Captcha Thief (Amy Lane Mysteries) (6 page)

‘There’s something odd about this girl.’

Amy continued to scan the flickering images on her screen, glancing at Owain’s reflection in the blank third monitor. ‘Odd?’

Owain waved his index and middle fingers vaguely at the centre of the screen. ‘She’s walked up and down the Impressionists gallery four times, but she’s not looking at the paintings.’

Amy paused her video as Owain tilted the laptop screen towards her. He played the footage at double-time and Amy watched one solitary woman flit around the gallery, inspecting every picture’s frame and every statue’s base without looking at a single work of art.

‘Checking out the security system,’ Amy said. ‘Can you get a good angle for a still?’

Owain stopped the video and moved to capture it.

‘Move it on a little,’ Amy nudged, and he obeyed. ‘There, stop. She was turning out of that glare. Worse angle, but clearer image.’

‘She’s probably too short for our thief,’ Owain said. ‘Look at her against “The Blue Lady” here. She’s nowhere near tall enough to cut the top of the frame.’

‘He wasn’t working alone. Keep looking – there may be others.’

Amy scanned through more footage, the chaos of the main hall causing her temples to ache. Or maybe that was her brain telling her to ease up on the caffeine, a war between the sluggishness of her sleepy brain and the need to quell the anxious fluttering in her chest.

Jason had been gone an awfully long time. She tried not to think about it, but he usually completed a basic two-day shop in under forty-five minutes including travel both ways. One hour and fifteen minutes had passed since he’d left the flat. What if something had happened to him? Her fingers itched to bring up the GPS tracker and locate his phone. Or the small coin-sized tracker she’d slipped into the lining of his favourite leather jacket, the one in the dashboard of the Micra, or the one in the shell of his motorcycle helmet. She liked to be prepared for any eventuality.

She almost missed the girl mounting the stairs two at a time to get into the galleries above. She flicked to the camera footage of the Impressionist gallery, but the girl was nowhere to be seen after ten minutes of scanning. Amy changed to the main art gallery on that floor and spotted her. She entered the gallery and continued her strange routine, checking frames – but only of certain pictures. Amy marked their positions on her gallery outline map, hoping to find some correlation between the pictures she picked. Artist, perhaps? Dollar value? Or maybe just the shopping list of her employer?

When Jason came home, she’d send him round the gallery to mark the positions of all the paintings. The CCTV footage was too poor for identification and he needed something to occupy him.

She had to maintain his interest in the work. Assistant to Amy Lane was only an attractive job title so long as Amy’s work was stimulating. Without the police cases, the thorny private investigations, what was there to keep him here? Amy didn’t flatter herself that she was enough. It was murder that had drawn him in and it would be murder that kept him close.

The man caught her eye because he was so still. He sat on the bench nearest ‘The Blue Lady’ and stayed there for forty minutes, looking at something on his phone. Occasionally, he would glance up at the picture, squint for a moment and then return to the phone. As his right hand cradled the phone, his left hand squeezed the edge of the bench, working its way all around the edge.

Eventually, he left his spot – but not before Amy had taken a series of stills. Another potential suspect. Amy noted down the timestamp and the location on her map.

As soon as he left, another man took his place, sitting in the exact same spot for seventeen minutes, before moving on. He also had his phone in hand. ‘Filming?’ Amy muttered.

‘Say again?’

Amy had forgotten Owain was in the room.

‘I have a pair of strange men sitting in front of “The Blue Lady” with their phones.’

‘I have a middle-aged woman doing the same.’

Amy reviewed the stills. ‘But only for a few minutes. It’s an unlikely crew.’

‘Maybe they’ve been recruited in? A cell structure – each of them only knowing their part and no one else’s.’

The lift doors whispered open and a ball of tension dissolved in Amy’s chest.

‘Jason. Can you go to the museum and map out—’

‘Can’t.’ He hauled two large shopping bags through the living room and into the kitchen. ‘I have to go away for a bit.’

Her heart stopped, a squeezing fist occupying its position in her chest. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe.

‘Something happened?’ Owain said, worried. ‘Is Cerys—?’

