Anke Brandt's Death

The name on the death certificate was Anke Brandt, and she had died on a wet Tuesday in November 1996 — six months before I was adopted.

I sat on the floor of my flat at gone half eleven, the city lights smeared across the window, a box of photocopies spread around me like a hand of cards I'd been dealt by someone who wanted me to lose. I'd pulled the file through a clerk at the Standesamt in Bremen who owed Matthias a favour — a birth register, a death register, and a single sheet of paper that should never have been released to anyone.

*Cause of death: industrial accident. Fall from height. No witnesses.*

I read it four times. The fifth time, my hands had stopped shaking and something colder had settled in behind my ribs.

Anke Brandt, twenty-four, machine operator, Voss Werke Bremen, employee number 4471. My mother. Not the woman who'd raised me with a closed fist and a colder word. My *mother*.

The flat felt too small. I stood, rolled my shoulders, walked the length of the room and back. The dark green scarf hung on the hook by the door — hers, the only thing of hers I'd ever been given, handed to me at fourteen with the words *this was your real mother's, now stop asking questions*. I'd worn it every winter since without knowing why it mattered.

Now I knew.

I called Sophie at ten past midnight. She arrived within twenty minutes, hair damp from the rain, pen already between her teeth.

"Voss Werke, Bremen," I said, before she'd even sat down. "November 1996. A woman fell from a gantry on the night shift. The report says no witnesses. The report was signed off by Ilse Voss."

Sophie went very still. "Reinhard's wife."

"Reinhard's wife. Who, six months later, brought a two-year-old into that house and called him her son." I kept my voice level. It cost me something to do it. "I did the arithmetic, Sophie. My birthday's on the adoption papers as March 1994. If I was two when they took me in, that's 1996. She died, and within the year I was a Voss. That isn't grief. That's an *arrangement*."

Sophie pulled the papers towards her and read the way she always read — fast, hungry, her finger tracking the lines. "There's no inquest listed here."

"There was one. It's been sealed."

"Sealed files still have spines." She looked up. "I know a registrar at the Bremen trade registry. And I've got a contact at the *Weser-Kurier* who owes me from the docklands story. Give me a week. Two at the outside."

"Sophie—"

"I'm not doing this because it's a story." She said it flatly, no softness in it, which was how I knew she meant it. "I'm doing it because someone decided you weren't allowed to know your own mother's name. That's not a family. That's a cover-up with a dining table."

I turned away so she wouldn't see my face do something I hadn't authorised. *Weakness*, I told myself. *This is weakness. Hold the line.* I got it back under control before I turned round.

"Then we do it properly," I said. "Every document, every signature, every shift roster from that week. If Ilse Voss signed my mother into the ground, I want the pen."

---

Across the city, in an office that still smelled of her perfume and someone else's fear, Elara was making a different kind of arrangement.

I didn't know it yet. I'd learn it from Matthias at twenty to three that morning, when my phone lit up with a message that made the blood leave my face:

*Vireo's data-centre contract is gone. She's sold the specifications to Nordwind. Signed tonight. — M*

Vireo Logistics — the one clean organ left in the Voss body, the freight-forwarding arm I'd spent four months quietly propping up because it was the only part of the empire that employed people honestly. Elara had tried to buy it through Nordlicht Holdings and failed. So she'd done what she always did when she couldn't own a thing. She'd burned it instead. Handed its routing technology to a competitor for a fee and a promise, and called it strategy.

I stood in the dark with the phone in my hand and felt the two discoveries lock together like teeth in a gear.

Anke Brandt, dead at twenty-four, no witnesses.

Vireo Logistics, gutted in a single night, no warning.

Same family. Same method. Same complete indifference to who got buried underneath.

Sophie was still at my table, still reading. She looked up at whatever was on my face and didn't flinch, which was the first honest thing anyone had done for me in years.

"Kieran?"

"Elara's just sold Vireo's routing specs to Nordwind," I said. "Tonight. She couldn't have it, so she made sure nobody could."

Sophie set the pen down. "Then we're not just investigating a death any more. We're investigating a family that kills what it can't keep."

I walked to the window. Below, the city carried on, indifferent, all those lit windows full of people who'd never had to wonder whether the woman who raised them had helped bury the woman who bore them.

My mother had a name. She had an employee number. She had a fall from height and no witnesses and a signature at the bottom of the page.

I was going to find out who held the pen. And then I was going to make them write it all down.

*If it were you — if you found out the woman who raised you might have put your real mother in the ground — would you want the truth, even if it tore the whole family apart? Or would you let the dead stay buried and walk away clean?*