Binary Witness (The Amy Lane Mysteries) (7 page)

Chapter Fourteen: Dial “M”

There had never been a man in her bedroom before. The internet had led her to believe it would go differently.

There had been no reason to get out of bed that morning. Yesterday, when Jason left her, the case had grown dull, lifeless. She had found Melody—now what? The corners of darkness folded in on her and she was alone with the black hole in her chest. So she went to bed and she stayed there, and she would stay until the black eased a little, just enough for her to believe the day wasn’t going to be utter shite.

And then Jason had turned up and hauled her out of bed like a lazy child refusing school—exactly what her parents, her grandmother failed to do. She should protest, complain that this was not in his job description, and fuck his sense of duty. But she had already asked him to exceed that job description days past and she couldn’t redraw the lines now.

So she nodded to Bryn and Owain and made an attempt at a smile. Bryn handed her a cassette tape and Amy scowled at it—God, what decade was this?

Amy hauled her ancient tape deck out from a pile of discarded bubble wrap, knocking it against a collection of empty wine bottles before setting it on the edge of her crowded desk. She loaded the tape and connected the thing to a hub crowded with connections and wires, patting AEON to assure her that the nasty nineties tech would be out of her way soon.

She installed herself in front of AEON, calling up an audio programme she’d cobbled together to identify instruments on metal tracks (definitively disproving the theory that “Stairway to Heaven” played backwards contained Satanic chanting—and securing her reputation in the conspiracy theory irc). She flinched as Bryn leaned over her shoulder, and fought down the urge to snap at him to back off, because this man was her friend, or the closest thing she had. Some days, Bryn gave her a reason to get out of bed.

“Grub’s up.”

Amy glanced at the mug that had appeared at her elbow, feeling Jason’s presence at her back, and gestured for him to balance the plate of toast and peanut butter on top of the cassette player.

“When you said
tape
,” she muttered, “I was expecting something from this century.”

Jason laughed and Amy caught Bryn’s grimace in the monitor reflection. He was leaning on the back of Amy’s chair and trying to subtly edge Jason away. But Jason just squatted down beside Amy’s chair, looking up at the screen with genuine interest. “This is the police tape?”

“Mmm.” Amy tweaked the programme to adjust for the horrible audio quality it was about to receive. “Silence in the library.” No one moved. She hit Record and pressed the Play button on the tape deck. The machine whirred to life, and the scratchy hiss of cassette background noise filled the room.

“
Whitchurch Police Station.
Sergeant Parry speaking.
” The man’s voice was surprisingly clear, but a rush of sound answered him, the buzz of several different voices in the background.

A woman’s voice spoke hesitantly, quietly. “
I
think I have information.
About the missing girls.
” She sounded young—and scared. The accent was unusual, something a bit...Spanish, maybe? Amy had to strain to make out her words at all.

“
What sort of information?
Can you tell me your name
,
miss?
” The sergeant’s voice was soothing, but the woman didn’t want to be calmed. “
It’s on the internet.
Write it down.
” She read back the address of the forum, one letter at a time, taking him to the specific post. Her voice shook on each one, a quavering treble that quietened whenever the ever-shifting crowd around her rose to crescendo.

“
And what’s there
,
miss?
What are we looking for?
” There was a long silence from the caller, as the crowd behind her hushed, as if in anticipation. Slowly, the world filtered back in and she shook a deep, shaking breath. “
I
think it’s Melody Frank.
It...it looks like the pictures on the news.
Please
,
find her.
He’s...
” She stopped, an alarm ringing out behind her. “
I’ve got to go!
” The phone line went dead.

Everything was still. The tape played on, its eerie static crackling across the room. Amy reached out and hit Stop before pausing the computer recording. Its cheerful
bing
broke the frozen atmosphere in the room, but it did not bring her peace. She hid her disquiet, throwing herself into the mix, separating out the sound waves on her screen, moving them to individual channels and adjusting the volume controls.

“There’s an algorithm to block the static. That’s half the battle.” With one click, the messy scrawl vanished, leaving a few distinct lines. “I can get a clear signal on her voice—we should be able to match it. What’s her address?”

“We were hoping you could tell us,” Bryn said. “The phone call was from a blocked number. Trace has it coming from the Heath.”

Amy smiled. “I presume you mean the hospital and not the surrounding area, its railway stations or the area of grass they call a park.”

“The University Hospital of Wales. Switchboard, if you want precise.”

“Can you make that background stuff louder?” Jason pointed at some of the smaller lines, his finger not quite grazing the monitor. Amy resisted the urge to bat his grease-stained hands away from AEON, concentrating on his words.

“Yeah, but why? That’s what’s interfering with the signal.” However, she started clipping and adjusting the smaller lines, moving them to a new channel to examine.