‘She’s fine. Coming over for dinner. Frieda and I are taking the fight to North Wales. Show them Gogs what’s what.’

Frieda.
Her anxiety morphed into white-hot anger, not enough diazepam in the world to calm the storm.

‘You work for me. Me.’

‘It’s for your investigation. I’ll phone in every day.’

‘You’re taking off with some London bitch—’

‘You don’t even know her.’ Jason’s body was all hard lines, steeled for a fight.

‘Neither do you!’

‘She’s police, Amy. I’m not hanging out with some drug lord.’

‘Not this time. Not yet. How can I trust you not to die out there?’

The anxiety and anger spiralled together, until she was spinning in a dizzy haze. When Jason left her protection, bad things happened. Fist fights, gunshots, running for his life. She couldn’t ensure his safety on such short notice, not in North Wales with its patchy mobile signal and poor CCTV coverage.

She’d stood up, but she didn’t remember when, facing him down like a matador with a bull. Except Jason wasn’t charging. His mouth was a grim line, but his eyes were dark and pained. Hurt.

‘You don’t trust me to go.’

‘I don’t trust her!’

‘I’m going, whether you like it or not.’

‘If you go, I’ll … I’ll…’
Fire you.

But she wouldn’t do that – couldn’t even make the threat. He knew he held all the cards. She would never fire him and he could do exactly as he pleased. She was too afraid of losing him, even to protect him.

‘I’ll be back in a couple of days,’ he said.

She could tell it was a lie. He had no idea when he was coming back. How long he was leaving her, placing himself out of her reach and in danger.

‘I can take care of things here,’ Owain said.

But she didn’t want him. She wanted Jason. Jason, who knew all her little idiosyncrasies, her favourite snacks when she was stuck on a problem, and exactly how she took her tea.

She wanted them to be a team again. She wanted him to rely on her, as she depended on him. But she knew she was losing control, losing him, and she had nothing that could stop the car crash occurring in front of her.

‘I’m going to pack,’ Jason said, and didn’t look back as he left her.

Gripping the edge of the desk, Truth fought the urge to run. Every cell in her body urged her to get out, flee far away. She had to get away from here, away from
her
.

She took a deep breath, closed her eyes. Counted to ten.

She wasn’t going to leave. She was going to see this through. Even after years of trying and never quite achieving, she had never yet quit.

She wouldn’t let that painted stare drive her away.

Waiting for a response was agonising. She didn’t even know if the message had been received, if it was being discussed, if someone had called the police. It was the uncertainty that killed her, fuelled her desire for flight.

But where would she go? She had no one who could take her in, and she could not live with herself if she left, nor with the consequences. Not now. All her hopes were pinned on Renoir’s infamous whore.

No, Truth had to wait. When the museum reopened, she would check out the lie of the land, see what could be seen. She had spotted the others and she had to ensure they came nowhere near the upper galleries. She hoped they would remain shut, but the museum management were money men who cared only for profit. They would not keep their prize pieces hidden from gormless eyes and grabbing hands.

Art should be reserved for an elite who could appreciate it. The Salon in Paris and the Royal Academy in London knew the truth of it. Those who tried to buck the trend, bring art to the masses, only achieved true greatness in death – where their radical thoughts could be separated from their grand works. When they became, instead of the anarchists, part of the establishment to be rebelled against.

Was Truth an anarchist now, a rebel? She had stolen a painting, killed a man. But theft and murder were sins old as story – nothing radical in sin. They were the price of her devil’s deal, the price of the life of a woman who did not love, did not hate, but merely expected her to do her duty.

If this continued, waiting without answer, she would have to take matters into her own hands. The television revealed nothing, but the police might catch her scent at any time. She might have to take care of those in the know, perhaps even those who pursued her. She needed to buy more time, except time was trickling through the glass with every passing day. She was losing with every minute lost.

‘The Blue Lady’ smiled at her with her nothing eyes.

‘Slut,’ she said and spat.

The glob of spittle struck the net curtain and gravity tumbled it over the lace to the floor with a splat. Anarchy.
Rebellion
.

Disgusted, she turned her back and ignored the laughing eyes of the bitch.

