Hurley. We should be helping each other, not hindering.’

‘Okay, in that case, maybe you could answer a question for me?’ Anjli asked.

Ilse nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘Why did you tell Nathanial Wing not to pass on his hard drive findings to your brother a day before he died?’

Ilse shifted uncomfortably in her chair. ‘I didn’t know the boy would kill himself.’

‘Technically he didn’t, but go on.’

Ilse looked around the bar, as if checking for her brother. ‘Rolfe, he has a… what do you call it? A bee in his hat.’

‘Bee in his bonnet?’

‘Yes. He’s obsessed with his father.’

‘Hauptmann Müller.’ Anjli asked.

‘Yes.’

‘The Reaper of the Berlin Wall.’

Ilse shook her head. ‘I know the rumours, the stories,’ she said. ‘Wilhelm Müller wasn’t the Reaper. These were lies, spread after the fall of the wall.’

‘Why should someone do that?’

‘Why would someone do anything?’ Ilse shrugged. ‘It was a terrible time. We were nothing more than babies, children even. We didn’t see the people spitting at him, laughing at him, hating him for doing his job. Do you know what the Staatssicherheitsdienst, the Stasi, our secret police would have done to him if he hadn’t followed his orders, no matter how abhorrent?’ She shook her head. ‘Wilhelm was a broken man. He was torn between honour and duty. When they burned the files he stole them, used them to ensure that terrible people were captured and punished. But he made enemies and had to leave. That’s when Rolfe began this hero worship. He believed that Wilhelm Müller was out there hunting a killer, a noble quest in a way. But I worried what’d be found, if the hard drive he wanted opened revealed the truth.’

‘Was it Patrick Walsh’s hard drive?’ Billy asked. Anjli knew Billy had already confirmed this, so looked to Ilse. To her surprise, the German woman nodded.

‘Rolfe was consumed with hatred for one man. And that man was friends with Walsh.’

‘Rolfe hates Karl Schnitter, doesn’t he?’ Anjli asked softly. ‘He told my Detective Chief Inspector today that he believes that Karl’s the man that had an affair with your mother.’ She took a calculated gamble. ‘The man that’s your actual father.’

‘How do you know that?’ Ilse asked, genuinely surprised by this. Anjli shrugged.

‘You mention your mother, but when you mention Müller, you say his name rather than call him father,’ she explained. ‘And, we know that a couple of months back, you visited Karl here in Hurley, without your brother. But I was under the assumption that you’d both kept it a mystery?’

Ilse nodded. ‘I learned by accident,’ she said. ‘I found I had breast cancer, or I should say a tumour. It was removed, and I’m healthy, but I was told that it was the BRCA2 gene, and that it was hereditary, from either my father or mother.’

‘But neither had it,’ Anjli mused.

‘No,’ Ilse replied. ‘And in doing the testing, I learned that although a DNA match of my mother, I wasn’t a match of my father.’

‘So why come here?’ Billy asked. ‘I mean, when you came the first time.’

‘I needed permission to gain Karl Schnitter’s DNA,’ Ilse explained. ‘I needed a… paternity test. And, as BCRA2 is a hereditary condition, I wanted him to get checked. It was never to bond with a stranger, to call him Papa.’

Anjli nodded at this, while a sliver of ice slid down her spine. Her own mother had been fighting breast cancer recently, and Anjli had also wondered whether the gene had passed on to her as well.

‘So you learned Karl is your father, I’m guessing,’ she said. Ilse nodded. ‘And I’m assuming that Rolfe meanwhile is on a vendetta against him.’

‘I was a fool,’ Ilse replied. ‘I mentioned to my brother that I’d travelled to England with my company, but I’d forgotten he’s a good detective. He learned I met with Karl, the man he had hunted for as Karl Meier, a guard who destroyed our family with an affair. Rolfe looked deeper into this, saw the same Red Reaper cases as you had. We call it a different name, but the result was the same. Rolfe came to England to face him and gain his revenge.’

‘So why wait?’ Billy asked. ‘It’s been two weeks.’

‘Because my brother is thorough, and when he arrived, we learned that Patrick Walsh was dead,’ Ilse sighed. ‘Rolfe wanted concrete evidence. He believed that this’d be found on the hard drive.’

‘Which he stole.’

‘No,’ Ilse shook her head. ‘I don’t know how he found it, but he didn’t break into your friend’s house. On the