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

  ‘What?’ he asked as they slowed to a walk.

  ‘I need to go back to the office to check a few things… but I might have something.’

  Fourteen

  Andrew pottered around the office making tea as Jenny typed on her computer. She stopped to make notes on a pad and then carried on with what she was doing. He knew she was taking things seriously when she had her glasses on and hadn’t opened any of the biscuit packets from her bottom drawer.

  After wasting as much time as he could, Andrew sat in his chair, fiddling with his phone to see if Keira had texted him. He hadn’t sent her a message because he didn’t want to seem too keen but he hadn’t received anything either. It really was like being a teenager again.

  ‘Did you see what was on the workbench in the back room of the jeweller?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘Tools.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘I don’t know – I wasn’t really looking. I was more worried that you were going to agree to buy that ring. How much did he say it was worth?’

  Jenny grinned. ‘A lot. We should do that more often.’

  ‘We really shouldn’t. What did you see?’

  ‘Cufflinks.’

  She said it as if it was a major revelation but Andrew stared on blankly. ‘Cufflinks?’

  ‘Didn’t you see them? He was setting some sort of jewel into them.’

  ‘Okay…’

  ‘They were in the shape of letters – a “B” and a “T”. Either he’s a big fan of British Telecom, he’s interested in tuberculosis, or they were for someone with the initials BT or TB.’

  ‘I still don’t get it.’

  Jenny reached into her bottom drawer, pulled out the Mini Rolls and unwrapped one. ‘Have you heard of Thomas Braithwaite?’

  Andrew scratched his head, trying to pluck the information from wherever it was lost, before shaking his head. ‘I know the name.’

  ‘He owns Braithwaite’s – it’s a chain of factories, largely across the north. My old flatmate applied for a job there, so I looked him up. Been keeping an eye out ever since, I suppose. They originated in Liverpool but there’s a factory in Leeds, a couple in the north-east, one as far south as Stoke, and another down the road in Stockport. There’s also an import-export side to the business and he’s worth a fair few quid.’

  ‘Liverpool?’

  She smiled. ‘You’re getting ahead. Anyway, he got off a bribery charge last year. There was a lot of reporting that he tried to buy planning permission to put up a new factory not far from Liverpool city centre. There were recorded phone calls, a money trail through the banks – all sorts, but it collapsed before it got to court. The councillor who was implicated denied all knowledge and was re-elected a few weeks ago. As far as I can tell, Braithwaite’s kept his head down since then.’

  Jenny handed Andrew a printout from a local newspaper and then talked him through it. ‘Braithwaite’s not mentioned in that report but it relates to him. Two years ago, customs impounded a shipping container at Liverpool docks that had arrived from Colombia. They held it for three months, pulling it apart and checking everything on the manifesto. That’s not necessarily uncommon – but it was bound for one of Braithwaite’s factories. Braithwaite filed court papers demanding the release, alongside making threats of lawsuits for compensation. Presumably the police didn’t find anything because it was never reported again, but the authorities have obviously got a thing for him.’

  ‘So his business might not be entirely what it seems?’

  ‘Perhaps. It probably is manufacturing, plus importing and exporting – it depends what he’s bringing into the country and sending out of it again. This is where he lives.’ Jenny passed across a sheet of paper with a printout from Google Maps. ‘It’s huge – big walls and gates, like a prison. That’s a lot of security for someone who runs factories.’

  ‘Maybe he likes his privacy?’

  ‘Or maybe there’s more to him than it appears.’

  Andrew scanned through the pages of news reports and focused on the map again, still not really getting it. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s assume Thomas Braithwaite has a bit more going on than it might first appear. That doesn’t mean those cufflinks were anything to do with him – lots of people have the initials BT or TB.’

  Jenny grinned. She handed over a final sheet of paper, a printout of something Andrew had read very recently. It was why the name Braithwaite seemed familiar.

  Aaron Evans, 25, Kal Evans, 22, and Paulie Evans, 29, all from Merseyside, are being questioned in connection with the incident at Sampson’s Jeweller’s, in which £700,000- worth of rings, necklaces and bracelets were stolen.

