Something Hidden: A totally unputdownable murder mystery novel (Andrew Hunter Book 2)

by Kerry Wilkinson

  ‘Dunno. I don’t worry about it – I earn my own money. Last year, Dad brought home two pairs of custom-made cat boots from Copenhagen to stop them getting their feet dirty when they’re in the garden. If that’s what he likes, then fair enough. Seems a bit stupid to me.’

  Okay – the games-playing, lizard-controlling, six-hundred-quid-a-week entrepreneur was the sensible one in the family.

  Andrew thanked Damian again, said goodbye to Pam, and then returned to the car. As he waited for the windscreen to defrost, he huddled within his coat as Jenny fiddled with her seatbelt.

  ‘Maybe I should take up game-playing?’ she said.

  ‘Wouldn’t you get bored?’

  ‘I dunno. Thirty-odd grand a year, weekends off, working from home. Sounds all right.’ She nodded towards his pocket. ‘Are you going to give that number to the police?’

  Andrew took out the Post-it note and fixed it to the dashboard between them. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I get why he didn’t call the police – he doesn’t want them looking into all his chat room activity too closely – but it’s a lead in a potential criminal case, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Andrew replied.

  Jenny took out her phone. ‘Shall I call? They’ll probably think they can try it on more if I’m a woman.’

  ‘Put it on speaker, and just…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know.’

  Jenny smiled sweetly, as if she’d never contemplated doing or saying anything reckless.

  The tinny-sounding ringtone spilled from the phone three times before a man’s voice answered.

  ‘A’ight. Who dis?’

  ‘Hi. I got your number from the chat room. I think you’ve got a cat for sale.’

  ‘You fed?’

  ‘No, I’m just a normal woman.’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Er, okay…?’

  ‘Cash only, girlie.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Big one. You bring Jack, I bring bangle.’

  ‘What does the cat look like?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Can you send me a photo?’

  ‘No, no, no, no. Jack for bangle. Tomorrow.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Text.’

  Jenny started to reply but her phone screen went black as the call dropped. Andrew felt as if he’d been listening in to two people speaking another language.

  ‘Jack?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s simple – if we take the money, he’ll bring the cat. He’s going to message us somewhere to meet tomorrow. I think he’s one of those white kids that thinks he’s a gangster. Either that or he’s got severe brain damage. I guess we’ll find out. I was going to ask him if he had two cats, but it sounds like just the one. Still, if he’s got one it might lead us to the other.’

  Moments later, the text tone sounded on Jenny’s phone. Whether they wanted to or not, the next day they were going to see a man about a cat. One who might or might not have taken a few blows to the head.

  Sixteen

  Thursday

  It was the silence that Andrew found disconcerting. A nice bit of peace and quiet would usually be wonderful. Sitting next to the window in his flat, feet up, brew in hand, watching the world pass by. Lovely. It was much better than watching the television.

  Here, it just felt wrong.

  Andrew expected prisons to be noisy, with inmates banging on bars, fights over the pool tables and whatever else he’d seen in movies. He was sitting in the large visiting room, where loved ones would wait for their partners to come down from the cells and have a catch-up under the watchful eye of the guards. He’d had to ask a few people for contacts and, ultimately, favours. Then he’d had to explain what he was after to too many people and be searched – luckily with his clothes on. He’d also had to drive to Preston, which was an indignity in itself.

  The room had long rows of grey and red tables bolted to the floor, with matching chairs. Steep, barred windows gave intoxicating views of more walls, with lines of vending machines at the back. Pinned up all around were posters with words like ‘respect’ and ‘think’ in large capital letters.

  It was a bit late for that.

  From the silence, rain suddenly started to fall, slapping at the windows, creating a cathedral of thunderous noise.

  He’d spent the rest of Wednesday doing odds and ends around the office, with Jenny phoning around vets, trying to find out how easy it would be to remove a tracking chip from a cat. The answer was, apparently, quite easy – with the biggest danger that the cat would scratch to pieces the person trying to cut him or her up. If it was drugged or subdued, all that would be needed was a scalpel. Someone had removed the chips from the stolen cats but Jenny found instructions on the Internet for how to insert and remove pet trackers. That ruled out Andrew’s idea that a vet would have had to have been involved at some point.

