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

by Kerry Wilkinson

  ‘Why did me being involved change things?’ Andrew asked.

  Edie didn’t look up. ‘How much has she paid you?’ Andrew fluffed his words, taking a step back as Edie picked up her bag and rounded on him. ‘Exactly. I don’t actually care – it’s just more money she was happy to spend on them. What’s new? I figured it was about time I got something for myself.’ She pushed past him, striding towards the corner, turning and scowling. ‘Look, tell her, don’t tell her. I really don’t care any more. If you want to mess up my life and you can live with that, then it’s up to you.’

  She stormed around the corner, leaving Andrew and Jenny alone on the wall.

  For a moment, neither of them spoke. Jenny broke the silence. ‘I like her.’

  Andrew laughed. Really laughed. If he’d been drinking milk, it would be spewing from his nose. ‘That’s perhaps the least surprising thing I’ve heard this week,’ he said.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  Andrew turned, heading for the car and sighing. He didn’t want to make decisions like this. Edie was right – if he told her mum or the police, it probably would wreck her exams in a few months. Regardless of the money, Margaret Watkins had seemed happy the previous day when the cats were returned.

  ‘You’re going to let her keep the money, aren’t you?’ Jenny said.

  Andrew rubbed the mark above his eye. It had been aching non-stop since Iwan had jabbed it. ‘I’ve not decided yet.’

  Jenny squinted at him, not saying it but confident she knew what he was going to do.

  ‘What next?’ she asked.

  ‘Now it’s time to get justice for Owen, Wendy and Fiona Methodist.’

  ‘How are you going to do that?’

  Andrew took a deep breath. ‘First, there’s someone we need to speak to – then I sell my soul.’

  Thirty-Four

  ‘Roses are red, violets are blue, you’ve got big tits, let’s go screw.’ Jenny giggled, peering up from the small yellow heart in her hand. ‘It does have a sort of poetry to it.’

  They were waiting inside a university building just off Oxford Road, where there was a giant pink heart attached to the wall. On a table nearby was a stack of heart-shaped yellow and blue sticky labels. The idea was that students could write romantic messages on the stickers and then pin them to the bigger heart for one another to discover. True love would be found and everyone would live happily ever after. Ahhhh…

  Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on an individual’s viewpoint, as with so many well-meaning events and celebrations, it had rapidly descended into a tsunami of filth, with people leaving increasingly disgusting or hilarious messages and no one in authority noticing.

  Jenny plucked another yellow heart from the board. ‘There once was a girl from Billinge, who had a really long fringe. She had so much hair, that it didn’t stop there, it went right down to her… oh.’

  Andrew picked up a blue heart and flipped it around, reading something about ‘Sticky Vicky’. He pinned it back on the board. ‘Some of these kids aren’t even trying.’

  As Jenny continued looking through the messages, sniggering to herself, Andrew gazed around the rest of the reception area. Usually, he would have felt out of place but there were people of all ages hurrying through and heading to class. Meanwhile, the university campus was a mass of purple and pink banners advertising that night’s Valentine’s Ball, which clashed with a speed-dating event and a separate thrash metal gig at the Academy. Of the three, he’d have probably gone for the thrash metal.

  Andrew was watching Jenny skim through the Valentine’s board when a tap on his shoulder made him jump. An Asian lad wearing jeans and a long-sleeved Man City goalkeeping top was nervously bobbing from one foot to the other. ‘Are you Andrew?’

  ‘Ishan?’

  ‘Yep.’

  They shook hands, with Andrew calling Jenny across. She made eye contact with Ishan, smiling and showing off her dimple. He was instantly nervous, avoiding her gaze and turning back to Andrew, who pointed towards the lounge area next to the coffee bar.

  ‘Do you want something to drink?’

  Ishan shook his head. ‘I’ve got another lecture in half an hour.’

