Captcha Thief (Amy Lane Mysteries) (21 page)

The steady rhythm of the train should’ve lulled him to sleep, but Jason was wide awake.

He couldn’t shake the image of that smart-mouth girl from his head, the teenager willing to go toe-to-toe with Amy Lane over some ridiculous geocache. Did she remind Amy of herself? Pushing at all the boundaries and willing to go to any lengths for her independence? Independence now shattered by one blow.

Jason had picked up a knife in Glasgow. It wasn’t difficult to find, following the decline of the streets until he found the rough heart of the city. They charged him tourist prices, of course, but he felt safer with some protection. His mam would kill him if she found out he was carrying again.

He hadn’t heard anything from Cerys, and Amy hadn’t answered her phone. She had texted him a couple of minutes later, just as he was about to place a 999 call – she was fine, Cerys was on her way, don’t worry. At least, that’s what he thought it said. He was getting better at deciphering Amy’s texts, but he could never be sure.

The Glasgow geocache had been easy to solve, in the end. He’d sat through hours of classical music before the final bow, slipping unobtrusively down to Row B of the Front Circle to seek out Seat 58. On the underside of the seat, a small black oval was stuck in the centre, difficult to distinguish unless you knew what you were about. And Jason had been briefed by Amy Lane – he knew what he was looking for.

He’d pulled out his phone and scanned the raised spot, which yielded a short alphanumeric code. The cache was his.

Sending the code back to Amy Lane, she’d replied with a short acknowledgement text –
ty @
. Jason tried not to be offended that he’d only warranted three letters in response to the greatest solved mystery of his admittedly short career.

But the taste of victory had soon faded, leaving him to think about Corelia, about Amy, about the thief and murderer who was desperate to solve these puzzles. For Jason, it was a game, but for the killer, it was worth taking a knife to a teenager.

They were missing something. But what?

His phone rang with his boss’ song, ‘Someday I’ll Be Saturday Night’ by Bon Jovi disturbing the quiet of the sleeper train. He fumbled to answer it with fatigue-induced clumsiness. ‘Amy?’

‘Frieda Haas was here. At our house.’

Jason’s mouth went dry. ‘Looking for me?’

Amy paused, before a soft sigh came down the line. ‘No. She was looking for me.’

With all the horror of a ticking time bomb reaching zero, the past few days slid into focus with absolute clarity. She hadn’t been hunting Jason at all. She had used him to get to Amy.

‘This is about … computers?’ he said vaguely, looking about him for eavesdroppers even as his mind reeled away from him. Frieda had used him.

‘I have something to tell you,’ Amy said. ‘It’s about my parents.’

Despite the circumstances, Jason felt his heart quicken in anticipation. He’d gleaned bits and pieces about Amy’s mysterious past, but never enough to weave a cohesive whole. A small part of him wished she could’ve told him without being forced, but it was too late for that now and he hadn’t the energy to dwell on it when so much was at stake.

‘When I was first … ill, Lizzie was at boarding school. Our parents went travelling and left us with our grandmother. She was … her memory was poor. She couldn’t do the things she needed to anymore. She went into hospital and never came home. Lizzie and I needed to get out. We needed to hide from Social Services, because I was underage and I was ill and they would take me away.’

Jason could hear Amy labouring with her speech, the tale tumbling out of her in a hurricane of words.

‘Breathe. I’m not going anywhere.’

She took a breath. ‘I stole from them. I stole from my parents. I hacked into their main bank account and I emptied it. I … I left them just enough for the flight home, to come back for us, but … they never did. They got insurance, or used their savings, I don’t know – I don’t care. I used it to buy our house and make new identities, to send Lizzie to university and then to Australia. That’s why Frieda’s investigating me.’

Jason closed his eyes. He’d always been suspicious about Amy’s unlimited funds, especially in light of her estranged parents and a spat he’d witnessed between Amy and Lizzie over them. But to know it was stolen? From her own family? That was hard to swallow.

‘How much money are we talking?’

‘Five million pounds. Not that they missed it. My father always invested wisely.’

Fuck, that wasn’t a handful of petty cash. A theft like that made Jason and Lewis’ planned gold exchange heist look like a raid on piggy banks.

‘Say something,’ Amy pleaded.

Jason realised he’d been silent for a couple of minutes. But what the hell could he say to that? ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’ve called my lawyer.’

Jason was well acquainted with Joseph Treves, who had defended him during his most recent run-in with the law. Jason didn’t know how Joseph had come to work for Amy, but he knew his stuff when it came to mounting a defence.

‘Why hasn’t she arrested you?’ Jason wondered aloud, before realising that was a question more likely to rile Amy than soothe her.