  As for Thomas Braithwaite, they’d dug and dug, finding out as much as they could about him. Sooner or later, Andrew was going to have to decide what he wanted to do. That was where the trail for the truth about Luke Methodist had led them – but he had to think of his own safety. If Braithwaite was a simple factory owner, there was no problem. If he was more than that, Andrew would have to tread lightly.

  Andrew started drumming his fingers on the table. He’d been brought to the prison’s visiting room almost ten minutes previously and left by himself. As the rain’s tempo increased from pneumatic downpour to outright monsoon, he wished for the silence of a few moments ago. Noah could’ve definitely come from the north of England. He was probably a Prestonian.

  Barely audible over the storm, there was a thump and footsteps from behind. Andrew turned to see a wedge of a man striding towards him. A pair of prison guards followed him into the room but stopped to rest against the wall, one of them offering Andrew the merest of nods. Paulie Evans was wearing jeans and a plain white T-shirt, his short black hair greased backwards, like he’d stepped out of a 1950s movie. His chest was puffed out, shoulders wide as he strutted closer, sitting opposite Andrew and splaying his hands on the table to reveal a web of tattoos that weaved from each of his wrists up to his elbows.

  ‘Whatcha want, pal?’ he asked, broad Scouse accent cutting across the rain.

  ‘I wanted to talk about your brother,’ Andrew said.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Kal.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘I’m a private investigator and—’

  Paulie eyed him up and down, jaw working ferociously on a piece of gum. ‘I ain’t talking to no bizzie.’

  ‘I’m nothing to do with the police.’

  ‘So whatcha here for?’

  ‘Luke Methodist.’ Andrew left a pause but there was no reaction other than more chewing, so he continued. ‘I’m looking into what happened with the shooting of Owen Copthorne and Wendy Boyes. Lots of assumptions have been made, mainly about your brother and, to an extent, you.’

  Paulie shrugged. ‘What about it?’

  ‘Are you happy with that – everyone assuming you arranged for a pair of kids to be shot dead to stop them being witnesses?’

  ‘What’s it matter? I’m in here anyway.’

  ‘You’ll be out in nine or ten years.’

  ‘So why would I say anything else that’d get me in trouble?’ He sneered the words, flicking his chin up to challenge Andrew’s stupidity. He shunted his chair back, ready to leave. ‘That all?’

  ‘If you did arrange the shooting, I understand why you’d keep quiet. It’d be more years inside, perhaps even a full-life sentence. But, if you didn’t, why not say so at the time? Everyone outside assumes you or one of your brothers got Luke Methodist to do it but if you’d said that wasn’t true, you’d have persuaded a few people – perhaps even members of the jury who sent you down. They were asked to deliberate on the robbery charges and nothing else, but every one of them would have known the names Wendy Boyes and Owen Copthorne.’

>   Paulie shuffled in his seat, checking over his shoulder and lowering his voice. ‘Why do you care?’

  ‘I just do.’

  ‘Who are you working for?’

  ‘No one you’d know.’

  ‘So why should I talk to you?’

  Andrew didn’t reply for a few moments, letting the drumbeat of the rain hammer through the almost-empty room.

  ‘Because it can’t do any harm,’ he whispered. ‘Tell me you didn’t have them shot and I’ll believe you. Shrug and walk away and that’s fine. It doesn’t matter what I think but there are people out there who deserve to know what happened. You’ve got two boys yourself. If something happened to Duke or Nathan, wouldn’t you want to know who did it and why?’

  Paulie’s brow rippled. He started flexing his arm muscles, stare fixed on Andrew. ‘You come here and bring my kids into it?’

  ‘I just mentioned their names – two clicks on the Internet and anyone can find that out. I’m making the point that Wendy and Owen were somebody’s children, too.’

