Captcha Thief (Amy Lane Mysteries) (23 page)

As Jason slept, Amy stared at four lines of poetry and willed herself to see the connection.

She had an advantage – she knew the identity of LizzieSiddal, had access to Paul Roberts’ previous caches, and anything left on the museum servers. But if Paul had made any notes, they were locked inside his laptop, beyond her reach.

Reviewing previous caches, she was struck by the frequency with which he used lines of poetry. AEON’s analysis confirmed they were mostly from Rossetti and Siddal but also other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

She reviewed a couple of the forum posts for LizzieSiddal caches, studying the comments of solvers for patterns in how he had worked his magic.

One seemed straightforward enough:

For all the voices from the trees

And the ferns that cling about my knees

It led to a small copse full of ferns and an old computer speaker lodged in a tree hollow. The community had not rated that cache particularly highly.

A more recent effort was far more oblique and seemed to have bemused the local geocaching community for a couple of weeks. The line was ‘Take thou thy shadow from my path,’ from the bitter rant that was Siddal’s ‘Love and Hate’. Amy hoped she would someday love someone so strongly as to despise them so thoroughly.

At first, the forum’s denizens had thought it was a UV-marked cache, best seen at night with a modified torch. They had traipsed all over the spot and drawn a complete blank, returning to the car cold and as bitter as Siddal had ever been.

But then Corelia, that child prodigy, had looked beyond the line of poetry, to the work as a whole, and found the line ‘And thou art like the poisonous tree’. Corelia had noted a tree with bright yellow flowers and tentatively identified it as the poisonous laburnum. Her gleeful chatter on the forum brought to mind her excited messages after she solved the Belfast cache, and the wide-grin selfie she’d posted alongside it.

Amy shook her head, shook off the image, and returned to the Welsh cache. What if there was a similar situation here, where some of these lines referenced the wider poem and not the individual words or even titles?

Of course, that widened the field of options considerably but there were only so many words that could match locations in the museum. And the easiest way to mark a location in the museum would obviously be to reference…

Amy stopped. She brought the four poems up in four windows, spread across all three monitors with her notes and the quoted lines alongside them. Her eyes scanned the poems and titles in line with her suspicions and it all fell into place before her eyes.

Of course. How had they not seen this before?

She leapt from her chair, flinging her arms over her head and shouting for joy.

‘What the hell’s got into you?’

She turned to Jason, who had snuck up on her, the scent of the shower still lingering on his skin.

‘I’ve solved it,’ she breathed, blood surging through her body at a rate of knots.

Jason said something but she wasn’t listening, too busy moving on to the next thing.

‘We have to get into the galleries ourselves, undetected. I can’t manipulate the security settings from here – it’s on a separate system, because they apparently have the sense not to network that. We’ll need help to get in and then I can divert them.’

She looked up from her computer. Jason was smiling at her.

‘What? Why are you smiling like that?’

‘You look better,’ he said simply.

She felt it too, a renewed sense of vitality, a sense of purpose. She tried to hold on to it, savour it. She would need it for what they had to do tonight, to get her past the fear of stepping outside the front door.

But the future that lingered was bleak and terrifying and, most important of all, lonely. She knew it was only a matter of time before Frieda returned, before she made good on her threat to ruin Amy’s life and those of everyone she cared about.

She could no longer protect Bryn and Owain, her former friends far beyond her reach, but she could still do something for Jason. With her last bit of borrowed time, she could fashion him a new identity and send him away.

He would have to leave his family, leave Cardiff for a time, but he wouldn’t go to prison again. She would set AEON to self-destruct and she would wait for Frieda like a lamb meek at the slaughter. She could not save herself, but she could save Jason.

Which was only fair, really, given how he had saved her, every day since he had walked into her life. She wished she could be brave enough to tell him, but she feared he would rebel, demand to stay, act like the danger-seeking fool that he was.

No, she would enlist Dylan’s help in spiking his drink and sending him on a train, with his new life and a brief note explaining that he couldn’t go home until after the trial. Gwen would be angry with her, but she would understand. Cerys would know why she’d done it and it might go some way to repairing things between them. Not that it would matter.

‘Penny for ’em?’ Jason asked, bringing her back to the room.

