Code Runner (Amy Lane Mysteries Book 2)

by Rosie Claverton

  As she walked in, Bryn looked up from AEON’s screen to greet her with a deep frown. “We had to bail them.”

  Amy scowled. “That’s how you greet me?”

  Bryn jerked his thumb towards the kitchen. “I’ll put on some coffee.”

  After her second cup, Amy was feeling slightly more human—and angry. “How could you just let them go?”

  “Nothing to tie them to the murder. Sure, they had a phone with Damage’s fingerprints on it, but they say he ran with them. And we can’t unlock the bloody thing.”

  Amy’s eyes lit up. “Give it to—”

  “Not this time.”

  Amy was taken aback, mouth gaping at his refusal. “That’s why you pay me! For these things—exactly these things!”

  “But you have a vested interest in this case.”

  “Damn right I do. My assistant is in prison—and getting beaten bloody, by the way. Not that any of you give a shit.”

  She had watched the shower footage with her heart in her mouth. Her alarm access wasn’t perfected—her only option was fire—and she didn’t want to give away her position in the system. But if Jason died because she hesitated, she didn’t know how she would forgive herself.

  As she was dithering, Jason failed to die. And somehow, he said something to Lewis that made him stop hitting him about the head and instead help him to his feet. Jason had a way with words. Maybe he told him to breathe.

  Bryn looked like he needed to breathe, or have the stick removed from his arse. “Do I even want to know how you know that?”

  “He calls me.”

  They both knew she was lying, but Bryn wasn’t going to call her on it. The less he knew about her investigations the better for his conscience.

  “Amy, you need to stop.”

  Or he was going to call her out, because he didn’t know what was good for him, or good for Jason. Amy would just have to make the right decision for all of them.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The investigation. Poking your nose in. You have to back off.”

  Amy looked deep into her empty coffee mug, her shoulders shaking with rage. “No.”

  “Think about it. If the prosecution gets wind that you had anything to do with Jason’s case, they will crucify us all—including him. Any evidence we do find, they’ll say you tampered with it or it was all entrapment.”

  “You never seemed to mind before. It’s only when it’s for Jason that you have a problem with it. I thought you were over this petty children’s rivalry you have.” Amy’s intention was to make him see sense, but all she managed to do was goad him.

  “This is not a game, Amy. The next ten years of Jason’s life will be determined by how we go about investigating this murder. And I need you to stay out of it.”

  Amy slammed the mug down on the desk, cracking it from base to rim. “You treat me like a child. I know what’s at stake—I’m the one whose best friend, whose only friend, is in prison because he was framed for murder. I am not giving up on him!”

  Bryn clenched his teeth before carefully removing the fractured mug from Amy’s grip. It fell apart in his hands. “You remember when we told him not to go looking for trouble in Canton? Not to go hunting cocaine and whatever else he thought he was doing? You remember how that turned out?”

  Amy hugged herself, curling up on her office chair. “I just want him to come home.”

  “Good riddance is what I say.”

  Amy froze. She was going mad. She had finally lost the last faint grip on her sanity.

  Lizzie was standing in her living room.

  Chapter Twenty: Somebody That I Used to Know

  Elizabeth Lane was standing in what had once been her home, a tote bag over her tanned shoulder. A mirage, an illusion.

  But Bryn was turning to her, looking at her with frank curiosity, and Amy knew it had to be real.

  “Lizzie. You’re...here.”

  Lizzie swung her tote onto the sofa and folded her arms, an exact mirror of Amy’s pose. “Damn right I am. I’m here to make sure you don’t let a criminal into your house again.”

  Amy’s face fell. “He’s not...he’s not a criminal.”

  “So he wasn’t sent to prison for robbing an old lady of her car and punching a police officer?” It was almost like she wasn’t Lizzie at all. She was darker, skin sun-kissed and hair bleached blond, and her accent was cloaked with an Australian twang. It made it easier if she wasn’t quite Lizzie.

  “You don’t understand—”

  “Yes or no, Amy?”

  Amy had forgotten what having a big sister was like, when she was in your face and determined on an argument. “Yes.”

  “And now he’s been arrested for a murder. That man was living in your house!”

  The silence that followed was hostile, guarded. Amy wasn’t giving an inch to her overprotective sister and Lizzie wasn’t willing to concede a millimetre of concern.

  “Uh...I’ll be on my way then.” Bryn tried to make a swift exit, but Lizzie rounded on him next.

  “And who exactly are you?”

  Bryn pulled out his warrant card. “Detective Inspector Bryn Hesketh, South Wales Police. Amy works for me.”

  Lizzie looked unimpressed with Amy’s choice of employer, but Amy didn’t have time for her disapproval.

  “This isn’t over,” she said to Bryn.

  “If you know what’s good for you, it is.” Bryn turned to Lizzie, his demeanour changing to the polite detached tone Amy imagined he used with witnesses. “It was nice to meet you.”

  And then the traitor was gone, abandoning her to her fate. Bastard.

  “It seems you leave a lot out in your phone calls, Ames.”