  Paulie started cracking his knuckles, glancing over his shoulder towards the guards again and then facing Andrew once more. ‘I was told not to talk about it.’

  ‘Who by?’

  ‘The solicitor dude told us all to say “no comment”. Bizzies checked our phones, houses, computers, the lot, but there was nothing there. He said they already had enough to try us for one thing and that we’d only make things worse. Everyone assumed we got Methodist to do it anyway.’

  It took Andrew a few moments but then he realised that the solicitor had played the stupidity defence. The brothers had been senseless enough to get caught for the robbery – the failure to set a car on fire, the fingerprints, Scouse accents, and everything else. The solicitor assumed they’d arranged the shooting too but suspected the police had no evidence for that. Rather than risk one of them saying something incriminating, he’d instructed them to say nothing when questioned. They’d gone down for the robbery they’d almost certainly committed, but not even been charged with arranging the shooting. Losing a case when defending armed robbers was one thing; having clients sent to prison for a full-life term didn’t look great whichever way it was spun.

  It was a solicitor’s last trick when he or she wound up with a bunch of morons to represent: the stupidity defence.

  That explained a few things. ‘If it wasn’t for your solicitor, what would you have told the police when they asked about the shooting?’ Andrew asked.

  Paulie shrugged, chewing the inside of his mouth. He looked bored. ‘Don’t matter now, does it?’

  ‘It would to some people.’

  He shook his head and started to stand. ‘I wanna go back.’

  ‘Hey!’

  Andrew’s stage whisper was louder than he meant. He peered around Paulie towards the guards who hadn’t moved. Slowly, the prisoner eased himself back into the chair.

  ‘Look, pal,’ Paulie said. ‘I might not be an angel but I know who’s fair game and who ain’t. If I had burgled that shop – and I’m not saying I did – those kids would’ve been right there. Why wait to do the job on them?’

  ‘Because you didn’t realise the police were onto you then. They went on the news telling everyone they’d heard three Scousers, and suddenly it dawned that people were looking at you.’

  Paulie shrugged once more. ‘Whatever. You figure it out for yourself. It’s not like I’m getting out of here anyway. We done?’

  ‘Just one more thing – I want to ask about Kal.’

  ‘So why are you talking to me? Talk to him.’

  ‘I know that Kal used to use people who lived on the streets as middlemen for his…’ Andrew dropped his voice to a whisper, ‘merchandise.’

  ‘You’d have to ask him.’

  ‘That’s how the police connected Luke to him and, in the end, you. Luke Methodist was homeless and hung around with a guy named Joe, who did odds and ends for your brother.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘It seems a bit flimsy to me. Joe went along with things because he was using at the time – plus he’s a little guy. Luke was an ex-squaddie – not many would pick fights with him, even if they thought they’d win. He’d certainly get a few blows in on anyone who went for him. Had you come across him before all of this?’

  ‘Luke Methodist? Never heard of him.’

  ‘What about Kal? Did he know Luke?’

  ‘Ask him.’

  ‘I’m asking you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You know why – he’s your little brother and you worked together. I read the court report of his day on the stand and he’s all over the place. It says he spent most of the time glancing towards you and Aaron in the dock. There’s no way he’d have arranged any of this without you knowing – so if you didn’t know Luke, then chances are Kal didn’t know him directly either.’

  ‘You deaf? I told you I didn’t know him.’

  Andrew scraped his chair back slightly: blood successfully extracted from stone, though he wanted to push the point. Time for some ego-massaging.

  ‘What about Kal? It strikes me that you’re the smart one of the bunch. Would he have acted on anything without you knowing?’

  Paulie shook his head and snorted. ‘Dude, neither of my brothers do anything without my say-so.’