  They sat anyway, with Andrew doing the talking. It wasn’t always easy to judge lads in their teens or early twenties. Some preferred to talk to Jenny, bragging and spilling everything they might usually keep to themselves. Others, like Ishan, were anxious around girls and drawn to Andrew, spotting one of their own.

  ‘I’d like to ask you about the day Owen and Wendy died,’ Andrew said.

  Ishan shuffled nervously. ‘You said on the phone this was to discuss putting together a team for the mathlete Olympics.’

  Andrew glanced at Jenny – her idea.

  ‘I’m trying to find out what happened on the day Owen and Wendy were killed,’ Andrew said. ‘You were there.’

  Ishan stood but Jenny was on her feet quickly too. ‘Please don’t go, Ishan,’ she said. ‘It’s really important. This is just the three of us sitting on a couple of sofas chatting. Nobody needs to know what we’re talking about. Andrew’s a private investigator and I help him out. We’re trying to find out what happened.’

  He glanced between the two of them, then Jenny placed a friendly, perhaps flirty, hand on his shoulder. Ishan shivered nervously then lowered himself slowly back onto the sofa. ‘How do you know I was there?’ he said.

  Andrew nodded at Jenny, who reached into her rucksack, the amusement from before now gone. ‘There was so much written about the shootings that it was really hard to find out much of anything. The papers and Internet sites pretty much all quote the same police press conferences and wire copy, which only mention two witnesses being on the scene.’

  Ishan couldn’t sit still, staring towards the café counter and the door, fidgeting constantly. ‘They kept my name quiet because of them.’

  ‘Owen and Wendy?’ Andrew asked.

  ‘They’d been on the news and all over the Internet as witnesses to that robbery. That gang knew what they were called and where to find them. When the police arrived and took my statement, they said they wouldn’t release my name to the media, just in case. Throughout the inquest, I was known as “Witness I”.’

  Jenny plonked half a ream of printouts on the table, brushing some loose hair from her face and grinning. ‘I know. I spent long enough searching for you the other night.’

  ‘But how did you find me? Most of my friends don’t even know I was there. I know it’s a miracle that the other people who showed up have kept their mouths closed, but—’

  ‘It was you,’ Jenny said.

  Ishan threw a hand up, confused. ‘What was me?’

  ‘Who did you tell?’

  ‘My parents, my sister, one of my flatmates. Some of the people on my course know because they were there, too.’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘No one.’

  Jenny sifted through her papers and handed him a page. ‘You wrote about it on this online maths forum. It only has your first name, but it wasn’t hard to find out the rest.’

  Ishan scanned the page, clearly unhappy. ‘This is a private forum, though. You have to answer a dozen complex equations to be able to register, let alone be approved.’

  ‘Yeah…’

  ‘You’ve got to be interested in maths.’

  ‘Yeah…’

  ‘It’s for, well, nerds, I suppose.’

  Jenny shuffled her papers until they were all in line and then dropped them back in her bag. She beamed at him. ‘What’s your point?’

  For a clever person, it took a few seconds for it to drop. ‘You like maths?’ Ishan asked disbelievingly.

  ‘My degree’s in ICT but I did two maths modules, one in functional analysis, another in algebraic topology.’ Andrew didn’t dare ask what either of those actually was. ‘I’ve been a member of that forum for about four years,’ she added. ‘I knew I’d read a first-hand account of the incident somewhere and th
ought it must have been on a news site. I waded through all those articles until remembering it wasn’t that at all. It took me ages to figure out where, and then I stumbled across your post. I wish I’d thought of that before reading through a hundred news stories.’

  Ishan suddenly seemed a lot more interested in Jenny than he had been before. He relaxed into the sofa, making eye contact with her for the first time. ‘I still don’t understand what you want to know.’

  ‘We’d like you to tell us what you remember. I read your post but it’s more about the aftermath and how you were dealing with everything.’ She gave him a sympathetic smile. ‘Everyone on there was really nice and supportive.’

  ‘It’s a decent community.’

  ‘I know.’