Yet she answered calmly. ‘I don’t think Frieda has hard evidence. If she gets access to AEON and the basement server files, she’ll be able to find the proof she needs. I can erase as much data as I can, but it always leaves a trail. My hacking skills weren’t up to much in 2003, so it’s a pretty obvious one.’

‘Will she get access?’

‘She needs a warrant. If she could get one, she would have one by now. She’s waiting for me to fuck up.’

Jason knew the perfect way for them all to fuck up and they were right in the middle of it. ‘Amy, these geocaches—’

‘We owe this to Corelia,’ she said, immediately, voice hard like iron. ‘I’m seeing it through to the end.’

‘If it gives Frieda the proof she needs, we’re sunk.’

‘I will worry about Frieda,’ Amy said, adding the NCA agent to a long list of anxieties that Jason had watched her buckle under for months. But not break, never break. He never wanted to see that.

‘And me? What can I do, Amy?’

‘Come home,’ she said.

With the National Crime Agency holed up in the detectives’ office and his best detectives in a little unit of their own, Bryn was at a loss. Until poor Leah Martinez was stabbed at Cardiff Central Station.

The scene itself was a write-off, already trampled before someone had thought to put up a cordon, and he sent his one remaining ally – Cerys Carr – with a uniformed copper to fetch the girl’s personal effects and clothing, for Indira to go over.

He should be sending Cerys back to college, away from this mess, keeping things official. But he needed someone on his side right now and if she was all he’d got, he would take her over a hundred uniforms who might have loyalties elsewhere. At least, with Cerys, he knew her loyalties lay in several opposing directions and he could wager that she felt as bad as he did about the whole bloody mess.

But when she returned from the hospital, she dumped the evidence with Indira and scarpered. Bryn made his way down to the forensics lab immediately, despite the clock ticking over to midnight, sensing that this hadn’t been some random stabbing. Leah was mixed up in the bigger picture somehow.

Indira had laid out the clothes on a tabletop in the shape of Leah’s body, two large monitors in the corner showing radiological images in cross section.

‘The hospital sent over their CT scans,’ she said, waving at the screens behind her. ‘It will allow us to reconstruct events without access to the original wounds.’

Bryn prayed they would never get that access. ‘Cerys left in a hurry.’

Indira wordlessly gestured at the small pile of personal effects, not yet relevant enough to the investigation to consider processing for fingerprints, DNA or trace.

Bryn donned a pair of gloves and inspected the items. The plane ticket stubs immediately caught his eye and his heart sank. Return tickets to Belfast? What would a Cardiff schoolgirl be doing in Belfast, and why would that information have Cerys vanishing into the night?

This had Amy Lane written all over it.

‘Very shallow wound,’ Indira said, calling Bryn’s attention back to the room.

She had altered the CT image so that it displayed a close-up of a spinal bone, pointing at the screen with a plastic probe.

‘The tissues have collapsed back where the assailant removed the weapon, but you can see by the mark on the vertebral process that the blade must’ve reached the spine.’ Indira moved the image on several layers. ‘Yet there’s no corresponding mark on the superior vertebra.’

‘Which means…?’

‘Which means the knife was asymmetrical. A shallow, asymmetrical knife. Where have we seen one of those recently?’

Bryn inhaled sharply. ‘When the thief took the picture from the frame.’

‘It would all be conjecture at this point, were it not for the clothes.’

Indira returned to the table, spreading out the back of Leah’s jumper. The material had been hastily cut down the front and was flaking dried blood, but the tear just to the right of centre was still obvious.

‘Pass me a swab.’

Bryn handed over a thin plastic-handled swab. Indira gestured for him to hold the material taut, as she ran the swab over the edges of the entry point. She held up the end for inspection and, among the rust-coloured bloodstains, little flecks of lilacs and green sparkled in the light.

‘I don’t think that’s your ordinary DIY emulsion. I think this will be a proof-positive match to a certain Renoir painting.’

‘So the murders are linked,’ Bryn said, his suspicions confirmed.

‘The attacks are linked,’ Indira corrected gently. ‘Leah Martinez is still alive.’

Bryn coloured. ‘Of course, that’s what I meant.’ He had worked too many homicides recently for a small-town cop. ‘Anything else you can tell me?’

‘Count the ticket stubs.’

Bryn returned to the tray – four stubs, two out and two back.

‘She was with someone.’

‘I’d check the hospital, if I were you. I think you’ve got an eyewitness.’

Trying to find an anonymous mail server was like following a breadcrumb trail after the birds had feasted on it.

After several dead ends and ghost routes, Amy tried to look for other sites accessed via the same route, a technique that had previously landed her a backup server in Poland. However, it seemed the thief only used anonymous email and not an IP spoofer. Which meant the rest of the trails were all out there somewhere, unencrypted and waiting – except Amy had no idea where to start.

