Binary Witness (The Amy Lane Mysteries) (22 page)

Chapter Forty-Seven: A Murder of Magpies

When Jason walked into her living room, Amy inspected her assistant as thoroughly as a pathologist, tugging off his coat and looking him over with a clinical eye. She distantly heard Jason asking Owain if he wanted a cup of tea, but the young detective declined, returning to the riverbank.

When the door closed, Jason touched her hand. “I’m all right. Just tired.”

Amy was sceptical to say the least. “You shouldn’t run with your arm like that. You might displace it and need an ORIF.”

Jason laughed, startling her. She didn’t see why major orthopaedic surgery was funny. “Have you been reading about my broken arm on the internet?” he asked, clearly amused by the idea.

Amy sniffed and returned to AEON, reviewing the CCTV footage of Jason chasing the killer from the station. Instead of lying on the sofa as she expected, Jason came to stand behind her, watching his pursuit through the car park.

“I watched it live,” she said quietly, remembering the acrid taste of fear in her mouth as she’d seen this fool of a man run after a serial killer in the middle of the night with flimsy backup.

“Pritchard reckons that he left the riverbank at the next bridge down. Bryn said to ask you about cameras.”

Amy had already considered the downstream and upstream exit points, and focussed in on that bridge and the cameras on the Grangetown side as well as ones in the Bay, which were far more numerous. It always seemed odd to Amy that the more affluent areas had the most cameras, despite being the least likely to host crime. The paranoia of the rich.

“What time did you lose him?” she said. In the answering silence, she perceived that wasn’t the most tactful way of accessing the information, though it was the most direct. She glanced up at him, but he seemed to be thinking, not brooding.

“Um...Bryn can tell you exactly. I’d say it was about five minutes after we left the station, maybe less.”

“I’ll take it from the last time we sighted you on camera.” Amy checked the timestamp and moved the footage to the correct point. “We won’t miss him then.”

The lighting was reasonable in this area because of the approach to the Bay, so they had a fairly good chance of seeing his face. It was barely ten minutes after the station departure time that a figure appeared beside the bridge, turning his head left and right, before strolling onto the road. He was dressed smartly, wouldn’t be out of place in a restaurant, and walked into Cardiff Bay.

“The glasses are an irritant.” She cursed their reflection and obfuscation of his face. It was the top half of his face they were missing, at least until Carla could identify him properly in the morning.

She followed him from camera to camera across the entire Bay until he crossed over Lloyd George Avenue, the main road connecting the Bay to Cardiff proper, and she lost him in the expensive housing estate. Cursing him, she picked up the surrounding camera streams but he didn’t reappear in a fifteen-minute window on any side where she had eyes.

“I can make a composite,” she said, reassuring herself that she had enough partial glimpses of his face to attempt to reconstruct the whole. She moved to begin the arduous task, when Jason’s hand rested over hers on the mouse. She realised he’d come to stand beside her, looking down on her with an indescribable look. Almost affection. Like he cared.

“Why don’t we call it a night?” he said. “Carla’s out of trouble, the pictures will still be here in the morning. We’ve got a hundred leads now and he won’t leave without Carla, will he?”

Amy suspected that last statement was more wishful thinking than certain knowledge, but she allowed herself to be drawn into the comforting lie. “You can’t sleep on the sofa,” she heard herself saying. “Not with your arm.”

His expression held a hint of awkwardness and he stared at the floor. His fingers twitched on hers. “I can’t take your bed.”

This tough ex-con was a bit of a gentleman and she didn’t think she’d budge him on that. “There’s another bed. Come on—I’ll show you.”

She stood and led him through the flat, past both the bathroom and bedroom doors until she reached a dead end. There was a light switch on the wall and she flicked it.

The wall slid back to reveal a second lift. Jason stared at the lift, then back at her. “Are you actually a Bond villain? Do you keep a white cat down there?”

“I’m allergic to cats.” Amy got into the lift and Jason followed readily, so she assumed he didn’t actually think he was being led to his death. Good to know, she thought, pressing the button for the ground floor.

“There’s a button for the top floor too,” Jason said stupidly.

“Lizzie’s dining room, kitchen, lounge,” she said, the words coming easier than she’d expected. “I don’t go up there.”

Thankfully, Jason didn’t question further, just followed her out of the lift and onto the dim ground floor. The heat and noise of the server hit her immediately and she’d forgotten how soothing that had been for the years she’d slept down here, lulled to sleep by its immensely powerful hum every night.

She turned right into the room immediately below her bedroom. The single bed was stripped down, but it was otherwise as she remembered it—the white rug on the floor with the purple spot where she’d spilled blackcurrant squash, the faded
Firefly
poster on the wall, and the bookcase of outdated Year 9 SATs books and laughable
PC World
magazines.