‘You’re trying to sell me back my own pennies,’ Amy joked, dodging him. ‘I don’t pay you enough to waste them like that.’

‘I was thinking, though,’ he said, ‘that I might have a way into the museum. A way that’s not entirely illegal.’

Amy forced a smile, snatching at her former job even as it ebbed away from her with the last of the day’s sunlight.

‘I’m all ears.’

With the Scottish cache attributed to her name, only one obstacle remained: the cache in the museum. The clock ticked down to the demise of ‘The Blue Lady’, but Truth was entirely focussed on the last cache. It was almost over.

Once she had the money, she would be free. Free from her past, her obligations. She would buy the life-giving organ her mother needed, become a true daughter – a success – and then she would vanish. She would run far away and start again, somewhere where the stain of blood wouldn’t spread, taint. She could forget, perhaps, what she had done for duty.

And, failing that, she could fall on her sword.

Her email buzzed with a new message.

Tonight it’s over.

Truth felt a strange sensation coiling in her belly, anticipation and fear. The last cache would finally be delivered into her hands, and she would be able to claim the prize fund. Pay the smugglers, buy another kidney, escape.

Unless this creature betrayed her.

What if they used the Welsh cache to complete the game themselves? What if they stole the prize from her, humiliating her, causing her to fall without a shred of dignity remaining? It would all be for nothing, nothing at all.

She had to protect herself. She had to protect her reputation, as a daughter. If the cache was being solved tonight, she knew exactly where her enemy would be. She would have all she needed to ensure her future, out from under her mother’s withering stare – a success, at last.

She might have needed help to reach the finish line, but she would be the one to cross it. There were no middle men, no one brokering her fate and her mother’s. Only her, standing alone, sword in hand. Ready.

She would wait and watch, and then she would act. She had done it before, after all. What was one more fallen? She had already paved her road to hell.

Truth had trusted in fate before, to her peril. This time, she would leave nothing to chance.

The first step was always the hardest.

When she’d taken that first lurch out into fresh air, she’d been fuelled by desperation. Jason, on the verge of losing his life to a madman, had proven to be sufficient motivation to risk her heart beating out of her chest.

The second time round, she’d had no choice at all. Flee from her former sanctuary or take a bullet. The handful of benzodiazepines she’d swallowed had numbed the fear – for a little while. Adrenaline was a powerful drug, the best she’d tasted yet, and she’d leapt from a burning building while in its grip. Once she was pushed beyond the door, she’d found she could run.

But every time since, she’d chosen to cross the threshold. Not because someone’s life was in danger, but because she wanted to be free. Free from fear, and good enough for Jason. Good enough to keep him close, to prove she was worth the investment of his time.

Tonight, she had to take that step once more. Except this step was a deliberate foray into danger. She could stay at home, stay safe, and screw the bloody painting. She could watch movies with Jason and eat ice cream and not take the chance that her heart would beat out of her chest, that her weaknesses would lead to their failure.

But Corelia was in hospital because of her. This was a mess of her own making and she had to be brave. She had to swallow down her medicine, her fear, and take the first step beyond.

‘You okay?’

She laughed nervously, unable to articulate how far from okay she was. Jason had watched her swallow the tablets nervously, checking the dose before he even gave them to her, making sure she was on the level. That she wouldn’t freak out, or pass out, or let him down. How little he knew about how badly she’d already let him down, and her barest of plans to save him.

She called the lift, clutching her tablet to her chest like a life preserver. Jason hovered beside her, like a shadow, and his warm hand settled on her shoulder. Silently there for her. Always there for her. What would she do when he wasn’t?

She couldn’t think on that now. She had to concentrate on tonight. Get in, find it, get out. All without getting arrested. How hard could it be?

The lift arrived and she stepped inside, the walls threatening to close in, but she held them at bay with the sheer force of her will.
I will not panic. I will not panic. I will not panic.

The floor sank, silently conveying them to the ground floor, to the door. The archway into hell itself. She was voluntarily throwing herself unto the breach, going into battle with herself, with only one man at her side. The only man she would ever need – if only he could stay.