  CCTV footage showed three masked figures entering the shop shortly before midday, with two brandishing sawn-off shotguns.

  The case took a sinister turn with the tragic shootings of Owen Copthorne and fiancée Wendy Boyes, both witnesses to the robbery, forty-eight hours later. Police have so far been reluctant to link the cases.

  Greater Manchester police spent yesterday working with Merseyside colleagues. They raided the homes of the three men and were seen carrying computer equipment out of a property in the Wavertree area of the city. They also visited a factory belonging to Braithwaite Industries in the Toxteth area of Liverpool, where at least two of the brothers were recently employed. A spokesman for the company insisted none of the trio still works at the site.

  The goods have yet to be recovered, with police appealing for witnesses.

  Fifteen

  Wednesday

  The weather had taken a marginal turn for the worse: freezing fog replaced by murky grey skies and drizzle. Technically, it was a degree or two warmer, but by the time the spine-chilling rain had dribbled through people’s clothes, it didn’t feel like it.

  Andrew left his car engine idling, the windscreen wipers squeaking back and forth in a losing battle against the elements. Jenny had spent the journey in the passenger seat sorting through her notes. It took her a few moments to realise the vehicle had stopped. She flicked her glasses off and plopped the cardboard file on the back seat.

  ‘Are we here?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s why the car’s not moving.’

  ‘Did you make contact with—?’

  ‘Yes but I’m going to have to wait until tomorrow, so that means today is—’

  ‘Cat day. You’re just annoyed because you’re a dog person who’s scared of cats.’

  ‘I’m not scared of cats.’

  ‘Pfft. Why are we here?’

  ‘I got a call from someone named Pam Harris last night,’ Andrew explained. ‘She owns the Bengal queen cats that Margaret Watkins’ studs were supposed to be mating with. She said she had something to show us.’

  ‘It’s not her cats, is it?’

  ‘I bloody hope not.’

  ‘Because you’re—’

  ‘I’m not scared of cats!’

  Pam welcomed them into the house with caramel-coloured cups of tea and shortcake biscuits already waiting in the living room. Jenny was delighted.

  Pam was a small, thin woman with a tight curled bob of dark hair who worked as a freelance accountant from home. She said her husband was on business abroad but Skyped twice a day so that he could have a ‘conversation’ with the cats. Andrew assumed it was largely one-way.

  With the husband marked down as the nutter in the family, Pam appeared far more normal than either Margaret or Harriet. The walls of the house were either plain, or adorned with family photographs, with no certificates, trophies or gigantic cat canvases in sight. What set the place apart was the prison-like security. There were CCTV cameras fixed to the front and back of the house, with beaming white motion-sensor lights and high mesh fences surrounding the rear garden.

  ‘They’re all my husband’s,’ Pam explained with a slight roll of her eyes.

  Definitely the normal one.

  When she finished showing them around the downstairs gulag, she took them upstairs, waiting at
the top, hands on hips. ‘It’s my son you really need to talk to,’ she said, knocking on one of the doors and waiting patiently until she received a ‘come in’ from the other side.

  Damian Harris was sitting at a desk using a laptop and desktop computer at the same time. As his hands shot frenetically from side to side, he glanced over his shoulder towards Andrew and Jenny, offering a subdued murmur that was either a ‘hi’ or a burp. He was seventeen or eighteen, with shoulder-length dark hair and round-rimmed John Lennon glasses. Andrew knew whose style the young man was emulating because the walls were covered with Beatles posters and prints of album sleeves.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Pam said, edging out of the room and closing the door behind her. Damian didn’t look away from his computers.

  Jenny turned to Andrew, who offered a shrug. ‘Damian?’ he said.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘I’m Andrew and this is Jenny. Your mum tells us you have something that might be helpful. Something to do with cats…’

  ‘Yeah… er, hang on.’

  He bashed away at the laptop, on which he was playing some sort of fantasy role-play game, before turning his attention to the second monitor, where rows of text were streaming upwards.