“This used to be your room.” Jason walked up to the bookcase and pulled a dog-eared copy of
The Hobbit
off the shelf. “I can’t imagine you reading a book.”

“The last one I ever read,” she confessed with a small smile. “I was thirteen.”

He replaced the book reverently and sat on the small office chair.

Amy waved vaguely towards the door. “There should be blankets and sheets in the box room next door. They might be musty. They haven’t been out for five years. And the rubbish skip is outside your window, so that can get unpleasant in summer. I never open the French doors in my bedroom because of the smell. Actually, I don’t open any windows...” She was rambling, but Jason just shrugged with one shoulder, a gesture that was becoming uniquely his.

“I’ll be fine. Cheers.” He hesitated, smiled up at her, open and honest. “You didn’t have to show me this. You could’ve kept me believing you only had the flat. I’d never have known.”

“I don’t want to keep things from you. I want you to stay.” The words tumbled out before she’d thought them through, but he wasn’t running away and he didn’t think she was a freak. She’d been alone for five years and here was someone who wanted to stay with her—no, who she could pay to stay with her. It was a business relationship. He was replaceable, just like a broken lamp. Not like Lizzie.

“We should get some sleep,” he said and she nodded towards the bed.

“Can you...manage?”

Jason laughed. “Are you offering to help me? Because I’ve seen your bed, Amy.”

“You’ll do a better job with one arm than I would with two. Lizzie...” She trailed off, stopped. She wouldn’t tell him how much Lizzie used to help her. That would make it seem like she was aiming to replace Lizzie, and that was not what was happening here. She had been fine on her own. This just made it easier for her to work, if she didn’t have to worry about the washing up or whether the milk was off. He was useful to her work.

She worried about him a little, but she worried about everything. She was one of life’s little worriers. That was what her mother had called her. Amy had done her level best to forget that, push everything her mother had ever said to her far out of her mind, but that phrase just kept coming back. “One of life’s little worriers”—it sounded so banal, so harmless. Not so crippling she could no longer walk through the front door.

“Amy?”

She blinked and realised he was standing again, his hand hovering over her arm.

“Are you all right?”

“Just tired,” she lied, wondering if she would sleep, having opened old doors, old wounds. “I’ll let you rest. We’ll start at eight tomorrow?”

“Eight’s fine. No commute, eh?”

Amy smiled and wished him good-night, wondering what it would be like to have him always on hand. If constant exposure to her neuroses would wear him away quicker, force him to find somewhere new and away from her. Like Australia.

With too many thoughts crowding her mind, Amy lay on top of her blankets, staring at the ceiling and wondering how she could be better. How to make the world outside safer, to make the world inside warmer. There were too many variables. Too much information. How was she ever to discover the answers?

Like this case. There were too many victims. They had too many facets to their lives, places they might have intersected with the killer and yet none obvious. They had different friends, different courses, different jobs. Kate liked to have a quiet night in with an Indian and a beer; Melody liked to be out and loud with housemates, coursemates, workmates; and Laurie liked to save her pennies for weeks away with her girlfriend where she could form golden memories to carry her through the rest of the miserable, dull year. And then Carla was the anomaly, the chosen one, who had split from a drug-addled boyfriend and had a full-time job that made for crazy, high-stress hours at odd times of the day and night.

Every little thing was a clue, a jewel of information fit for a magpie. But how could she put it all together to make a trail to this killer, this man who knew them all? The most useful thing was the timeline of Laurie’s life between Melody’s death and her own demise. She must’ve encountered the killer then and she was sufficiently connected to update her Facebook status, Tweet about it and check in on Foursquare for every active minute of her day.

Unable to rest, Amy returned to AEON and brought up the timeline. Ten days. Ten short days in which so much had happened in Laurie’s life. The most striking thing had been the new job at the bar, but she’d met several friends for coffee and cocktails, gone to the cinema with Gina twice, and attended lectures most weekdays. Tomorrow, Amy would send Jason to every one of these contacts and find out if they knew the other girls.

And maybe Carla would wake up with the perfect sketch in her head, maybe the killer’s coat would yield some definitive evidence to Pritchard, and maybe some enterprising member of the public would recognise the killer at the bus stop and call it in. But Amy would still do her bit for these dead girls, her own threading of the jewels left behind, because she needed to be useful. She needed to have a purpose besides hiding in her flat and drinking Jason’s tea.

And, for now, catching the Cardiff Ripper was her purpose. Before he came back for more.

* * *

He lay on her bed, wrapped in her blanket and surrounded by her gentle musk. Tears warmed his frozen cheeks and he sobbed into her pillow. How could he have been so careless? He’d had no idea they were so close to him, that they would snatch his beloved from under his nose.

They had stolen her, and the nightly news, always so ready to tell tales, had shown new pictures of the two of them in their oversized coats and hats. They’d said only that she was being treated in a “secret location.” He would find her, though. There was no other option.