“Maybe it’ll tell us where she is. Like that alarm? That could be one of their...y’know, emergency things. Where they all run to shock the guy.”

Bryn snorted, but Amy was nodding along, plucking up the large wave sound at the end of the recording and adding it to her collection. “The crash bell. Could be. Would need a comparison sample.” All that
ER
-watching was finally paying off.

Jason climbed to his feet and nudged the side of her chair. “Now eat your toast. It’s getting cold.”

Amy dutifully picked up her toast, still playing around with the sounds, and munched thoughtfully. “Why call from the hospital?”

“She doesn’t want to be identified,” Owain answered from the sofa, biscuit in hand. “It could be anyone—doctor, nurse, cleaner, porter, patient. The place is its own village.”

Amy started playing the various tracks. Some were too quiet to be heard clearly, but there were five distinct voices on the tape, three women and two men. Only the odd word could be made out, but it seemed to be two conversations, one about a failed celebrity marriage and the other about rugby. “Mundane. Nothing identifiable at all.”

“It could be a waiting room or a café,” Jason said, but Amy just shrugged. Without anything concrete, it was all just guesswork. She played the alarm, a high-pitched beeping that echoed around the living room.

“That would move you in a hurry,” Bryn said, slurping down his tea.

Amy tapped impatiently on her mouse and picked up her second round of toast. “It’s useless without a reference. It could be anything—crash bell, fire alarm, doorbell? Useless.”

Jason suddenly leaned forward and gestured to the middle of the main monitor. “Go back on her—just before the alarm goes off.”

Amy looked up at him curiously, before doing as he asked, playing the recording again. “
—pictures on the news.
Please
,
find her.
He’s...
”

“There!” Jason looked round at them triumphantly, only to be greeted with blank faces. “Don’t you get it?”

“No, boy, we don’t get it,” Bryn said, his tone cutting. “Want to share with the class?”

“She said ‘he’! Who’s she talking about?” Jason gestured at the screen. “It doesn’t make sense with what she’s said. Unless...”

Owain grimaced. “Unless she knows him.”

Amy struggled to process that information. “Then why hasn’t she come forward?”

“She’s scared, isn’t she? You can hear it in her voice.” Jason sounded like he knew what he was talking about, the woman’s tremor echoed in his own words. It was only then that Amy remembered he’d been to prison, that he was a rough man with a criminal record whom she’d invited into her home, but it didn’t occur to her that she should be afraid. That those large, clumsy hands that carefully spread peanut butter on every inch of her toast could pound a man into the ground was failing to register on her usually hypervigilant radar. “Maybe the hospital was the only place she could call from. Maybe he put her there.”

“Or I was right and the picture was put up on that forum for her. He was sending her a message.” Amy bit her lip, looking nervously up at Jason. He placed a hand on her shoulder and she looked back to her monitor but didn’t move away. His palm was warm through the thin cotton of her T-shirt. She didn’t want to move away.

“What kind of message?” Owain said, voice concerned. “‘You’re next’?”

“We don’t even know if it is a message.” Bryn moved away from Amy’s chair to pace the room. “We don’t know who this woman is. She could be a victim, sure, but she could be Myra Hindley. We need to find her.”

Even with her fascination with the macabre, Amy had struggled to read about the Moors Murderers. The idea that a second Brady and Hindley could be gathering momentum in Cardiff chilled her.

“Ain’t that what you do best, Detective—catch crooks?” Jason’s voice was all innocence, but Amy sensed something between him and Bryn, something sour that she was only just noticing. What had passed between them in the time it took her to shower?

“Oh, we’ll find her, son. Don’t you worry about that.” Bryn drained his mug and gestured to Owain, who snagged another biscuit before hurrying to follow his partner.

Chapter Fifteen: To The One I Love

When he sat down at his computer, his hands were shaking.

The girls were all over the news. Someone had found out they were dead, but he didn’t know how. They were calling it murder. Murder! They didn’t understand, none of them did. At least she would understand. He could tell her. She’d understand it was all for her.

The old laptop started slowly, but he coaxed it to life, talking to it like his old mum had talked to plants. To help them grow. He’d talked to the girls, but they hadn’t wanted to chat, just stared at him. Their pretty pictures would have to talk for them.

He logged on with his good password, with all the letters and numbers, random to anyone else but his shibboleth to the real world. Here, he could be free. Here, he didn’t have to be with people who didn’t understand.

There were places, good places where they taught you things. That sometimes loving someone meant that other people got hurt. That was part of life, they said. The way to drive a woman mad, they said, was to make her jealous. Summon the green-eyed monster from the depths and she would come to you, beg you to take her. His friends were mentors to his superhero, spurring him on to greater heights, greater devotions.