  The old nickname stung, a petty part of Amy wanting to demand that Lizzie never use it again. She didn’t have the right to barge in and rip to shreds the life Amy had patched together after Lizzie had torn it apart.

  “I told you all about him. Everything important.” Amy had told Lizzie how he was kind to her, how he fed her and cleaned up the flat, how he even laughed at her lame jokes. “And you were the one who hired him.”

  “I didn’t realise he was an ex-con!”

  Amy itched violently at her hair, her fingers coming away smeared with grease. She realised she must present a disgusting picture to her sister, unwashed and surrounded by coffee mugs. Five days without Jason and she had already let a number of things slide. When he got home, the first thing he would do is push her towards the shower and make dinner. Something with sausages and gravy. She salivated at the thought.

  “Are you even listening?”

  Amy tore her thoughts away from food and stared sulkily up at her sister. “You don’t know him. You saw him on the news and recognised the name. So you caught a flight over here to scold me for my choice of cleaner.”

  “I came to check you were all right! You were alone with him for months.”

  Something didn’t add up, some little thing that was eluding Amy’s memory. “You could’ve called...”

  “I did. Your line was permanently engaged—I thought I was the only who used that line. Since when do you talk on the phone?”

  Amy had been running her telemarketing exercise to interrogate the gang members’ phones, the ones who’d known Damage and the two heavies with his phone. Not that she would tell Lizzie that. And, of course, Jason had called from prison.

  “A lot’s changed since you’ve been gone. Jason is one of the best things that ever happened to me, especially after you fucked off to Australia.”

  Lizzie flinched. “I went to pursue my dreams. While you stayed here, wasting away under a blanket.”

  “You left me. Jason gave me something to live for. He literally saved my life.” Amy stopped, the ev
asive thought slamming down into place. The memory threatened to bubble up, overwhelm her, but she forced it back down into the depths.

  “It was all over the news last year.” The words came out of her mouth, but she felt strangely detached from them. “The BBC did a special feature on it. Jason’s name, his criminal record—it was there for anyone to see. And yet I heard nothing from you. Nothing.”

  Silence. Amy studied Lizzie’s face, the closed expression giving nothing away.

  “There was a murderer in my house. Where were you then?” Her voice trembled, the memories painfully evoked by her words, but she wrestled them away. This was between her and Lizzie, not the ghost of the man who would’ve killed her.

  “I wasn’t...I wasn’t at home. In Australia.”

  “Where were you?”

  “With our parents!”

  Amy felt like she’d been smacked across the face. “What?”

  It was clear Lizzie had never meant to say that. She turned away, pulling at her hair until her ponytail came loose. “Look, it doesn’t matter—”

  “It doesn’t matter?” Amy was surprised at the shout from her mouth, the violent hatred she felt towards Lizzie and the disgusting excuses for human beings that had given them life.

  “They want to make amends—”

  “Amends. They want to make amends for leaving us to rot here. With Gran and what was left of her mind.”

  “They didn’t know—”

  “They never bothered to find out!”

  Lizzie took a deep breath and put her hair back into a ponytail. “I can see that you’re angry. But you don’t get to decide that we are never seeing them again. I wanted an explanation.”

  Amy laughed, a mirthless sound full of broken promises. “What excuse did they have for abandoning their children?”

  “None,” Lizzie said simply. “They assumed we were getting on with our lives, that the money they sent had found us and we had everything we needed.”

  “That’s a lot of assumptions.”

  Lizzie spread her hands, pleading for understanding. “I’m not condoning what they did. But I have forgiven them. I want them to be part of my life, Amy.”

  “As you said, that’s your decision.”

  “They want to know you too.”

  An uncomfortable feeling bloomed in her chest, an old anxiety rekindled. She didn’t want to be known. If they saw her now, what would they say? Would they want to know her at all? Would they be...proud? “You do remember that we stole five million pounds from them.”

  Lizzie wouldn’t meet her eyes. “They don’t know that was us.”

  “But it was us. Did they ask how we came to move house, how we paid for your degree and your move to Australia? Of course they didn’t. Money is no object to our parents. That’s how they brushed aside the loss of five million quid.”

  “Will you just give them a chance?”

  “Like they did with me?”

  Lizzie didn’t have an answer for that. Their parents’ answer to Amy’s neuroses was child psychiatrists, psychologists, hypnosis, flooding, zombification with drugs—anything to make her Normal. The shrinks wanted to label her, a long list of colourful diagnoses that each came with a bag of meds and a hefty price tag. Her parents threw money at the problem and, when that didn’t solve it, they decided to see the world—so they wouldn’t have to look at their daughter.

  “I think you should leave.”

  Lizzie looked at her incredulously. “You’re throwing me out? This is our house!”

  “This is my flat. You gave up all claim to it when you moved out of the country. Get out.” Amy turned her back on her sister and stared at AEON’s blank monitor, struggling to contain the hot ache behind her eyes.

  She heard the scrape of the tote bag across the sofa and the lift doors closed. It was only when she saw Lizzie leave out the front door—the front door of the place she’d once lived—that her tears spilled over, grieving for the loss of the last of her family.