She only had to wait.

Amy hadn’t said goodbye.

Jason had packed his bag and marched into the hallway in his leathers, ready for another fight. But she’d just stood there, fiddling with her fraying hoodie sleeve, watching him. Her eyes were wide, huge dark pupils eclipsing all but a slither of green around the edges, black holes in her drawn, milk-pale face.

He did not speak and she said nothing, and he was gone before he could regret it.

Except now he felt it. He’d known working with Amy would be difficult from the first moment he stepped into her domain, and expecting it to get easier had been foolish. Being Amy’s friend was as much hard work as being her cleaner or her assistant. Every time he thought he understood, she demanded more – and he was running out of life to give.

But he also had his faults, no point denying it. He had something about him that stopped her trust being total, keeping parts of the work from him, trusting Owain the copper over Jason the ex-con. And how had he reacted to that? By running off to North Wales with a woman she hated on sight, even if that was totally misguided. What was there to hate about Frieda?

He parked up outside Dylan’s, behind Frieda’s Mercedes, and waited in the car. The sky was a mixture of oranges, pinks and shadows, and he reckoned they only had an hour or so before they lost the light completely. But the country lanes were better by headlights – you could see a driver coming by the glare off the hedgerows, and only a heavy-duty lorry would have difficulty passing a touring bike on a back road.

If he could forget Amy’s face, he could get excited about this trip. Hot bike, hot woman, hot trail of a murderer. An entirely legal buzz in his veins with an acceptable level of danger for his mam and his boss.

Operating under the protection of the National Crime Agency, he could wander where he pleased, piss off the local cops if the investigation called for it. He could have the freedom he’d possessed as a kid running with his best friends through Butetown – then, he hadn’t cared about the law, thinking himself invincible. Now, he knew what the weight of the law felt like, but Frieda could give him licence to break the rules.

Of course, she might turn out to be a stickler for rules and a complete killjoy, but she was taking a completely impractical bike over Snowdonia in pursuit of a case. He suspected she had a little rebel in her.

A sudden rapping at the glass made him jump and he wound down the window.

‘You’re late,’ Frieda said.

He locked the car, handed the keys to Dylan and donned his helmet. Frieda held out her hand silently for his pack and stuffed it in the saddlebag. Her leathers were perfectly fitted for a hard ride, no vanity in the cut and a few scuffs on the elbows. She’d clearly put in a lot of riding time but the leather was still expensive, well-maintained.

Jason mostly wore jeans and jacket riding around Cardiff, but he suited up for a long ride, like seeing Lewis in Swansea or taking in the coast. His one-piece was in need of thorough conditioning and he brushed at the flecks of mud dusting the outside of his thighs.

‘Stop preening, princess. We have a lot of road to go.’

Jason didn’t rise to the bait, didn’t comment when she mounted the bike and nodded her head towards the pillion. He was too tall to ride like this for long, but he’d known what he was signing up for. The thrill of the ride would be worth the sore arse.

He mounted the bike and chose the grab rail over her waist, before leaning in a little. ‘I’m heavy for a pillion.’

‘I’ve chauffeured men hundreds of times,’ she said dismissively. ‘My ex was built like a wrestler and we survived the Lake District.’

The engine throbbed through him, a tamed tiger waiting to be unleashed on unsuspecting Welsh roads. She moved without warning, but he had played pillion before to Dylan and his excitable sister, so he knew what to expect from an erratic driver.

After that, though, she was considerate. The traffic in Cardiff was minimal and they headed for the M4, the main artery of South Wales. However, Frieda ignored the turning and continued on the A470, a broad, busy main road that soon dwindled to little more than a lane with some road markings.

Jason had never crossed Mid Wales before, never ventured much outside his Cardiff home. He’d looked up the route on his phone before he’d left Amy’s – over four hours, staying on the one road, though that road would change its shape significantly.

Frieda was a law-abiding citizen, it seemed – or else she couldn’t go too fast with his fat arse weighing down her bike. They soon left behind town lights for trees and vast bodies of water, the haunted Llwyn-on Reservoir the first they saw but by no means the last. The still waters captured the fading light, glowing in muted red as if a dragon slumbered beneath the surface, witness to danger and tragedy.