He opened up his blog and he wrote to her. She was his muse, his inspiration, his prize. Without her, he wouldn’t have the strength to make these sacrifices, but he had to unleash the monster. He had to make her realise that she loved him.

And that meant he needed to find a new girlfriend. Slim, blonde, perfect. Nothing like his love, but that flawless skin and shining hair that was splashed all over the covers of magazines, top shelf, quality. Her skin would glow in the flash and there she would be captured, ready to tantalise, to enrage.

He smiled to himself, the fear fading, as he wrote, confessed:

My love, I need you. Please care for me as I do you. Don’t you understand? There needs to be more between us, oh so much more. Not with him. I’ve seen you with him everywhere and it hurts me, freebird. I know you don’t want to hurt me. These girls mean nothing to me, just a good time. If you say the word, I will come to you and we can be together. That’s how it’s meant to be. Meant to be, freebird.

I love you.

Chapter Sixteen: Big Brother’s Watching You

Amy found her.

She almost missed her, chivalrously shielded beneath a bouncer’s umbrella, but the coat’s loose button was unmistakeable. Melody and her distinctive coat then headed down the street towards the Hilton, and walked beyond the camera’s meagre range.

Amy slumped in her chair, clearing her parched throat and tapping the rim of her long-empty wine glass. She needed something to drink. She’d get up in a minute.

She picked up the feed from the hotel across the street and fast-forwarded to the correct timestamp. Once she’d found her, it was impossible to lose her—the camera never lied.

She laughed to herself, a croaking gulp. It was funny, how she could make the camera lie in a matter of minutes. Fabricate a girlfriend in an instant so the judge would grant a divorce. She could go to prison for that, but the woman’s black eye had been turning yellow round the edges and she looked so tired. Amy had done that one for free.

There—Melody, trotting down the street on her spindly heels, slightly unsteady but practiced. She hurried on past the camera and Amy flagged that segment for her timeline, before skipping ahead to the next.

Melody’s route followed the walls of the castle, past the statue of the intense Aneurin Bevan and down St. Mary’s Street. She was practically alone on the street, too late for latecomers and too early for closing. She was wrapped tight against the wind and rain, swaying like a willow tree. She carried herself with a relaxed, confident air, ironic for her gallows walk.

Amy shifted her shoulders, drawing herself up in her chair. She took a deep breath, forced her shoulders down and lifted her nose, contemplating her reflection in the monitor. No, not even close.

At the end of the street, Melody stopped. Amy’s focus returned, waiting. What had caught her eye? Amy tried to find the reverse angle, but the nearest camera didn’t cover her line of sight. Melody walked back down the street and down one of the side streets. Here, there were plenty of cameras and Amy had a good view of Melody stuffing her face with chips. Amy’s stomach rumbled. She checked her watch—01:09. When had she last eaten? Jason had made her toast this morning, hadn’t he? She’d find food in a bit.

Melody tottered back onto the main street and wandered back—wait, was that the nightclub where Kate worked? Kangaroos, Wallaby, some kind of Australian mammal. Amy captured a still and saved it, before continuing to play the footage. Where was she headed?

The cameras grew sparser away from the city centre and Amy struggled to follow her. Melody crossed roads haphazardly before finally disappearing under the Brains bridge towards the Bay. Amy frantically searched her camera database, but the next set she had was in the Bay proper or much farther along the Taff.

Amy stabbed the keys angrily. So, she was walking towards Bute Street—Jason’s territory. Where was she going? Was there a specific person she was looking to meet, a boyfriend maybe? Or was she just lost? There was no data. Just speculation.

Amy got up from the chair, pinning her blanket to her like a cloak, and collapsed in a heap on the sofa. Speculation was boring. She needed something to analyse. She closed her eyes, bored to death. Sleep was something to do.

At 23:49, she heard a noise. An odd little noise—
scratch scratch scratch
like the first hesitant skips of a dying hard drive. The glow of AEON’s monitor was the only light, but she had already imagined him: an intruder, a murderer, a rapist.

Amy was frozen, unable to move from her spot on the sofa. What was it?
Where
was it? She had to know, she had to compute—to file it under safe or deadly in her head.

The noise was coming from next door.

Amy was torn between relief and the desperate urge to call Jason. Next door was safe, wired with half a dozen sensor wires and cameras lying dormant that could be activated on her word. Her grandmother’s house had been her first project.

It had been Lizzie’s idea, hiding in plain sight from Social Services and anyone else who wanted to drag Amy into the light. Their parents were gone, drinking cocktails in some semi-legal speakeasy in Dubai. And their grandmother... There was nothing left of her, not really. The threads of her mind had all unravelled and the woman who stared accusingly at them was not their grandmother anymore. When they took her into hospital, it was the beginning.