  Chapter Twenty-One: Off the Grid

  When Amy was done feeling sorry for herself, she decided on a new plan: What would Jason tell her to do?

  While it wasn’t a pithy acronym that would work well on a wristband, it gave her the impetus to push aside what sulking Amy would like to do—go back to bed—and focus instead on what her assistant would make of her day.

  Her first stop was the shower, sluicing away five days of sweat and misery in hot water and lemon-scented suds. She put on clean, fresh clothes from the airing cupboard—not the once-worn pile threatening to topple off her chair—and went to the kitchen to find something to eat.

  There was nothing fresh except milk, so Amy made a cup of tea and plucked a sachet of instant porridge from the cupboard. It had some dried fruit in it, which made it healthier than the crisps sitting next to it. She carefully followed the instructions and took the result back to AEON, feeling rather pleased with herself. She didn’t need Lizzie to baby her anymore.

  In hindsight, and with warm food in her belly, Amy could concede that Bryn had a point. If her meddling in Jason’s case was discovered, it could prejudice the investigation. However, she had been invited to investigate the case of the deceased men on Pembrokeshire beaches. Therefore, she should continue to pursue that angle and hope against hope that all roads really did lead to Rome.

  If Jason’s statement was accurate (and Amy had relied on his listening and recall skills many times before), Madhouse Mickey had stolen Stuart’s cocaine from the Colombians. Therefore, it stood to reason that the most likely murderer of the Colombians was Mickey, or one of his gang. Or possibly Stuart, if the Colombians had betrayed him by selling to Mickey. Or Mickey really had just happened upon the coke and the Colombians had fought among themselves, killing two of their number in the process.

  It would be easy enough to find out if the heavies in possession of Damage’s phone had also been in Pembrokeshire. However, that would only mean they were in a position to gather the cocaine, and phone signal was notoriously terrible in the region anyway. What she really needed was one of them to be stupid enough to talk about it on social media, or find one of the boys willing to roll on the others. But who?

  And then it came to her: DS Rich Porter.

  He was Mickey’s informant, but maybe he was also privy to Mickey’s privileged information. At the very least, he might be able to name names and share contact information that could open up doors for her. And he could do it all in blissful ignorance.

  Bryn, the traitorous bastard, had shut down her link to his computer. Luckily, she had been keeping tabs on the Rich Porter case and had triumphantly read his arrest report. He had refused to roll on anyone, denying his involvement entirely, and had been released on bail with a warning to stay within Cardiff city limits.

  That should make finding him easy.

  Amy already had his phone number, having used a sophisticated voice emulator to enable Jason to pretend to be Rich when cancelling the original direct debit. She might be good, but getting inside a phone network to remotely disconnect someone’s mobile phone and then pretending to be the customer service operator had seemed too much like hard work. Sending Jason to snoop on him had been a far easier option and it had worked like a charm.

  Amy checked Rich’s phone records. Last phone call was made on 6 May—the night of Damage’s murder.

  But of course—Jason had said he was there. The question was, where was he now?

  The last known location of the phone was in Canton, before the connection was lost. Again, on the sixth. The phone could be dead, switched off or destroyed. Amy brought up Rich’s recent transactions on both his accounts, the public and the payoff—no activity for the past five days. It was possible he had just been lying low in his house, eating frozen food and watching TV. Amy’s own accounts were hardly frene
tic with activity.

  She browsed social network activity. Not a peep out of him. At the beginning of the month, he’d been a daily Facebook user and had tweeted twenty to thirty times per day. Even after his arrest and public disgrace, he’d still posted regular updates and pseudonymously shared cat pictures on Tumblr.

  What had he been doing with his life since 6 May? Or had he been unable to do anything at all, held captive and at the mercy of gangsters? Or floating in the Taff, looking with unseeing eyes into the river’s depths before crashing against the Cardiff Bay Barrage?

  Before, Amy would’ve sent Jason round to bang on his door or called up Bryn to organise a welfare check, but both of those options were currently barred to her. While she wasn’t expressly going against Bryn’s instructions, she doubted he would appreciate the distinction.

  However, Owain was working with Sebastian Rawlings on the case with the Colombians. If she told him about Rich Porter’s mysterious radio silence, perhaps he would be able to look into it—and bring her some more investigation titbits.

  She checked the clock—twenty past six. A perfectly reasonable hour to be calling. She always checked now, after she accidentally woke Bryn up with a lead at four o’clock in the morning.

  Owain answered on the third ring. “Hello?”

  “Owain, it’s Amy. Listen—Rich Porter is off-grid. As he’s a possible witness in the Colombian case, I thought I should let you know.”

  The line cracked and buzzed. “—what? Amy...can’t...you. Say...’gain?”

  “Rich Porter. You need to check on him.”

  “...really bad...back later?”

  “I’ll text.”

  She disconnected and composed a text, running a trace on his location out of curiosity. She had a series of complaints running with the phone networks who covered Cardiff, telling them to improve their coverage and signal strength. How was she meant to track people if their phones kept dropping off the grid?