Something Hidden (14 page)

‘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.’

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 happen the way everyone’s saying. It feels wrong anyway. They’re scroats, 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.’

‘I have but what can we do? We’re here to look at a cat, not start a fight. It’s not like I’m going to turn up packing heat.’

‘
Packing heat?
How old are you?’

‘Old enough to watch American movies. Anyway, there are two of us.’

‘There might be two of them. Or three. Basically, your thinking is that everything’s fine because if they’re a bunch of nutters who go mental, they’re at least going to
have to murder the pair of us, rather than just you?’

It really didn’t sound so good when she put it like that.

‘We’re in Wigan – it’s hardly the gun capital of Europe.’

At least he was trying to convince himself.

As Andrew finished speaking, a banged-up green Citroen flung itself into the car park, catapulting over the kerb and nearly hitting a concrete post, before swerving sideways and spinning one
hundred and eighty degrees. The rear bumper was held on with duct tape, with the exhaust howling like a tractor that had failed its MOT.

Nice and incognito.

Jenny was out of the car and on her way before Andrew could stop her. By the time he’d opened his door, heaved himself out, and pulled his trousers up, she was almost by the green car.

A man stepped out of the other vehicle wearing a purple basketball vest, baggy grey three-quarter-length shorts and Converse trainers.

In. Bloody. February.

Jenny was right: he probably was a nutter. He was white, with cornrows and, apparently, no mirror.

A second man bundled his way out of the passenger seat, wearing a puffed-up coat so huge that he looked like a giant grey bubble. He was wearing a baseball cap with sunglasses.

In. Bloody. February.

Cornrows eyed Jenny up and down. ‘You a’ight, baby?’

She wasn’t fazed: ‘Have you got the cat?’

‘Jack first.’

Andrew wondered if the translation app on his phone would be of any use. Not only was Cornrows talking nonsense, he was doing it in an accent that had a sort of Australian-American twang, albeit
with a Lancashire inflection. It sounded like he’d had a stroke.

Jenny turned to Andrew, who still had his hands in his pockets, thinking that it might look a tiny bit intimidating. No one had to know that the only thing in his pockets was a half-eaten packet
of Polos.

‘We want to see the cat first,’ Andrew said.

Cornrows shook his head. ‘No way, bro.’

Baseball Cap had walked around the car, all five foot four of him. With the coat, he was almost as wide as he was tall. Andrew took half a step backwards to try to peer through the rear window
of the green vehicle but the glare was too intense.