Something Hidden (12 page)

‘Hmm . . . I’m not sure.’ She side-stepped to the next counter, tugging on her ponytail. ‘How did they know it was here?’

Nobody replied for a moment until Sampson realised she was talking to him. ‘Sorry?’

‘The robbers. How did they know the necklace for the movie premiere was here?’

The shop owner shuffled nervously but Jenny hadn’t glanced away from the cabinet. She was scarily good at lying. Andrew had seen her in action before but not quite like this.

‘I don’t know,’ Sampson said, stumbling over the words. ‘I do repairs and resets for production companies fairly regularly, so it could have happened at any
time.’

‘How much was the necklace worth?’

‘Er . . .’

Jenny finally gazed up, hitting him with her light-up-a-room smile, dimple on show, hair-twiddling aplenty.

‘They said it was about £250,000.’

‘Wow.’ She twisted back, reaching for Andrew’s hand again. ‘Would you buy me a necklace for that much if I asked you to?’

‘Um . . .’

She was back peering at the rings. ‘I suppose it was just bad timing then . . . ?’

Sampson was stumbling over his words worse than Andrew. ‘The police said they looked into it. I think they interviewed some of the production assistants – that sort of thing. I
don’t really know.’

‘How long did it take you to get back up and running? It must’ve been a nightmare with the insurance and everything. We were broken into last year and it took ages to sort
out.’

‘It wasn’t too bad – they didn’t steal everything, it was more about getting the shop into a decent state again. The men who did it were sent to prison a few weeks ago,
so it’s nice to move on.’

Sampson tapped gently on the case, ensuring that was the end of the conversation.

‘You can’t let them grind you down, can you?’ Andrew added. It was something his dad used to say.

Sampson nodded, shuffling back towards his workbench until Jenny caught him in her gaze once more.

‘There are some nice things here,’ she said, ‘but I think I’m looking for something a bit . . . bigger. You said you get your own diamonds in . . . ?’

The shop owner glanced from Jenny to Andrew and back again.

‘Money’s not really an issue,’ she said, looking particularly pouty.

He glanced over his shoulder towards a door next to the workbench. ‘I do have something in the back . . .’

In a flash, he skipped across the shop, locked the front door, and flipped the sign around to read ‘closed’. He delved into his pockets and unlocked the internal door, leading Andrew
and Jenny inside. The room was small, with a long table built into the wall on one side and rows of drawers and cabinets on the other. At the far end was a safe, almost hidden by a filing cabinet.
There were no windows, only a bright white strip bulb overhead.

As Sampson headed for the safe, Jenny peered around Andrew towards the table. He followed her gaze towards neat rows of small tools: tweezers, what looked like a dentist’s scraper,
silicon, plus chain links for a watch and a few other odds and ends.

‘How about this?’ Sampson said.

The ring he was offering Jenny looked like a child’s toy because it was so large. The prism-shaped diamond gleamed in the light, a row of tiny red jewels surrounding the main crystal. He
licked his lips as Jenny took it, first twisting it around in her hand and then slipping it onto her little finger.

‘Wow.’

‘I set the stones myself.’

‘How much?’

Sampson leant forward and whispered the amount in Jenny’s ear. She nodded along, adding a low whistle for effect before handing it back and waving Andrew towards her. As he bent his knees,
she pushed onto tiptoes and spoke softly into his ear: ‘This is fun.’

Andrew stepped back, smiling. ‘It’s up to you.’

‘When are you expecting your bonus?’

‘Any day now.’

She nodded, twisting back to Sampson and offering a little curtsey. ‘We’ll come back after we’ve been to Monaco in that case.’

The shop owner’s face fell as he crouched, returning the ring to the safe. Jenny was looking past Andrew towards the worktop again but he couldn’t figure out what had caught her
attention. When the safe was locked, Sampson hauled himself up and ushered them back towards the main area of the shop.

Jenny hurried towards the front door, unlocking it herself and calling ‘thank you’ over her shoulder. She grabbed Andrew’s hand and pulled him across the road until they were
well out of earshot.

‘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.’

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 print-out 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 print-out 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 print-out of something Andrew had read very recently. It was why the name Braithwaite seemed familiar.

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.