Captcha Thief (Amy Lane Mysteries) (4 page)

Amy was seething. How dare he hang up on her! While flirting with that moronic NCA officer!

She threw her phone on the floor, the casing bursting open and the battery lying exposed on the floor. She left it there out of spite. If Jason wanted to get hold of her, he could come home.

Staring at the broken phone, Amy realised that had been a particularly stupid thing to do. But she couldn’t quite muster the effort to put it back together, so it remained as a symbol of her anger – towards Jason and NCA agents who blatantly wanted to sleep with him.

Amy knew Jason was a hit with women, but she rarely witnessed these encounters. Somehow, it made the reality more solid, the churning in her gut justified. Of course, this was professional interest. While she’d like to say his tail chasing had never compromised him professionally, she remembered all too well the witness he took to bed and the ill-fated date to a body dump.

She swallowed a couple of little blue pills, to quiet her anger, and returned to her research. The original design and blueprints for the National Museum of Wales were locked away in an archive somewhere, and the historical map data was sadly lacking – at least, in an online-accessible format. From what she could tell, however, there had been a number of architectural landmarks nearby, including an old convent, numerous canals and, of course, Cardiff Castle. The museum had been built in what had been Cathays Park, the only remnant a small patch of grass in the centre of the civic buildings which boasted the city’s war memorial.

It was therefore feasible that there was some underground way out of the museum that the thief could’ve exploited. Amy would need to access experts in historical architecture to confirm it, and the most likely candidates worked at said museum. Which argued for an inside job.

She would need external verification of possible locations before sending Jason in to investigate. It would be too easy for one of the museum staff to misdirect them, if they didn’t know what they were looking for.

Amy set AEON to finding a list of names who might be able to help and switched her focus to investigating art heists. She was surprised by the sheer number of missing paintings, expensive ones, never found. She concentrated on Impressionist works, but the high-profile thefts involved brazen raids by men with guns.

One theft caught her eye – the targeted removal of a Cézanne piece from Oxford during the millennium celebrations. The entry was stealthy, but that was the only similarity. Thieves used scaffolding to get in and set off smoke canisters to cause confusion, whereas their thief had used a stolen key card and a brutal hammer blow.

However, Oxfordshire Police believed the painting had been targeted for theft. Perhaps that was the case here? From what Amy could see, it was the most famous piece at the museum. She interrogated the museum’s website for nineteenth century paintings of comparable value – and stopped dead.

One picture in particular had caught her eye, the most spectacular beauty filling her screen. A woman with startling red hair, like DC Aitken’s carrot top, painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Amy was captivated by the colours, the vibrancy of it all. She had never realised art could be alive like this, as if she could reach out and touch it – as if she were out among these things, in the real world, feeling the sun and tasting the fresh air.

The door buzzer sounded and Amy saved the painting for later, the colours still burning bright in her mind.

‘Yes?’

‘Amy, it’s Owain.’

She buzzed him up. Should she reinstate Bryn and Owain’s access privileges to the flat? She had shut them out after the police investigation into Jason earlier in the year, but they had all kissed and made up since then. Yet she liked having more control over her space, with only Jason able to come and go as he pleased. It made her safe space safer, secured her territory. She had increased the trip sensors around the perimeter, added more barbed wire and cameras. It was her fortress.

The lift doors opened and she turned to see him for the first time in weeks, the first time since … before. He was thinner and his eyes were pained, the same look she saw in the mirror every day. But he was whole and alive, and sometimes that was enough.

It was unlike him to visit her alone for an investigation, usually tagging along with Bryn and staying in the background. It was unusual, but Amy wasn’t quite sure what it meant yet.

‘Welcome back,’ she said, pushing her curiosity to the side for the moment.

He smiled half a smile and said nothing. He shifted his laptop bag off his shoulder onto the sofa, tactfully ignored the disembowelled phone decorating the floor, and handed her an encrypted memory stick.

She opened up the files – in quarantine, of course – and scanned through the lines of code. She wasn’t familiar with security systems outside her own, but she recognised a log when she saw one.

‘Who owned the stolen card?’

‘Talia Yeltsova. Senior Oil Painting Conservationist. Her car was broken into last night but, as the radio was obviously missing, she didn’t check to see if anything else was stolen.’

