Whisper For The Reaper by Jack Gatland (best motivational books for students txt) 📗

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