She examined the raw traffic data for the UK Treasure Hunt website, narrowing down the index of search to Cardiff – if the perpetrator could make it to Cardiff Central with less than an hour’s warning, they had to be local. She saved the previous month’s data to a database and set AEON to match up public and not-so-public information with the IP addresses. They might be able to narrow down the list by the known demographics of the assailant.

Not that there were many. An approximate height was all they knew for certain, and that could easily be altered by footwear. Amy could only hope something would stick out when she had the list completed.

The last geocaching clue was the only thing left to work on. She hadn’t looked at the lines of poetry since Corelia’s call. Amy veered her mind away from thoughts of Corelia and tried to focus on the task in hand.

She brought up the lines of poetry alongside the original poems’ titles.

Yesterday was St Valentine:
‘Valentine – To Lizzie Siddal’

Water, for anguish of the solstice:
– nay
: ‘For A Venetian Pastoral’

Oh! May sits crowned with hawthorn-flower:
‘Fior Di Maggio’

And day and night yield one delight once more?:
‘Sudden Light’

Something weakly stirred in the recesses of her memory, an association between the titles and something important to the case. But what exactly it was escaped her tired, sluggish brain. Why couldn’t she think?

Amy looked at the poems again. The first poem was a comic tale for Valentine’s Day, about how much Rossetti missed his lover. The second was a sonnet inspired by a painting, as the full title explained – ’For A Venetian Pastoral, by Giorgione (in the Louvre)’. The painting was still in the Louvre, though it had now been attributed to Giorgione’s collaborator and successor, Titian. Not that Amy could find any connection between artists and their particular case – neither artist had work currently displayed in the National Museum Cardiff.

The third poem was a short, four-line effort. Not Rossetti’s best work, in Amy’s uncultured opinion. The fourth was beautiful, however, a poem of adoration likely directed at his muse – Elizabeth Siddal. But what the hell did they mean? Why those four poems, and why those four lines?

To Amy’s mind, a cipher was unlikely. The lines were rendered as originally composed – to find four lines of poetry, even in Rossetti’s prolific body of work, that exactly matched the coded message Paul wished to send? It was not impossible, but it was vanishingly improbable. Therefore, the secret must be hidden in the broad brushstrokes. Something about the words or the poems as a whole must solve the puzzle.

The doorbell rang. Amy froze with a convulsive jerk, hardly daring to look at the monitor. Was Frieda back with a warrant? Had the killer come for her?

But it was Cerys’ face which stared back at her and Amy let her in, relief sinking deep into her stiff muscles. She needed a hot bath, a glass of wine, and for this hideous case to be over. Before she fucked it up. Again.

The elevator doors closed and Amy spun her chair to greet her. Cerys stood in the doorway to the living room, tense and dripping rainwater from her soaked uniform. Her blonde hair had flattened into a dark bronze mat, trickling water across her neck, though she didn’t flinch as it hit her skin.

She looked angry. And dangerous.

With a quiet horror that crept up her spine, Amy remembered that Cerys wasn’t a good girl, had run with drug dealers and hard men, had set fire to public property and revelled in it. Cerys wasn’t a good girl and she was angry with Amy.

‘Well?’ Cerys breathed, like a dragon prepared to flame and burn everything in sight. ‘What have you got to say for yourself?’

Amy moved her mouth but no words came out.

Cerys’ laugh was cold as a tiled floor in winter.

‘You sent her into danger. You let her just walk right in and you don’t give a shit, do you?’ Cerys paced as she raged. ‘Is that what you do to my brother? Is that how his bones get broken and gangsters come after him and how Owain almost fucking died?’

Amy braced herself against the onslaught, hands gripping the arms of her chair. She had to keep breathing. Just keep breathing and it would go away.

But Cerys wasn’t going anywhere.

‘Do you have any idea of the consequences of what you do? The fucking terrible positions you put people in? No, you just sit here in your ivory bloody tower and let other people fall into shit.’

Amy wanted to remind Cerys that she too had been hurt, had faced danger with Jason, but it would only fan the flames. And Cerys was beyond reason.

‘That girl trusted you. I trusted you, because Jason said you were a genius and you knew what you were doing. You haven’t got a bloody clue, have you? You’re just stumbling around in the dark, while other people get hurt.’

Cerys raised herself to her full height, glaring down at Amy.

‘I’ve had enough. Owain is well shot of you, and so am I. You tell my brother – you tell him that if he wants to be part of this family, he’ll come home. Our mam’s had enough sleepless nights because of you.’

She left, leaving only embers and ashes in her wake, and Amy quietly shaking in her computer chair. She was losing what little control she had and, with an ultimatum like that on the table, how could she make Jason choose?

It was time for this to end.