  Ishan had relaxed to such a degree that he was almost sitting still. ‘I told the police everything I saw at the time but I’ve forgotten a lot of it now.’ He stopped, clearing his throat. ‘Tried to forget.’

  ‘Can you try to remember?’ Jenny asked. ‘For me?’

  He looked from one of them to the other. ‘It’s not for some book, is it?’

  ‘Why would it be?’ Jenny replied.

  ‘Because everyone I know’s writing a bloody book. It’s an epidemic.’

  ‘It’s not for a book.’

  He pinched the top of his nose, much in the way Andrew did, and then peered towards the coffee bar. ‘I think I need something to drink after all.’

  Jenny turned to Andrew, raising her eyebrows. Go on then.

  ‘What do you want?’ Andrew asked, standing to do as he hadn’t been told.

  ‘Green tea and a muffin,’ Ishan replied.

  ‘Jen?’

  ‘A hot chocolate, almond croissant, blueberry cupcake and one of those dippy things. Oh, and an apple.’

  ‘“Dippy things”?’

  ‘You dip them.’

  Andrew didn’t feel as if he had enough information, but headed to the counter anyway, ordering everything, plus a coffee for himself, and being shocked that he got change from twenty quid. That could only happen in a university building – cross the road and go into Starbucks and he’d need a second mortgage. The dippy things turned out to be piped shortbread with chocolate on either end. Apparently, it was only Andrew who had no idea what they were. As soon as he mentioned ‘dippy thing’ to the waitress, she plopped it on a plate and gave him a sideways glance as if to ask what he’d been wasting his life on.

  As the waitress stacked up the calorific collection of diabetes-inducing items, Andrew watched as Jenny worked Ishan perfectly. They didn’t want to use him – it had taken them long enough to find him – but they needed him to be relaxed in order to talk about the trauma he’d seen. He’d gone from not being able to look Jenny in the eye to smiling and mirroring, touching his hair when she touched hers. It wasn’t just him who had changed. Barely a day ago, Jenny had been snarling, scratching and kicking. If Andrew hadn’t stopped her, she would have kept fighting until Iwan had done her some serious harm.

  I’m not a psycho.

  She might be right – but not many people had to go around telling others what they weren’t. It was largely implied by the way they acted.

  Andrew crossed back to the seating area, balancing the cups and plates. Jenny instantly launched herself into the croissant as Ishan sipped his tea.

  ‘Ishan was telling me that he was in a maths lecture when he heard three shots,’ Jenny said, not looking away from the student.

  Ishan nodded. ‘It was a normal Monday. I was a bit tired and there’s this lecturer who just bangs on and on in the same tone the entire time. It’s really hard not to fall asleep.’

  ‘Where were you sitting?’ she asked, taking control again.

  ‘At the back.’

  ‘How did you know they were gunshots?’

  ‘I live close to Longsight and you recognise things like that. Not often. Me and my friend Vik were chased by this gang one time. We got away but… you don’t forget.’

  ‘What did you do when you heard the gun?’

  Ishan bit a chunk from his muffin, chewing and playing for time. ‘I wasn’t really thinking but I knew something bad had happened. I went out of the back of the lecture theatre into the corridor where there’s a glass door that leads out to this courtyard area.’

  ‘I know it.’

  ‘Right. When I think of it now, I don’t know why I went out there. Whoever had the gun could have still been roaming around, picking people off. That’s what you hear about whenever there’s another shooting in America – some maniac with a weapon wandering around taking potshots.’

  ‘But you went out there anyway?’

  ‘I know – it’s not the sort of thing I’d usually do. I’m not some sporty, athletic hero-type. I do maths because my mum and dad want me to.’

  ‘You must’ve been brave to go out there.’

  Ishan took the compliment well, smiling gently and having another bite of his cake. ‘I felt drawn to it. The tiles are bright white but there was this red. You could see it from way back.’

