Code Runner (Amy Lane Mysteries Book 2)

by Rosie Claverton

  They were surrounded by sheep. On the ground, Dopey lay like a broken marionette, bleeding from his head. Jason didn’t have time for horror, legging it away from both men towards the front of the van. The doors were still open and another bloke was leaning across the seat, reaching for the technology interface at the front.

  His mate yelled to him and the man tried to slide out. Jason whacked the door closed as he ran past, and the bloke yowled in pain.

  Jason caught sight of Grumpy sprawled over the van’s bonnet, neck at an impossible angle with his eyes staring blankly. Fuck, what was going on here?

  The sheep formed a seemingly impenetrable wall of wool, but Jason waded through them, glancing back at the two men. They were trying to follow him but there were three rows of sheep between him and them.

  Finally, he shoved the last sheep aside and sprinted down the open lane, ignoring the pain that threatened to cripple him. It was misty and he hadn’t the faintest idea where he was, but the fog would give him the cover to get away from those brutes and work out what the hell he was going to do.

  He leapt a crumbling stone wall and landed in a shallow brook. He could hear the heavies running past, as he stayed perfectly still, waiting.

  After a few minutes, he heard them tramping back. “Just leave him. Zook’s got his Plan B.”

  Zook? Why was that name familiar?

  His memory stirred, the final moments in the copy room before he’d blacked out slowly returning to him. They had mentioned Zook, hadn’t they? Who was this guy? Was he a guy at all, or was it a title? A gang?

  The heavies disappeared back towards the busted prison van and the mob of sheep. The water in the brook was soaking into Jason’s socks, his shiny black dress shoes doing nothing to protect him from the elements. The mist was turning his clothes damp and he realised he needed to get out of the rain.

  But where could he go? He could call the police, but look at how well that had gone last time. They were never going to believe him. He was also mindful of the clear and ominous message that this Zook character could get him anywhere and at any time. In prison, in secure transport—none of that mattered to this guy. His life was in danger if he was returned to police custody.

  He had only one option. He had to get back to Amy. With the information he had, she might be able to unravel this whole mess and maybe set him up with a new identity in the meantime, like she had for her and her sister.

  However, Cardiff must be at least twenty miles away and he was wet, wounded and handcuffed. He had to find shelter and a change of clothes, some means of disguise. In a day or so, he might reach Amy, but first he had to avoid civilisation and any chance of the cops finding him.

  Jason tramped along the stream, heading determinedly away from the van and the sheep, hoping that at least God or Amy was on his side.

  Chapter Twenty-Six: The Welsh Inquisition

  Twitter had it first, as always. BREAKING NEWS: Jason Carr escapes from prison transport, escort seriously wounded. More to follow.

  Her heart stopped, then stuttered to a staccato. No, that couldn’t be right... She tried to call Bryn’s phone, but it was engaged.

  Amy set up a feed for Jason’s name and read the various titbits of half news, half gossip with acute agitation. The next important fact struck her cold—the guards had been pronounced dead at the scene.

  Another two murders, both laid at Jason’s door.

  Her heartbeat throbbed through her body, her fingers and mouth tingling. No, not now, not now...

  What if he’s dead? her treacherous mind whispered. What if he’s bleeding out in a ditch somewhere, cold and alone? You cannot save him. You are powerless. You will die with him.

  Amy choked. The room closed in around her, a prison, a cage. The walls that formed her defence against the world were now her enemies, holding her down, crushing her chest with their weight.

  She tried to breathe, to claw back her control, but it was gone. She gasped for air, pain gripping her heart like a vise. She was going to die in this room, alone. No one would find her for days. And Jason...God, Jason...

  It was the beeping that brought her back to herself, AEON’s insistent buzzing for attention. Her lifeline. She reached out blindly and stopped the noise with the space bar, warm air flooding back into her lungs. She felt sick and her T-shirt was stuck to her back with cold sweat.

  Focus, Amy.

  AEON’s alert was for news articles containing Jason’s name. Sky News, the BBC, Channel 4—they had all collated the same scant details.

  Then Amy remembered she had something better.

  She pulled up her GPS tracker and looked for Jason, praying that he’d taken the badge with him in the van. It lit up immediately, somewhere in the countryside north of Bridgend, a nothing town bang in the middle of the stretch of M4 linking Cardiff and Swansea.

  The buzzer for the flat door sounded, startling her. She didn’t know anybody who didn’t have their own voice imprint to get in and she wasn’t expecting a delivery. She brought up the camera and saw Bryn standing outside, with two uniformed officers and another man she didn’t recognise.