‘Where was her car parked?’

‘Outside the museum.’

Amy drummed her fingers on the edge of the keyboard. ‘Why was her access card in the car if she was at work?’

Owain pointed at the code on her screen, careful not to touch her precious monitor. ‘Looking at the log, you need a card to get in but not to leave. Security signs everyone in and out on paper and she arrived at nine-fifteen. The museum was already open, so she probably came in through the front door.’

Amy pulled a face at the paper records. Why anyone would store important information on something so fragile was beyond her.

Owain, however, was one step ahead. ‘I scanned and uploaded it to police evidence. It should be on the stick.’

Amy opened the hi-res scan and scrolled down the list. ‘Out at twenty-five past eight. Did she report the theft?’

‘No police log. We’re checking with the insurance company.’

‘Sunset was at…’ her fingers drew the data to her, like a spider flexing the strands of her web, ‘…nineteen fifty-three. That’s half an hour of darkness. Where exactly was she parked?’

She opened Google Earth and Owain pointed out the row of parked cars right in front of the museum’s main entrance, a small park up against them and the main road a stone’s throw away.

‘How did no one see him?’

Amy found the time window and camera angle on the CCTV footage she had stored. The image frame concentrated on the main entrance and quality was poor, but a few cars were visible in the background.

‘Show me the exact position,’ Amy said.

Owain pointed at the leftmost car. ‘That one. Volkswagen Golf. Red, not that you can tell on this.’

She scrolled through the footage, but only a few people passed by, not one stopping near the car. ‘He pulled this off in daylight.’

She started again from nine in the morning, the car parking up after a minute and the day zipping past in a haze of people and cars. It was just after two o’clock when she saw him, wearing a baseball cap with an oversized hoodie drawn over it. He walked up to the car, his back to the camera, and reached for the window. He withdrew his hand and then returned it a moment later, seemingly passing through solid glass to delve inside. Within a minute, he was walking away across the park and it was all over.

‘Professional,’ Owain said.

He sounded slightly awed but trying not to be. Most criminals in Cardiff tended to be gifted amateurs at best.

‘Inside information.’ Amy rewound the footage and captured the segment. ‘He knew exactly where she kept the key card.’

‘If she left it out, it would be easy. Or he looked the day before.’

‘We need to find out what he did to the car. Is it impounded?’

‘She already took it to a garage. We sent a couple of uniforms over there, but they’re a same-day service. The evidence is gone.’

‘The technique alone may be telling. We need to figure out his MO.’

Owain’s hand settled on her shoulder. ‘There’s a lot of ‘we’ in this case suddenly.’

It was odd, his hand being there. Only Jason touched her like that, but she didn’t move or shy away. He was warm and the smile on his face had grown more real.

‘Where’s your bloody – oh. Owain.’

Owain’s hand fell from her shoulder but Amy did not look at Jason, her cheeks red with unnamed shame.

‘Just bringing over some evidence,’ Owain said, his voice too even, like a man calming a bull.

‘When she didn’t answer her phone, I thought…’ Jason trailed off.

Guilt flooded her. She always answered her phone – and when she didn’t, she was immersed in a deep depression or a serial killer had broken into the house.

But then she remembered she was angry with him. ‘How’s your NCA friend?’

‘At her hotel. You should’ve told me you had something for Amy – I could’ve brought it.’

Jason’s voice was accusing, but he had no right to be angry. She burned with questions – how did he know Frieda was at her hotel? Had he escorted her there? Had he … lingered?

‘It came after you left,’ Owain said.

But that didn’t add up. They would’ve checked the security logs early in the day and, besides, a personal delivery wasn’t required. He could’ve added them to Bryn’s evidence folder and called her.

Which made her think he had come over to see her. But why?

‘You’d better be getting back to work,’ Jason said. ‘Because there’s so much to do, isn’t there?’

Suddenly, she understood the hostility, though Owain’s actions now puzzled her further. If he had blown off Cerys for the case, why had he made time to see her?

Owain moved away from her, past Jason and into the corridor beyond. She still didn’t look at Jason, even as she heard him plucking up the pieces of her phone from the floor.

‘He’s messing her around,’ he said.

