Something Buried: An absolutely gripping mystery thriller

by Wilkinson, Kerry

  ‘Jen, just wondering where you are. Call me.’

  Andrew hung up, stared at the screen and then dialled once more. He got voicemail again and hung up. An Arctic chill tingled at him, but he wasn’t ready to admit he was wrong yet. It wasn’t Braithwaite. Not yet, anyway. Jenny could have returned to her own house for some reason.

  Andrew left his flat and knocked on the door opposite. It was soon opened by a black man with bushy stubble, who nodded a surprised ‘hi’. Andrew didn’t know the man’s name, although they knew each other in the same way Andrew knew everyone else on his floor. For the most part, he and his neighbours kept to themselves. They were polite enough to nod at one another when they passed in the corridor, got into the lift at the same time, or lobbed bags of rubbish down the trash chute – but that was about it.

  ‘Hi,’ Andrew replied. ‘I was wondering if you’ve heard anything from across the corridor? I’ve got a friend staying for a few days and I wanted to make sure the noise was fine.’

  The man shrugged. ‘It’s fine, mate.’

  ‘Cheers.’

  The door closed and Andrew knocked on the doors of the flat either side of his, asking the same question. Nobody had seen or heard anything that day, which wasn’t a surprise but hardly reassuring either. They might have heard nothing because nothing had happened, or because their music or the television was turned up.

  Andrew locked his flat and returned to his car. Before he set off, he called Jenny once more, but still only got her voicemail. The upbeat sound of her voice grated as he willed her to actually answer.

  The roads around the university were busy as Andrew drove to her house. A group of lads in fancy dress were doing the conga close to All Saints Park on their way into one of the nearby pubs, while other students filmed the spectacle on their phones. Every traffic light seemed to be red as Andrew stopped and started his way towards Jenny’s place, trying to assure himself that all was fine.

  When he arrived at her house, the lights were off. There were a few sawdust shavings underneath the newly replaced window, but the blinds were down and he couldn’t see inside. Andrew knocked and waited, pressing his ear to the door, though he couldn’t hear anything. He tried phoning once more but got voicemail again – and there was no sign that her phone could be in the house.

  A young woman roughly Jenny’s age turned out to be her next-door neighbour. She was in fleecy pyjama bottoms and a dressing gown when she answered and left the door on the chain.

  ‘Sorry,’ Andrew said, ‘I’m looking for my friend who lives next door. Jenny. Do you know her?’

  The woman shook her head.

  ‘I’ve sort of… lost her,’ Andrew added. ‘I’ve tried her phone, but she’s not answering.’

  ‘Long dark hair?’ she said.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I’ve seen her around, but I wouldn’t know her name.’

  ‘Do you know if she’s friends with anyone around here?’

  Another shake of the head. ‘Sorry.’

  The woman clearly wanted to go, so Andrew apologised again and stepped away. He started to pace the street, phoning Jenny twice more. The result was the same as before. Fighting back a rising panic, Andrew continued to the end of the road and then followed the lane that flanked the back of the houses. He counted them down until he was pretty sure he was at the back of Jenny’s. He looked both ways and then jumped the gate.

  The yard was small and empty, except for a bicycle concealed by a rain cover underneath the back window. Andrew pressed against the glass, trying to angle himself in a way that would allow him to peep through the small gap in the curtains. Even when he managed it, all he could see was a bare patch of wall in her living room, certainly nothing that could help him find Jenny. He tried the back door just in case, though it was locked. Out of ideas, he headed back to his car.

  Two more calls to Jenny’s mobile went unanswered, so Andrew scrolled through his contacts list, thumb hovering over Thomas Braithwaite’s name.

  Should he call?

  Was Andrew’s attention what Braithwaite wanted? If so, had he wasted the past hour by knocking on doors and trying to find Jenny when he already knew what had happened to her? He’d last seen her four hours before. In that time, so many things could have happened. If she’d been snatched in the way he had, she could be on a ferry at Liverpool docks by now, or hidden away at the other end of the country. Braithwaite could have done anything to her.