The twilight chill settled on them both, and Jason dared to reach out, moving closer to Frieda’s warm body. The last time he’d been in the Valleys, he’d have given anything for a motorbike and a woman beside him, but Frieda’s body heat was the only warmth she was likely to give him.

Why had she brought him along? National agencies didn’t just pick up waifs and strays, bringing them along for the ride. If she needed backup, she could seek out the local cops, not a former gang runner with priors for assault and theft. Maybe, under that icy gaze, she liked him. She wanted to get to know him.

But this was business, work. She must’ve seen something he could offer her. But he was the first to admit he was dull-witted compared to Amy or one of Cardiff’s detectives. He was handy in a fight but she had no way of knowing that. Though she had looked over his criminal record – what could she have seen there to make her think he’d be good for this job?

Of course, Amy had seen something in him, but Amy had been desperate. Thinking about her made him feel uncomfortable, uneasy, and he pushed the thoughts away, out into the night. He was going to enjoy this ride with Frieda, and damn Amy’s expectations.

Only a few cars passed them as darkness swallowed the road, scattered lights between the trees marking pubs and houses along the way. Villages popped out of nowhere, with increasingly unpronounceable names, and vanished just as quickly.

He lost track of time just as the road opened out on to a little town the sign proclaimed to be Rhayader. Frieda swung the bike into a deserted car park and killed the engine.

‘I’m hungry,’ she declared.

‘Pub?’

‘Not if you want to drive.’

They settled for fish and chips, leaning against a wall, hot grease coating his fingers and lips, dripping onto his boots. Frieda said nothing until her dinner was mere paper and scraps, wiping her fingers on the feeble napkins and stabbing her plastic chip fork into their remains.

‘The roads are quiet,’ she said. ‘We’ll be in Bangor before midnight. I’ve arranged a room there and we’ll move on in the morning.’

Jason noted the use of
room
, singular, but said nothing. Was he being brought on this trip as entertainment? Was he okay with that? He’d never been particularly discerning about who he took to bed, but they were working together professionally. Surely that was against the rules?

But the longer the silence lasted, the harder it was to ask. He polished off his cod, removed the worst of the grease with an unsullied corner of the newspaper, and finished his can of Coke.

The bike was designed for the novice and veteran alike and, with some gentle nudging from Frieda, he started her up. The NCA officer climbed onto the pillion and wrapped her arms around him, snug and warm at his back.

Riding out of Rhayader, not knowing where this journey was leading him, Jason felt like a king.

Cerys turned up just after Jason left and retreated to the kitchen with Owain, where they pointedly did not argue, exchanging the bare minimum of words required to cook dinner.

Amy had struggled to settle after Jason left. She wanted to work, to distract herself, but she kept returning to the GPS tracker that showed him moving farther and farther away from Cardiff. When the mobile signal gave out entirely, she shut down the programme and went to the kitchen, where there was light and people and a different kind of tension.

Cerys made a passable macaroni cheese, even if it was nothing like Jason’s, and they ate in tense silence.

‘How’s the investigation going?’ Cerys asked the table, but she looked at Owain.

Owain looked at Amy, but she was not in the mood for chat and stuffed another forkful of pasta into her mouth.

‘There’s a lot of CCTV to go through,’ he said.

Cerys waited for him to elaborate and, when he said nothing more, she tried a different tack. ‘If you need any help, I have nothing else to do tomorrow.’

Amy refused to meet Owain’s pleading gaze. If he did not want to spend time with Cerys – and Amy had no idea why that might be, apart from the fact that all Carrs were infuriating and irrational and should probably be shot – then he would have to tell her himself. Amy was not a creator of excuses.

‘That would be … good. I think there were some things Amy needed at the museum.’

‘You should both go,’ Amy said. ‘Take in the galleries. Make notes.’

‘It’s not a date,’ Owain said quickly.

‘We don’t need a date,’ Cerys said, her voice sharp, acid. ‘We’ve been going out for five months. We live together!’