He had no idea she was annoyed. It was hard to stay angry with someone who was completely oblivious to it.

‘You need to be more careful with your phone,’ he continued. ‘Or answer the landline.’

She’d left the telemarketing software running again, comparing voice imprints to a series of harassing phone calls received by a local businesswoman. She’d have to put her private work on hold if she was taking on the museum case, of course. Murders tended to consume her entirely.

Except, this time, it wasn’t the dead man’s face that haunted her, but the delicate features of a woman who’d died a century earlier.

‘The Blue Lady’ was staring at Truth.

She rested on an easel against the wall, out of direct sunlight and shrouded in netting. She couldn’t stay furled in a couple of old bin liners, despite how much Truth itched to stuff her back into the darkness. Instead, she looked at her captor through her veil of white lace. She didn’t accuse or judge, but her blank eyes were worse than any condemnation. She was vapid, empty. She thought nothing, knew nothing. What a worthless subject.

What had Renoir seen in her? What did so many morons see in her?

Perhaps it was their reflection staring back that fascinated them. They saw something of themselves in the nothingness of her face, her soul. They came every day in droves to coo and cluck over her, pretending to know something of Impressionism, claiming they loved ‘The Blue Lady’ to complete strangers and then forgetting about her for another year.

Maybe that was why
La Parisienne
repulsed Truth, who was nothing like the sheep who crowded those marble spaces with wide eyes and slack jaws. Beneath a quiet veneer, Truth was so full of thoughts, ideas, opinions, colour and contrast. But no one saw that.

They saw this hollow girl painted in brightest blue and assumed she had colour. They saw her and failed to see Truth.

But now they had to look. She had wagered freedom to finally be seen, to stop disappointing. Not in some gallery among so many other so-called masterpieces, but standing alone. The robbery was already in all the newspapers, a nationwide sensation – but that did not thrill her the way it might some. Only one person’s opinion mattered, a good opinion that could never quite be gained.

But that security guard – why was he there? Why had he come running? Why couldn’t he have stayed away? She was now stained with his blood, a black spot that could not be removed, like Shakespeare’s haunted woman.

Yet Truth was no further down the road to salvation. Trapped in limbo, only the waiting remained, draining life and colour as it eked out from hour to hour. She could wait a lifetime, but not with the harlot’s eyes burning a hole through the thin shield of the netting.

At least the dappling of red on those bluest of blue skirts made something interesting of her. Until it was painstakingly expunged from the oils, the whore restored to her former vacuous vanity. How easily the physical stain could disappear, yet the guilt beneath wore on.

Until that time, Truth was forced to look on the silly little girl in the portrait. But it would be worth it in the end – to finally be recognised, respected.

Visiting Swansea Prison felt like stepping back in time, retreading the steps of his past but rewriting the ending.

Jason had been banged up here twice before and he’d more than learned his lesson the first time. Being beaten to within an inch of your life tended to condition a person against risking a repeat experience. The second time was also his fault, but only in near-fatal stupidity rather than criminality. It had all come out in the wash for him, but he saw the scars their misadventure had left on Amy, on Owain.

Every time he visited Lewis, it was as if a shadow fell over him, a heavy cloak of dismay and failure.
You’re back
, the walls whispered.
You will never really leave us. Once a thief, always a thief.
Only when he escaped could he truly breathe again.

A few guards recognised him but he didn’t acknowledge their smiles or scowls. Lewis waved at him from his seat, Jason’s mirror in height, build and shaved head. They even shared the same tattoo, a fierce Welsh Dragon curled up on their right shoulders.

‘Jay Bird,’ Lewis said, clasping his arm before letting Jason take his seat. ‘How’s tricks?’

‘Still walking on the right side,’ Jason said, grinning. ‘Still rotten through and through?’

‘Chaplain tells me I’m a reformed sinner.’

Lewis matched Jason’s broad smile, but he suddenly looked much older, as if a forgotten weight had fallen again on his shoulders. The loss of Lewis’ little brother Damage tormented them both. Jason dealt with it by thinking about it as little as possible, and drinking whisky when he couldn’t bury the pain anymore. Lewis had instead tried to make sense of it as best he could. He’d seen counsellors and men of God, tried meditation and hard work, and shunned anyone in Swansea Prison even remotely connected to drugs. Which didn’t leave him with a lot of friends.