  Andrew pressed the button to call Braithwaite and then instantly thumbed the end call button before it connected. He paused over the redial button and then dropped his phone on the passenger seat. If she wasn’t at her home and she wasn’t at his, there was one other place Jenny might be.

  Andrew parked in his office space and hurried along the cobbled alley, fighting the sense of fear as he passed the spot from which he’d been grabbed. There were no street lights and the only illumination came from the steady haze of orange of the main throughway at the end. He got to his office unscathed, though his heart was a hammer thumping away at his chest.

  The door was locked, the lights off – exactly as Andrew had left it when he and Jenny had finished earlier on. He’d gone to the car park, while she’d set off through the tight mangle of alleys towards the spot where she would eventually emerge onto Cross Street.

  Andrew walked the route just in case, but, for much of it, there was not enough light to see anything anyway. The backs of the offices doused the tight roads in shadow and, aside from scattered rubbish and the odd person using the lanes as a cut-through, there was nothing. Certainly no signs of a struggle.

  Back at the office, Andrew let himself in. He locked the door and left the lights off as he headed upstairs.

  ‘Jen?’

  The upper lights were darkened, too – as he’d left them – and there was no sign anyone had been around their desks. Andrew shone the torchlight from his phone around the room, finding the pair of upside-down mugs on the draining board. As far as he could see, nothing was out of place. The only other light was the red LED blinking underneath his monitor, telling him the computer was off.

  Andrew sat at Jenny’s desk, almost falling over as he misjudged how low her seat was. He looked underneath her keyboard and mouse mat, but there was nothing. Her drawers were locked, but he undid them with the spare keys they had concealed underneath the cactus that lived on the window sill. The top drawer was full of paperclips, pens, Post-its and the usual array of stationery. The second contained envelopes and a file relating to another case they’d been looking into. Nothing unusual.

  The bottom drawer was three times the size of the others and was packed with the types of thing more usually associated with a shopping trolley packed by an eight-year-old. There was a box of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes and another of Coco Pops, plus half-eaten packets of Hobnobs, chocolate Hobnobs, chocolate digestives, rich teas, chocolate rich teas, Bourbons, shortbread fingers and Fox’s Creams. There were also two large bars of untouched Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut.

  Andrew marvelled at the amount of sugar she’d packed into one drawer and was about to close it when he noticed the large red envelope wedged between the two boxes of cereal. There were two words on the front: Emergency only. The handwriting was Jenny’s – neat and efficient. It was sealed, but Andrew figured this was as much of an emergency as it was going to get. He ripped open the envelope and then picked a second, slightly smaller one, out from the first.

  No, really. This is only for an emergency – Jenny’s handwriting again. She drew a circle over the letter ‘i’ instead of a dot.

  Andrew couldn’t help but smile. He opened the second envelope, but that only revealed a third.

  Seriously, if this isn’t an emergency, don’t open this.

  He could almost hear Jenny’s voice saying the words she’d written on the envelopes. Andrew pulled apart the final one anyway and twice read the card inside. Even with the situation, he couldn’t help but smile sadly.

 
; Regardless of what anyone else thought of her, Jenny was something special.

  Which was all the more reason why he needed to find her soon.

  Thirty-Seven

  Andrew sat at his own desk, following the bullet point instructions from Jenny’s card. When he loaded findjenny.com, he was taken to a black screen with three small white squares. He typed his day, month and year of birth into the gaps and then pressed enter.

  For a panicky second nothing happened, and then the screen flashed bright with colour, displaying a map of the United Kingdom. Almost instantly it began to zoom in, first on the central part of the country, then more specifically on the north-west of England, then Manchester itself. The screen froze momentarily, the blue M60 motorway ringroad hooped around the edge of the city before it zoomed once more.