‘I know that,’ Owain mumbled to his plate. ‘I meant … it’s work, isn’t it? Not for fun.’

‘You can have lunch,’ Amy said, magnanimously. ‘All work and no play, et cetera. Come back in the afternoon.’

Amy left the table and returned to AEON, itching to remove Cerys and Owain from her space. She wanted to rant, throw cushions, play screamo at top volume. She wanted to open a bottle of cheap red wine and swipe the books from Jason’s shelves.

But she wouldn’t do those things. She would watch more CCTV footage and research North Walean gang connections, and try not to refresh the GPS tracker every five minutes to see if it had picked up a signal again.

And she would find out more about Frieda bloody Haas.

The National Crime Agency staff database was easy to infiltrate, but its employee information was sparse. Where could she find more intel on Frieda Haas? She seemed to shun social media and Amy couldn’t even construct a basic family tree from the scraps found through Google. The woman was a ghost.

Amy went back through Jason’s phone data, looking for significant interactions around the time he’d first met Frieda. She got a hit off Cerys’ phone, then an unknown, and then a flurry of data including Owain’s number. Therefore the solitary unknown must be Frieda’s phone.

The number was unlisted, unsurprisingly, and registered to the NCA. Of course, it was currently in the wilds of Mid Wales, so interrogating its data was pretty much impossible.

Amy returned to the CCTV. But after five minutes, she knew she wasn’t seeing much of anything, the museum’s visitors passing in a blur before her tired eyes. She was getting too old for all-nighters, twenty-five years weighing heavy on her bones. She brought up the calendar – twenty-five years, eleven months and twenty-two days. Would Jason be back for her birthday?

She wanted to curl up on the sofa and take Jason on a guided tour of early noughties alt music, or watch him watching a
Die Hard
movie or some other mind-numbing action flick.

But Jason wasn’t here. And there was a murder to solve.

She checked her search, the trawling of dark corners for something about gangs and the art trade. Nothing yet, but she now had another reason to delve into the deep web to find their hiding places. She ghosted into a few IRC channels, hoping to get lucky, but nothing beyond the usual trade in drugs and women caught her eye. She sent out a few more feelers into the darkness, hoping for a vibration down the line to lead her in the right direction.

‘We’re going to catch a late film,’ Cerys said, Owain following like a lapdog.

‘See you tomorrow,’ Amy said, averting her eyes from their joined hands and the smudge of pale pink lip gloss at the corner of Owain’s mouth.

When she was alone, the need to work fuelled her on. The need to think about anything apart from Jason and that woman. Owain and Cerys. Other people’s happiness.

She made coffee and tackled another day of footage. She’d hit the last twenty-four hours now, and found nineteen suspicious people who warranted further investigation.

The girl was back, she noted, the checker of frames and statue bases. She was wearing a school uniform this time and Amy tried to make out the logo on her jumper. What was a secondary school student doing mixed up in an art heist?

Amy followed her to the exit, trying to get a good angle on the jumper, when a man stepped in front of her. Amy vaguely recognised him, froze the footage, and flicked through her gallery of suspects. He was one of the sitters in front of ‘The Blue Lady’.

Amy watched their interaction. The girl was grinning, practically dancing from foot to foot, as the man looked increasingly irate. He reached for her arm, then withdrew, looking about him anxiously.
A barely controlled temper and a guilty conscience.

The girl used the opportunity to give him the slip, and he fumed impotently in the centre of the hall. Then he went back upstairs to the gallery and made for the bench in front of ‘The Blue Lady’. Except someone was already sitting there, the middle-aged woman from before.

However, instead of replacing her, he sat down beside her and studied ‘The Blue Lady’ as before. They did not acknowledge each other until she accidently swung her handbag into his leg, and he said something sharp to her. She ignored him and walked away.

Amy watched their exchange again, but she couldn’t see any notes or code pass between them. They were successfully ignoring each other, as strangers in public places were wont to do, until he’d snapped at her.

Nothing about this canvassing operation made sense. A teenage girl in the crew, operatives openly confronting each other, lingering on the changeover without any exchange of information yet drawing attention to themselves.