He’d barely got away with his life. That man... He shuddered, curling in on himself. He’d chased him down roads he’d barely known until he’d got to the blessed spectre of the river. Down by the bank, he was at home, scrabbling through the soft earth as quickly as he could until he got to the bridge into Grangetown.

Casting off the coat and itchy beard, he’d emerged with a bit of mud on his shoes and a shirt, tie and soft suede jacket. With his trembling hands concealed in his pockets, he wasn’t out of place amongst the late diners of Cardiff Bay, strolling along the waterfront as if he belonged there. He wanted to get out of the crowd, back home, but he couldn’t bear the thought of being there without his freebird.

He’d walked slowly through Splott, returning to familiar streets and trying not to cringe every time the helicopter flew overhead. They were looking for him. They were casting him as a criminal.

When he’d arrived home, opening up the house he’d never expected to see again, it had seemed wrong without her. The empty bottle of Bombay Sapphire on the table—only the finest for her, all the jewels of the Empire—reminded him of their bold caper, their heroic flight. They would’ve looked back on it in years to come and smiled fondly at how daring they’d been. But the scum had taken it from them.

And he knew exactly who was to blame. He’d seen that face before, remembered it vividly. Another favourite of the journalists, that one, but he was with the police now. He was the key to finding his freebird.

If he got to Jason Carr, he could have his freebird once more.

Chapter Forty-Eight: I Don’t Like Mondays

“I’m heading back to London.”

Bryn looked up from his desk to look at Eleanor questioningly. She was dressed in another sharp suit, this one in mauve with a frilly white blouse. And his ex-wife said he didn’t notice these things. “Already? You don’t want to wait until the thing is done?”

But Eleanor shook her head with a small smile.

“You’re doing a good job,” she said with surprising honesty, and Bryn felt his cheeks flush with pride. “Don’t let anyone above tell you otherwise. Besides, you’re close to him now and the girl’s safe.” Her face settled into an expression of disgust. “There’s word of a copycat in Manchester. I’m going to try to nip it in the bud before the situation escalates.”

Before there are three dead bodies and a hostage, Bryn thought grimly. He’d always be twitchy about missing persons from now on.

“Any last insights before you head off?” he asked, genuinely interested in what she had to say. She might be a bit odd and a bit English, but her heart was in the right place, and she was smart in ways he could never hope to be.

She studied the whiteboard carefully before gesturing towards her profile of the killer. “He’ll be in work today. He’ll have to be. But he will make a move for Carla, either today or tomorrow. He may have been patient before, played hard to get, but he’s had a taste of her now—he’ll be back for more.”

A chill crawled down his spine at her words and his hand unconsciously reached for the phone, thinking about adding another officer to Carla’s hospital room. Eleanor nodded to him and waved as she left, and Bryn watched her go with a sadness that surprised him.

But then he was back to the work, and she soon faded into the background of his memory, like old marks on a chalkboard.

* * *

All around her were dead ends and windows not yet open. It was a miserable day to be alive.

Amy stewed on the sofa, counting down the minutes until Jason came back and made lunch. Then he could get started on the list of places to visit on Laurie’s schedule. She’d shaded in the details since she’d handed the copy to Bryn, even going so far as to devise a route through town that would most efficiently cover the places Laurie visited before she died.

But first Jason had some errands of his own—picking up a few things to put in the room downstairs, stopping his benefits, checking in with his mother. Amy liked Gwen because she clearly cared about Jason. She’d stuck by him even after he stole that car, after prison. She was resourceful and she was tough and, if Amy ever grew up out of this shadowed half-life, she wanted to be a woman like Gwen Carr.

Amy had still been working on the CCTV composite when he left, mumbling complaints about the phone signal on the ground floor. She’d barely acknowledged him, putting the finishing touches on the killer’s face. It still wasn’t perfect and she was uncertain about the width of his eyes, but it was better than nothing. She’d sent it off to Bryn with a deep sense of satisfaction.

However, her productivity had left her with nothing to do. Melody’s phone, now slightly less soggy, was still transferring data to AEON but Amy wasn’t convinced anything workable would come out of it. And once she’d accessed Jason’s police statement and noted the reference to ticket machines, she had started work on accessing their records only to discover their servers were painfully slow and surprisingly resistant to an enterprising hacker. She’d given up on the personal touch and was now throwing her suite of cracking tools at it in the hope that something would penetrate. Meanwhile, Bryn was trying to gain the intel through old-fashioned policing—she had six spring rolls riding on his failure.

AEON beeped at her, then trilled again. Two alerts—almost worth getting off the sofa. Amy made a halfhearted effort to move, then sank back down. In a minute. Maybe when Jason got back.