  East Manchester.

  The earrings Jenny had taken to wearing weren’t a fashion statement at all – one of them contained a tracker that synced with a website she’d set up herself. She didn’t want Andrew to spy on her as such – but she did want to him to be able to find her in an emergency.

  He wondered if she was more observant than he’d given her credit for. Things with Braithwaite had been building and perhaps she’d realised something like this could happen.

  The map zoomed once more, showing the massive Clayton Vale park on the left of the screen and the far edges of the motorway on the right. Another flash and it was homing in on the Droylsden area of Manchester.

  Two final flickers and there was a red dot hovering over a single house on a road that backed onto Ashton Canal.

  Jenny – or at the very least, her earrings – were in a house five miles away.

  Andrew’s first instinct was to charge across the city, but he wanted to be prepared. He typed the address into the electoral roll and came up with a name that meant nothing to him: Tyler James.

  He didn’t think he’d ever met anyone named Tyler and the last name meant little. Andrew searched the name, looking to see if there was any further information, but a credit check revealed nothing important and there were no hits from the Morning Herald’s online news archive. Next, he tried searching for Tyler’s name along with Braithwaite’s – but there was no obvious link between the two. Andrew knew he could try one or two of his sources to get more information – a criminal record check, that sort of thing – but he’d already lost five minutes.

  He didn’t stop to think much more. It was a straight drive out of the city, albeit one punctuated by nonsensical traffic lights that were on red, even though there was hardly any traffic. Andrew drummed the steering wheel anxiously and called Jenny twice more, getting voicemail both times. The satnav got him through the final few streets until he emerged onto the street where Jenny’s dot had been.

  He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but it was a picture of suburban normality. There was a mix of neat semi-detached and detached new-builds, each with tidy white-rimmed double-glazing, small patches of green at the front and pristine driveways. It was as picket-fence-perfect as England got.

  Andrew drove to the end of the cul-de-sac, turning around in the circle at the end and then heading back the way he’d come. He parked on a connecting street and then walked through the shadows of the pavement, surveying his surroundings. There was nobody on the street, not even any passing cars. Most of the curtains were pulled closed, but a few had the blueish light of a television spilling through the front windows. This didn’t have the feel of something Braithwaite could have set up, but then Andrew had no idea what else might be going on.

  Number thirty-six was close to the end of the cul-de-sac, detached with a small black rail fence surrounding a patch of grass at the front that wasn’t even a metre wide. It could barely be called a garden. The downstairs lights were on, seeping through a gap at the top of the dark curtains. There was a small, unmarked white van on the driveway, but nothing unusual. Andrew stood directly underneath the street lamp, which, because of the angle at which the light was set, happened to be the darkest spot on the street. He turned in a circle, taking in the houses around him, looking for movement. There was no one around, nobody showing the slightest bit of interest in him.

  Andrew headed to the front door and knocked sharply. He held his breath, waiting and wondering what might be inside. He heard a shuffling and then the door opened to reveal… a stranger.

  The man was a few inches shorter than Andrew, nearly bald and thin, though not in an athletic way. He had youthful eyes and largely unwrinkled skin, making it difficult to judge his age. It was like he was a young man trapped in an old person’s body – some sort of not very good Hollywood comedy caper. Probably involving Adam Sandler. The man blinked up at Andrew, eyes widening. ‘Hello?’

  Andrew had been expecting something more than this. A person he knew, or at least recognised – or some Iwan-like brute.

  ‘Hi,’ Andrew stammered, ‘Um… sorry, I think I might have the wrong place. I was looking for my friend.’

  The man – presumably Tyler James – continued to stare. Beyond him was a bright hallway, nothing untoward. ‘Who’s your friend?’ he asked, rubbing at his eyes. It was only then that Andrew noticed the vague rounded outlines cut into the area above his cheekbones. Andrew tried to picture him with glasses and then wondered if, perhaps, he wasn’t such a stranger after all.