  Andrew shuffled awkwardly, not knowing what to do. The room smelled of deodorant, with fraying socks littering the corners and a Lego Millennium Falcon hanging from the ceiling. Andrew shared a smirk with Jenny, although he was a little jealous.

  Damian spoke without turning from the screen. ‘Do you know what IRC is?’

  The letters prickled at the back of Andrew’s mind – he’d definitely heard of whatever it was, but without Google in front of him, he was lost.

  ‘Internet Relay Chat,’ Jenny replied.

  Damian glanced over his shoulder towards her, giving her the quick toe-to-head scan, followed by a nod of approval that presumably doubled as a mating call. ‘Right,’ he said, focusing back on his laptop. ‘What do you know about it?’

  ‘Not much. They’re chat rooms that run on their own servers and are separate from the web itself.’

  ‘Have you ever used one?’

  ‘No.’

  Damian nodded towards the monitor with the scrolling text. ‘That’s an IRC room for the latest Doomslayers game.’ His attention returned to the laptop. ‘In the game itself, there are moderators who keep an eye on what everyone says or does. IRC is completely separate, plus, because it’s not on the web, it’s largely unregulated. Players go on to trade items for real-world money.’ He paused, mouth gaping. ‘Hang on.’

  On the laptop screen, what looked like a giant green lizard clad in heavy metal armour was walking on its hind legs, carrying a battleaxe. Damian grunted, weaving his head one way then the other as the lizard buried the weapon in the head of what could only be described as a child-sized squirrel. Blood sprayed the screen as he bashed the keyboard and then clicked the tracker pad ferociously. Bats swooped down from the dark parts of the screen, making Damian duck in real life as the pixelated lizard hacked at the skies with the axe.

  ‘Oof-oof-oof. Take that.’

  Damian bobbed in his seat as the bats splatted to the floor one by one. When the hack-a-thon was finally over, he guided his character towards the edge of the screen, waiting in shadow.

  ‘Sorry, I’m on a mission,’ he said, not turning around. ‘I can’t pause, else I’ll lose the credit.’

  ‘Right,’ Andrew replied.

  Kids today. Still, better than going out with an actual battleaxe.

  ‘Do you play MMORPGs?’ Damian asked.

  It sounded like a sexually transmitted disease: I copped off with Sharon out the back of Lidl and she gave me MMORPG.

  ‘What?’ Andrew asked.

  ‘Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games.’ Damian risked another glance at Jenny. ‘You?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘You should. I can teach you.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

  Back to the laptop. The lizard was edging his/her/its way through some caves. ‘I’m on a quest to find the haunted sea horn,’ Damian said. ‘When I get that, the game-makers offer two options – I can either wear it for twenty-five per cent magic protection, or I can sell it at one of the marketplaces for in-game money.’

  ‘Okay…’ Andrew replied.

  ‘Except that I’m already at level sixty-eight, with ninety per cent magic protection and more in-game money than I can spend.’

  Damian paused, as if that was enough information.

  For Jenny, it seemingly was: ‘So that’s why you use IRC?’

  ‘Right. The makers only offer those two options to keep people within their world – but I can work outside of that and sell the horn for actual pounds. Someone on a lower level might want the magic protection or the in-game money. They PayPal me the actual cash, I wait until it drops in my bank account, tell them where I am on the map, and… hang on.’ Bash, bash, bash on the keyboard. ‘Then I give them the horn.’

  Jenny giggled.

  Andrew gave her a disapproving glance and then continued watching the laptop screen. The lizard had emerged into some sort of forest and was edging around the trees, axe at the ready.

  ‘How much could you sell the, er, horn for?’ Andrew asked.

  ‘Fifty quid, perhaps? It depends on if I put it up for auction, or sell for a set price. It’s why we’re all on IRC. Technically, it’s in the game’s terms and conditions that you’re not supposed to sell things. If you put something on eBay, or a regular web forum, they’ll shut it down. On IRC, no one knows we’re there. The server is run from someone’s private computer, so the games company have to find that person to shut it down. With all the proxies, they’d never be able to do that but, even if they somehow did, people would start a new one two minutes later. It’s not illegal.’