Hacking their parents’ bank account was the most difficult work she had ever done, but it was the piece of which she was most proud. Five million quid—gone, in an instant. And then slowly filtering into the account of Amy and Elizabeth Lane. Money was all just code, in the end.

She left them just enough for the plane ticket home, but they never came. From their transactions, she gathered they camped out in the Middle East until Daddy’s next paycheck or the insurance company coughed up. After that, it hurt to watch anymore and she stopped obsessing over their pennies and moved on to building her and Lizzie a new life.

And so she’d bought the house next door. Preparing herself for moving even that distance had taken a whole morning of deep breathing, a handful of little blue pills, and Lizzie’s hand pressed firmly into the small of her back as she stepped over the threshold.

Lizzie had boarded up their grandmother’s house and attended the cremation alone. Amy kept the urn on the mantelpiece of that sad little house, among the dust and the memories. And the things that went
scratch
in the night.

She sank back into her blanket nest and closed her eyes. But sleep was distant, and she spent hours listening to the mice playing in the spaces where she used to live.

* * *

On his day off, Jason headed down to Dylan’s garage to spend his afternoon under a car and take his mind off the murders. But the girls wouldn’t leave his head and as he passed the back of Cardiff Central station, he was thinking about Melody’s last steps. Had she ended up in his part of town, the rough end of Cardiff?

From under the shadow of the Millennium Stadium, he emerged opposite the walled-in greenery of Bute Park before continuing on across the river and into Canton. Here, the pound shops rubbed shoulders with bohemian cafés and Indian restaurants, and Jason caught a whiff of marijuana floating alongside the strong smell of curry.

Dylan’s garage was tucked away down a residential street, occupying the place where a couple of terraced houses once stood. One of the first things Jason had done when he got out was help Dylan repaint the shabby signage to reflect a reputable business. A lick of paint could cover a multitude of sins.

When Jason arrived, Dylan had already locked himself in the office with the accounts and Jason had no wish to disturb him and get roped into helping. He imagined it was quite hard to conceal a couple of grand in dodgy parts from the taxman. So he settled himself underneath a rusting Ford and went hunting for a radiator leak.

“Pass me the sealant, love?” he said to the pretty redhead kicking back on an ancient deckchair in their garage. He wasn’t entirely sure if she was Dylan’s latest bird, or a very attentive customer, but it was nice to have someone to talk to. “Do you think the police are telling the truth about those girls?”

Jason sat bolt upright, narrowly avoiding clanging his head on the underside of the Mondeo. “What do you mean by that?”

But the girl continued to blithely chat away as she handed him the sealant, seemingly oblivious to his irritation. “They must know something. They just don’t want to cause a riot. It’ll be English students or Polish plumbers, something political. Or they don’t want to stop people going out in the run-up to Christmas.”

“What if they just haven’t found him yet?” Jason returned to the undercarriage of the car. A conspiracy theorist—great. “They don’t have a lot to go on.”

“Oh, whatever. They say they don’t have the bodies, but where can you hide a body round here? The docks? The river?”

It kept coming back to the river. Funny that Dan and Amy had come to the same conclusion. Why was the river such a good place to dump a body? Or was it all nonsense? With the Taff swollen from the autumn floodwaters, the body would probably be carried downstream until it hit the Cardiff Bay Barrage. Surely they would notice that? They must have sensors or something to stop the thing getting blocked.

Then again, where else would you hide a body? Jason watched a lot of TV and the type of movies where hiding bodies was just another day at the office. You couldn’t just keep it in the house or the basement—the rats would get the scent of it. Even the car boot wouldn’t hold it for long. Dump it or bury it, and you’d be a fool to do it inside the city. Especially when you’d got at least two bodies to hide.

The woman continued to natter. “Nah, the pigs have got everything they need—they’re holding back, aren’t they?”

Jason thought she was being ridiculous, but it was a thing to consider. Amy only had what Bryn gave her—what if he missed something? Jason had already done a bit of legwork for Amy, talking with Pete and Dan mostly by accident. Couldn’t he go out and ask questions? He knew people, the kind who wouldn’t talk to Bryn. He could get information that the cops never would. He could be Amy’s man on the street.

Jason pulled a face. Man on the street? He needed to get a life, or no one in the neighbourhood would talk to him ever again, including his mam.

But maybe he could go over old ground, talk to these students and the girls’ friends. He was more their age, had more in common. They might be willing to tell him things that the cops wouldn’t understand. And then he’d take it all to Amy, so she could solve this thing. Be a real member of the elite taskforce, a real asset to her. And he wouldn’t need to worry about what time Cerys got home at night.