  ‘No one,’ Andrew replied quickly. ‘I think I’ve got the wrong address. Sorry to have bothered you.’

  The man mumbled something Andrew didn’t catch and then clicked the door closed.

  Andrew stepped back onto the pavement, trudging slowly in the direction of his car, counting to ten and then turning to see a flicker of the downstairs curtain.

  He sped up, making sure he was out of eyeline from the house and then tucking underneath another lamp-post to think.

  The man’s identity was a mystery and yet there was something niggling at the back of Andrew’s mind that made him think they’d seen each other before. What’s more, with the way the man’s eyes had widened, it felt like he knew Andrew.

  Above that, he trusted Jenny – and the tracker she’d set up said she was inside.

  Andrew kept an eye on the window of number thirty-six while he hurried from lamp-post to lamp-post. He paused underneath each one, making sure nobody was watching, until he was back at the front of the house. Once there, he squeezed into the gap between the side wall and the parked van, sidestepping until he reached a wide garage door with a gate at the side. It was panelled wood, a little taller than he was. There was no light at the back of the house, leaving thick shadows that stretched from the neighbouring property. Andrew could barely see anything himself, but at least that meant the cover shrouded him. He tried twisting the gate handle, rattling it gently, though it was blocked.

  After taking a breath, Andrew pushed himself onto tiptoes, reaching over the gate down to where the latch should be. It was a stretch, but the tips of his fingers scraped the top of the metal catch. He pushed up even higher, cheek grazing the wood as his back strained and his shoulder clicked so loudly that it actually echoed. Andrew clamped his lips together, forcing himself not to grunt in pain as – finally – his fingers reached the solid spherical catch. He popped it up and the gate creaked inwards.

  Andrew held his breath, listening in case the sound had been heard. A few seconds later and he was in the back garden. It was small and tidy, a rockery lining the length of one fence with a puddle of grass surrounded by paving slabs. There was a barbecue underneath the window and a single gnome staring at him from the far corner, lit up by the white of the moon.

  All ridiculously, unerringly normal.

  Except for the gnome.

  It had a sky-blue hat and scarf – and suddenly Andrew knew exactly where he’d seen Tyler James before. He’d been one of the crowd by the players’ coach at the football stadium and also outside the gates of Jack Marsh’s house. He’d been with the woman who had an enormous chest and wore shirts that were way too small. She
’d told Andrew that Jack was going nowhere in response to the newspaper rumours of him leaving and then goggled as Jenny said they’d been invited to the house. Andrew had barely registered them – two hardcore fans among a sea of slightly more normal supporters.

  Andrew eyed the house, looking for curtain twitches or any other signs that he was being watched. When there was nothing, he crept to the back door and delicately tried the handle, which was locked. He ran his finger along the window frame, just in case they’d not been secured, but he wasn’t that lucky.

  What should he do?

  He could call the police – but what could he realistically tell them? He could hardly explain about trackers in earrings. They’d think he was mad.

  He could knock on the front door again and try to barge past Tyler. That was assuming he answered. The woman he’d been with at the football was bigger than he was, the sort of person who looked like she could give sumo wrestling a good go. Assuming she also lived here, Andrew didn’t particularly fancy his chances against her.

  It was now nearly five hours since he’d last seen Jenny and any number of awful things could have happened to her.

  This was no time to be fannying about.

  Andrew picked up the biggest stone he could see in the rockery and hurled it at the back door as hard as he could. He hoped for splintering glass, thousands of pieces, the satisfying crunch of something being shattered.

  Instead, the rock bounced off the glass and dropped back to the ground with a pitiful dink. As far as Andrew could see, it hadn’t left an indent.

  He thought about picking it up to try once more, but there was suddenly light streaming through the thin blind of the room next to the back door. Andrew ducked behind the wall of the porch as the sound of a key turning clinked around the garden.

  Everything happened in a flash.