  ‘How much do you sell in a week?’

  ‘This is my job. I make maybe six hundred if I take the weekends off, more if I don’t.’

  ‘Six hundred pounds?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Actual, real-life, UK pounds that you can spend in shops?’

  ‘Yep.’

  What with the hundred-grand cat litters and six-hundred-quid-a-week computer game players, Andrew wondered where he’d gone wrong in life. First cats and now this. What else was he missing out on? He was lost for words, as if he’d been smacked in the chest.

  Meanwhile, the lizard was winning a fight with an oversized pelican.

  Six hundred quid!

  Damian thrashed at the keyboard, offering his own ‘ooh-ooh-ooh’ sound effects, to which Andrew would’ve felt far more superior if it wasn’t for the fact that they were probably worth fifty pence per ‘ooh’.

  Six hundred quid!

  It was Jenny’s amused gaze that finally reminded Andrew what he was supposed to be doing.

  ‘That’s very impressive,’ he said, ‘but what does that have to do with cats?’

  ‘One minute.’

  After more mouse-hammering, lizard-slashing and pelican destruction, Damian spun to face the main monitor, clicking through a few screens, before returning his attention to the laptop and talking without looking up.

  He pointed at the main computer. ‘That other IRC room is dedicated to Doomslayer – but there are different ones. Look.’

  Andrew and Jenny gazed at the monitor. The window was labelled ‘UK Pets FS’, with rows of users along the left-hand column. On the right were long lines of what looked like computer nonsense.

  ‘FS means “for sale”,’ Damian said. ‘That’s a list of people selling various animals. The same principle applies.’

  Andrew got it: if a person had a standard dog/cat/budgie to sell, he or she would do it on a classifieds website, or somewhere open where the maximum number of people would see it. If a person had something unusual or, more likely, illegal or stolen, he or she would need another way. Exactly like the Doomslayer room.

  Andrew stared at the monitor again, sc
anning through what he first thought was code.

  @Franz123 – 0409: Ylw prrt. £150. NE. DM only.

  In context, it made sense. Andrew turned to Damian, who was still facing his laptop screen. ‘So, at nine minutes past four this morning, a user named Franz123 offered a yellow parrot for sale. He lives in the north-east, wants a hundred and fifty quid and you’ve got to message him for the details?’

  ‘Exactly. Move up to half two yesterday.’

  Jenny scrolled up.

  @Devilsedge1 – 1429: Bangle. NW. Msg.

  ‘I figure they can’t spell,’ Damian said.

  Jenny was copying details from the page onto a notepad. ‘I can set us up with this in the office and send him a message.’

  ‘No need,’ Damian replied, flapping towards a Post-it note that was underneath the keyboard. ‘I sent him a message last night asking for details. I thought there might be a photo or a price – or even confirmation it actually is a cat – but all I got was a mobile number.’

  Andrew made sure he could read the writing and then pocketed it.

  ‘Pow-pow-pow-pow!’ Damian leapt from his chair, thumping the space bar with his left hand as he steered the mouse with his right. His lizard was taking chunks from a yeti-like figure that was fighting back with some fearsome-looking claws. ‘Shiiiiiiiiiiiite… come onnnnn. Yes! Boom. Take that.’

  The yeti fell, bloody and defeated.

  ‘Well done,’ Andrew said, unsure if that was correct etiquette. Jenny glanced at him as if he was her granddad. ‘Thanks for the help,’ Andrew added.

  Damian, still focused on the laptop, mumbled something under his breath that Andrew didn’t catch. It sounded friendly enough.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ Andrew said.

  ‘Un-huh.’

  ‘What’s it like with the cats?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘It looks like your dad is pretty keen on them, if not your mum too. They haven’t got the awards on display all over but your garden’s like a fortress. It must take up time and money.’

  ‘I s’pose.’

  ‘What’s that like for you?’