However, he had started hanging out with a better class of criminal and working towards his transfer to Cardiff Prison. That brought him into contact with exactly the kind of people that Bryn wanted to know about – the fraudsters and smugglers and gentlemen crooks.

Jason got straight to the point of his visit, respecting Lewis too much to lie about his reasons. Lewis listened attentively but silently, giving nothing away. Jason knew that none of this information was new to him. The prison grapevine often had the details of a police investigation before the papers.

‘And the police want to know who might be into a thing like that.’

Lewis sat back in his chair. ‘Obviously, the blokes I know have been banged up in here this whole time. And I’m not a grass.’

Jason snorted. ‘I know. You didn’t speak to me for two weeks when I told my mam about what you were growing in the back garden. I’m not asking for names. More like … what kind of blokes are they? Local boys? Out-of-towners?’

Lewis folded his arms. ‘What’s in it for me, Jay?’

His mate had always been mercenary. That was how they’d ended up planning a gold exchange robbery and not knocking over the corner shop.

‘Bryn’s already writing you a letter for the transfer board. Because he’s a good bloke and I asked him. You know I’ve got nothing else for you.’

Lewis’ face was impassive, stony. ‘My mam likes One Direction.’

Jason blinked. ‘Right.’

‘There’s a concert coming up. She needs tickets and an escort.’

Their eyes met. And they burst out laughing, startling everyone else in the room.

‘Oi, Jonesy!’ A guard called across the visiting room, a soft face that Jason recognised. ‘You too, Carr. No need to be rowdy now.’

Jason threw him a sloppy salute before turning back to Lewis.

‘Deal. But I’m sending my mam. I love Auntie Elin, but not enough to sit through that shit.’

Lewis leaned forward, eyes sparking with amusement but voice pitched much lower. ‘The word in here is that the crew can’t be locals – no one round here has the connections or the balls. Something similar went down in Oxford about fifteen years ago, but one of my boys knows the guys what did that and says it’s not them. They wouldn’t have killed the guard, no way. The gangs who are into moving art get into it because they don’t want the hassle of drugs, guns, and girls anymore. And they work big.’

‘How big are we talking?’

‘Jay, come on. We robbed the gold exchange and that was the crime of the year. These guys just made off with a painting worth millions. One fucking painting! But it’s high risk at both ends, y’know. What if the buyer don’t like it? What if you’re going international and his boys take against your boys? My friends who know about these things tell me it’s all Arabs and Chinamen. Who wants to get involved in that shit?’

‘So, they shove it in a suitcase and fly it out to Dubai?’

Lewis chuckled, quieter so they didn’t draw too many eyes. ‘Nah, butt. The Oxford boys made for Liverpool. Same way the drugs go – in and out on the boats.’

‘Good job we’re a landlocked country in the middle of Europe,’ Jason quipped. ‘Any idea where to start?’

Lewis subtly glanced left and right, checking out their immediate neighbours.

‘The boy in the know? He’s a Gog.’

Jason didn’t ask further, though he wanted to interrogate Lewis about which part of North Wales he was from and where along that vast coast to begin. But they had been talking in hushed tones for too long and the last thing Jason needed was to be suspected of a conspiracy or for Lewis to be fingered as a snitch.

They chatted about the Autumn Internationals, their mutual friends on the inside and out in the world, and how Cerys had mutated into a sensible proto-cop with a copper boyfriend. When their time was up, they embraced with a slap on the back and the promise to email.

And the old guilt burned in Jason again, the knowledge that the clouds hanging over his head would soon dissipate to reveal blue skies but Lewis had yet more time to serve under the cosh. Time they should be sharing, together.

He should’ve been at the gold exchange that day, standing beside his best mate as they robbed an old man blind. But he had been arrested one week before for stealing their getaway car. For years, Lewis hadn’t been able to forgive him for that abandonment, the reason their plan had fallen apart. If he’d been there that day, maybe they’d still be leading a life of crime, or retired rich somewhere hot and sunny. Instead of Jason visiting his mate in prison.

He went out the gates and it started to rain, a typical Welsh absolution, the chains dissolving into the puddles, and Jason walked away, free in body if not in mind.