The lift door opened and Jason stepped past her to hold open the front door, like a gentleman does for a lady. As if she was worth that, as if she was something more than a little girl playing dress up, pretending to be a grown woman and hoping he would never notice how uncertain she was inside.

‘After you,’ he said.

She breathed in. Breathed out.

And stepped out into the world.

They waited outside the museum in the Micra, parked around the corner at the front of the Main Building of Cardiff University, where Jason had first spied Frieda.

Of course, now he knew that she’d wanted to be seen, had reeled him in to get to Amy. And he had let her, intrigued by her strange mixture of flattery and derision, playing hard to get so he would push harder.

What a fucking mess he’d made, thinking with his dick.

He’d fetched the Micra from outside Dylan’s garage, not venturing inside, not ready to face his mate’s questions about his trip with Frieda. He would’ve preferred to have the Harley, but Dylan might not have caught all of Frieda’s damage and Amy would never consent to ride pillion. He had a hard enough time persuading her outdoors, let alone onto the back of a vintage motorcycle.

Her fingers drummed on her tablet case, a bass line that was vaguely familiar to him, her eyes darting from shadow to shadow through the windscreen.

‘All right?’ he asked, for what must be the hundredth time.

She nodded once, her neck so tense it looked like it might snap at the action.

‘It’s okay if you’re not,’ he added.

She took a deep breath and let it out with control. ‘I want to be at home in my bed with a cup of tea.’

‘As soon as we’re done,’ he promised.

His phone rang once and stopped.

‘That’s the signal.’

They exited the car, Amy taking a moment to get her legs under her. She was wrapped up in an old hoodie of her sister’s, still not possessing a coat of her own that wasn’t over ten years old. She’d resisted any attempt on his part to suggest she buy one, as if owning a coat meant she was now a person who went outside.

They rounded the back of the museum and ducked the barrier into the car park. Crossing the dark, empty space, they descended down to the loading bay for the museum.

Silhouetted in the doorway, a figure waited for them.

‘The night guard is patrolling the ground floor. We don’t have long.’

Talia held the door wide and beckoned them inside. They followed her up a back staircase and into a gallery, objects in shadow forming menacing shapes in the half-dark. She led them to the security office without a word, the door ajar.

Amy slipped past her and bent to insert a USB stick into the terminal that was connected to the rotating images on screen. A mess of code scrolled across the screen for a few moments, before a new screen showed the computer logging Amy in as an administrator. She brought up a code box and typed fast as lightning, swearing under her breath every time she had to backspace due to clumsy fingers.

Talia moved away from him and Jason caught her arm. ‘Where are you—?’

‘I’ve played my part,’ she shrugged. ‘Make sure you get her back.’

Jason held on to her, unsure whether he could truly trust her. But she misread him, leaning in to plant a soft kiss against his lips.

‘Maybe in another life,’ she said, and vanished into the dark.

Jason looked back to Amy, just in time to see her look away from his reflection in a blank monitor. Shit, she had seen.

‘Amy—’

‘I’ve replaced the feeds,’ she said quickly. ‘We have blank corridors for the next hour.’

‘That was—’

‘I’m tired and I want to go home. Let’s get this over with.’

She removed the USB stick and uncovered her tablet, the live camera feeds now streaming directly to her.

‘I’ll be in the lab,’ she said and made her way down the corridor alone.

He adjusted his Bluetooth headset to hear her breathing in his ear, anxious about letting her wander off on her own like that. But what could possibly happen to her in a deserted museum?

He made his way upstairs along the agreed route – the one with the most cameras, contrary to his instinct. But Amy needed to see him and she could warn him of any impending discovery.

Jason entered the main gallery from the back. But this time he walked away from the entrance to the adjacent gallery, where they had found Paul Roberts and what remained of ‘The Blue Lady’.

Instead, he flashed the light from his phone onto a scuff mark on the floor, one that had yet to be cleaned away from the last time it had been made. From there, he angled the torch up and took in the beauty of
Venice at Dusk
, the spectre that had drawn Paul Roberts here night after night.

Of course he would choose his favourite painting for this most important of caches. And beholding it for the first time in the paint, Jason could understand the thrall of Monet’s
San
Giorgio Maggiore at Twilight
.

But he could not linger. Tearing his eyes away from the painting, Jason started his search.