She pulled her dressing gown closer around her. Jason would have to investigate the heating—it was too damn cold in here. There must be a draught coming in from somewhere, and he would probably know how to do something about that. It was useful having an assistant.

He would be disappointed, though, if she hadn’t finished this when he got back. Especially if he found her in exactly the same position on the sofa. He’d started going on about deep vein thrombosis and not drinking enough fluids, and she’d eventually relented and had another cup of tea. It was worse than having a mother. In fact, that particular paranoia had likely originated with Gwen.

Amy prised herself off the sofa cushions and shuffled over to AEON’s flashing screen. Melody’s phone data, such as it was, was ready for perusal, and the creaky old train ticketing system had finally relented and let her in. Lured by the hope of a man stupid enough to use his credit card, Amy went for the train tickets first and remotely connected to the little machine at Cardiff Queen Street.

AEON beeped again. Amy flicked open the alert—one of the external perimeter wires had tripped. It was the bloody pigeons again. She had been tempted to order a crossbow to rid herself of that menace once and for all.

The alarm beeped again. With a growl of frustration, Amy switched off the feeds from the perimeter sensors. How was she meant to work with all these unnecessary beeps?

While the ticketing machine data slowly loaded, Amy opened Melody’s data in a phone emulator and tried to make sense of the files. Some were corrupted beyond all recognition and she might have to go down into the raw data to find anything useful in them. A handful of contacts had both name and number, and a smattering of old text messages were available, but none particularly recent or relevant. Amy made a note of her most frequent text contacts regardless, but didn’t expect them to yield much. Bryn and Jason had already exhausted those avenues.

The ticket machine finally connected and Amy trawled Sunday evening for purchases. Twenty-six people had used the machine after eight o’clock that evening and only five of them had used a card. The rest were cash purchases, mostly to local stations, but Amy plotted all the destinations on a map. She also flagged the stops en route, in case he had both brains and means to purchase beyond his true station stop. The five card purchases traced to one woman and four men. Of the men, one was geriatric, so that left three potentials. Amy started an automated background search on the names, looking for addresses, workplaces, social networking, and returned to Melody’s phone.

She hoped that Jason would be pleased with how productive she was being. Maybe he would make her more spaghetti, or something different. He’d mentioned sausage and mash the other day, and her mouth had watered at the prospect of onion gravy.

Melody had the usual apps, some games, social networks, a few university-relevant items, and a browser with eight open tabs. Amy flicked through what remained of Melody’s notes—books for class, National Insurance number, a postcode, shopping list, university email address. Of all of them, only the NI number and postcode were created in the timeframe between Katie’s death and Melody’s.

She stuck the postcode into her map search and reviewed the background checks. One unemployed divorcé, one single athletic primary school teacher, and...

Amy stopped. She returned to the map search and zoomed in on the one highlighted building in the City Centre.

That was the connection. Of course. How could she have been so stupid? That was what all three of them had in common—it was staring her right in the face. She’d been so bogged down in the
who
and the
why
and the
where
that she’d completely ignored the
what.

Suddenly, a terrible thought occurred to her. A painful, twisting thought that made her blood run cold. Jason had gone into town this morning. What if the killer knew Jason? What if she’d sent him into the lion’s den?

Amy reached for her phone and started texting him. She had to warn him. She had to be subtle, in case the killer was sitting in front of him.
Oh God
,
please let it not be too late—

Hands grasped her from behind and hauled her back out of her chair. Amy shrieked and tried to pull away, but he was strong, seeking out the flesh of her neck. He’d strangled those girls. She was next.

Amy twisted and fought, trying to scream against the pressure on her neck. But he was dragging her backwards towards the kitchen, her feet slipping out from under her.

“I’m afraid no one can hear you,” he said, calmly. “But he’ll be home soon, won’t he? We’ll just wait for him over here.”

This was it—she was going to die. She had to focus, she had to find something strong inside her. She stilled in his arms, dropping her hands from his scrabbling hold on her shoulders. “Good girl,” he said. Her fingers tugged at her dressing gown belt and slid free of the heavy robe. She seized the handle of her chair and swung it at him. She saw it collide and then fled, running for the end of the corridor.

She grasped for the light switch and the lift doors shuddered open. Flinging herself inside, she pressed urgently at the ground floor button. At the end of the corridor, she saw a figure lurch into view. She realised she was somehow still holding her phone and, as the doors closed, she pressed Send.

“Please,” she begged. “Send, please send...”

The lift descended, the sound of banging and shouting coming from the floor above. The doors finally opened and she staggered out, before regaining her mind and shoving her arm in the door. The doors jerked open and she slid down, sitting in the doorway to prevent the lift moving.

She looked at her phone. No signal. She was alone in her house with a serial killer and Jason was walking into a trap.

“Fuck,” she said and banged her head against the door, praying for deliverance.