  Seventeen

  As soon as Andrew left Preston, the rain abated to a slow drizzle and, eventually, a misty sort of nothingness as he reached the outskirts of Manchester. He picked up Jenny from the office and then headed back up the M61 towards Wigan. It really was a tour de Lancashire, with a stop-off at Gregg’s to appease Jenny’s hunger for good measure. Steak bake sorted, they followed the instructions from her text message to the back of a burnt-out pub on the edge of Wigan town centre. The car park was strewn with crumbling bricks, shattered pieces of wood and a pair of overflowing skips. The ground floor of the pub was boarded up, with flame-licked black streaks around the windows and doors. Upstairs, a flower-print purple and white curtain flapped through a smashed window. Someone had graffitied the f-word over a sign that had once read ‘The Frog and Toad’. Whoever had the spray paint had given the toad a comedy-villain twirly moustache and giant penis, which would surely make hopping across lily pads impossible. Well, unless it was used as some sort of propeller.

  It was the sort of place a person might go camping if he or she had a thing about war zones.

  Andrew parked behind one of the skips where only the front of the car could be seen from the road. Just in case anything unexpected happened, he had a clear run across the pavement onto the main road. They were fifteen minutes early, which might give Jenny enough time to clear the flaked pastry from her lap.

  ‘Classy place,’ Jenny said, delving into the backpack between her feet and pulling out a grease-soaked paper bag. She licked her lips as she moved on to a cream doughnut. ‘Want a bite?’

  Andrew shook his head. ‘We’re here to potentially buy a stolen cat. They’re hardly going to meet us in the town centre.’

  ‘Do you reckon they went into the bank with this as a business plan? “We’ve got an idea: we’re going to steal pets, advertise in private chat rooms, and then meet buyers in dodgy pub car parks. All we need are start-up costs – two grand for a van and thirty quid a month to pay the phone bill.”’

  Andrew laughed as Jenny wolfed down the cake and then opened the door to brush away the crumbs.

  ‘Do you believe Paulie Evans?’ she said.

  Andrew sucked on his bottom lip. He’d spent the car journey running through the conversation from the prison in his mind. ‘Probably. Kal was the youngest, so they sent him onto the street to do their dirty work with the drugs. They’d have had to keep their heads down because they’re Scouse lads and wouldn’t have wanted to upset whoever runs the drugs around Manchester. They were small-time. I can’t believe Kal suddenly decided to organise killing two people by himself. I don’t think Paulie knew anything about it, which means it probably didn’t h
appen the way everyone’s saying. It feels wrong anyway. They’re scrotes, scallies, selling drugs on the street. How do they go from that to robbing a jeweller’s and having two kids killed?’

  ‘You don’t think they were the robbers?’

  ‘No, I do think it was them. The police wouldn’t have messed up that badly. But think of all the ways the brothers screwed up – they didn’t manage to burn out their getaway car, one of them left a fingerprint and, in the end, they got caught. Their solicitor thought they were too stupid to be allowed to talk to the police. If that’s all true, how did they arrange for two kids to be shot, yet not have anything come back to them? Even if they did, why Luke Methodist? They must’ve known more suitable people in Liverpool who could’ve done the job.’

  ‘Wouldn’t the police have thought of that?’

  Andrew was drumming on the steering wheel once more. A bad habit. ‘Almost certainly but they’re coming at it from a different angle. All the evidence is there that Luke Methodist shot Wendy and Owen, they just don’t know why. He’s not around to tell them, so we end up with something plausible relating to the Evans brothers. It starts to come apart when you pick at it but no one wants to pick.’

  ‘What does that leave us?’

  ‘Fiona wants us to say that it wasn’t her dad but we’ll likely never be able to do that. The best we might be able to do is give her a “why”.’

  Jenny picked up her phone and checked for new messages as the agreed time came and went.

  ‘Shall I call?’ she asked.

  ‘Not yet. There’s a green car that’s driven past twice in the past five minutes. They’re probably checking us out.’

  ‘Do you think we should’ve told someone we were coming?’

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘I don’t know – the bloke selling the dodgy cat could have a gun. Probably a Browning.’

  Andrew didn’t look sideways but Jenny’s remark sounded decidedly smirky.

  ‘Nice of you to mention it now,’ he replied.

  ‘I figured you’d already thought of it.’