  Jenny had stopped eating and was nodding along. ‘The papers said there were witnesses on the scene within seconds.’

  ‘That was me. It felt like I was being pulled. There were three of them on the ground. I know the names now but I didn’t then. I remember staring at the lad’s – Owen’s – hoody, because I have one just like it. There was a voice in my head saying it could have been me. Then there was the soldier in all his green stuff. I remember him seeming really big but he wasn’t really, it was just in comparison to the other two. There was so much blood from the three of them, all running together.’

  ‘Did you call the police?’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s in the statements and they played the 999 call at the inquest. It’s weird because I know I did – but I don’t remember any of that. I remember the noises around me. People were screaming, crying, but there were also a few seconds where it felt like everything had stopped, even the buses and the traffic.’

  ‘The report says “witnesses”.’

  Ishan nodded.

  ‘How many were there?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘It’s complicated. Lots, I suppose, because there were people in the windows and others coming out of the lecture theatres.’

  ‘But how many of them were next to the bodies? The reports imply there were only two – one of them is you.’

  ‘I was the second one there. By the time I arrived, Professor Steyn was already there.’

  It was the first time either Andrew or Jenny had heard the name. She glanced up, catching Andrew’s eye, letting him know she was still in control.

  ‘If he was there first, what was he doing?’

  ‘He was a mess.’ Ishan glanced between them. ‘You sort of expect older people to be the ones in control, don’t you? Especially when things start going wrong. It’s like when you’re a kid. You assume your mum and dad have the answers to everything because they’re the grown-ups. It’s only when you grow older yourself you realise that it’s not like that. You only know the answers through education and experience. Most of the time, you’re guessing and hoping for the best.’

  ‘What was Professor Steyn like?’

  ‘He could barely speak. He had his hand over his mouth and was stumbling along, like his knees couldn’t hold him up. He was trying to help her.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Wendy. I think he thought she was still alive but she was long gone. The police said she died instantly. He tried to turn her over and then he was sick everywhere. All over himself, all over them. I think he saw the actual shootings.’

  Andrew was now the one fidgeting. If that was true, it had never been divulged in the papers. If it had been brought up in the inquest, it had been kept secret, most likely to protect Steyn’s identity.

  ‘Did he say anything?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘The professor? I don’t know. He was slurring his words. I took a module with him in year one but I don’t think he reme
mbered me.’

  Slowly, Jenny had gone from smiley, happy look-at-me maths friend to interrogator. Her eyes locked with Ishan’s, voice calm. ‘Think about what he was slurring. If he saw what happened, what did he say?’

  Ishan scratched his head with one hand, holding his tea steady with the other, transfixed by her. When she wanted to command a conversation, Jenny could be as good as Keira’s father.

  The student’s voice was a whisper. ‘He said, “He shot them both”.’

  ‘But you didn’t actually see the gun fired?’

  ‘No, it was on the ground next to the soldier when I got there. I heard it.’

  ‘And Professor Steyn definitely said, word for word, “He shot them both”?’

  ‘Yes… and then…’ Andrew could see the light bulb going off in Ishan’s mind. He sat up straighter, putting down his cup, his hands becoming animated. ‘It’s strange because that’s how I remember it. He said “He shot them both” and then a few of the others who came out started repeating it.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘I remember it now – that’s what I told the operator on the phone. She asked what I could see and I spelled out the name on the soldier’s coat, then I said that he’d shot both of them, then himself. The gun was next to his hand but the only reason I thought he’d shot them is because Steyn told me.’ His eyes widened, turning from Andrew to Jenny. ‘Is something wrong?’

  Andrew told Jenny the answer with his eyes and a barely perceptible shake of his head.

  ‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘You said the professor didn’t recognise you but what was the module you did with him?’

  Ishan’s voice was starting to crack. ‘He’s not really a lecturer,’ he said. ‘I think he used to be but he does a lot of research now. He teaches a first-year elective in African Studies. That’s all I know. I’ve not seen him since.’