  Amy closed down all her open windows, erased her recent activity from AEON’s logs, and locked her down. Only then did she allow Bryn access to the flat, grateful that he hadn’t flaunted his access privileges in front of the other cops and revealed her security features. She had to appear unassuming, benign. They couldn’t know the extent of her prowess.

  They had already been round to search Jason’s room and had removed half a dozen odd things, like his phone, toothbrush and razor. Did they think he’d somehow communicated his plan to her? Or got from Swansea to their flat in less than an hour?

  Amy frowned. She definitely needed a better time frame for that, but as she went to type it into her reminders, she remembered that AEON was locked for a reason, and the lift doors opened.

  “Miss Lane?” A middle-aged man with black-and-grey hair was standing in her living room, broad shoulders emphasised by the sharp cut of his suit—smarter than Bryn, certainly, who looked like he’d been sleeping in his for several days.

  Amy regarded the stranger with open hostility. “What are you doing in my house?”

  Bryn hurriedly stepped forward. “Amy, this is Detective Inspector Sebastian Rawlings. He’s an old friend of mine, so play nice.”

  “Jason told me about you,” she said simply. She doubted he had turned up now for an update on the Colombian case.

  “Miss Lane, are you aware of this morning’s events?”

  Amy addressed her answer to Bryn, accompanied by a look of silent accusation. “I found out from Twitter.”

  “Then you understand why we’re here?”

  “No.”

  Sebastian leaned in to speak to her. Amy pressed herself back into her chair, her nerves still jangled from her panic attack. Her hairband dug into her skull but Sebastian didn’t let up an inch, didn’t back off. She clawed at the armrests, eyes searching for anything to look at apart from his looming face. He had a tiny purple-brown smudge on the cuff of his white shirt, oily, thick.

  “Miss Lane, this is very serious. Your assistant is a fugitive from the law and has murdered two prison escorts.”

  Amy’s eyes narrowed, anger overriding anxiety. “That was a very quick forensic investigation you did there, Detective. How exactly did you prove my assistant responsible?”

  Sebastian blew air from between his teeth. “Setting those two deaths aside, he is on the run and charged with murder. That, at least, you will concede?”

  “Charged but not convicted.”

  “You seem to believe very strongly in his innocence.” Something dangerous lurked beneath his words, something Amy could not quite fathom. She had to tread carefully.

  “That’s because he is innocent.”

 
“And you want to help prove his innocence?”

  Amy looked again to Bryn, who was silent as the grave. “I’ve been advised against it.”

  “So, in what other ways could you possibly help him?”

  A chill ran down her spine. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  But she could guess what he was implying. Did he think she had aided and abetted a murderer? That was an imprisonable offence, one that not even Joseph could save her from.

  “But I think you do. You see, Jason escaped from a LOCDunne van and LOCDunne are at the technological forefront of prison transport. You can’t flash an indicator without head office knowing about it. Except the computer in this van has been wrenched out. Why do you think that is?”

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you ask whoever murdered the prison escort?” She looked again to Bryn. “Why aren’t you looking for Jason?”

  “Oh, we are certainly looking for him,” Sebastian said. “In under an hour, there will be hundreds of officers combing the countryside for him. He won’t get far. But it would all go a lot faster if we knew exactly where he was.”

  Amy didn’t look to Bryn this time. He knew she’d had some kind of surveillance on Jason in prison, and he suspected it was more than just cameras. She folded her arms, trying to appear sulky and indifferent. “There isn’t exactly much CCTV in the countryside.”

  “How do you know he’s in the countryside?”

  “You just said so. ‘Hundreds of officers combing the countryside.’”

  Sebastian’s lips twitched. It seemed she amused him in some way.

  “We’ll need access to your computer.”

  “No.”

  “Miss Lane, are you trying to be obstructive?”

  “Where is your warrant?” Amy might not be a legal expert, but she watched enough TV to know that police officers couldn’t just wander into your home and steal your stuff. Though she had invited them in—maybe there was some vampire lore tied up in it?

  “I was hoping to avoid that. Time is of the essence here. I’m sure we can both agree that finding Jason is our top priority.”

  “Why would you need my computer for that?” Amy wasn’t planning to give up AEON, but she would like him to spell out the nature of his accusations. She had to memorise them all for Joseph. She regretted now the lack of auditory recording equipment in the living room.

  Sebastian pursed his lips. They were thin and bloodless, white as bone. “We will be back with a warrant, Miss Lane. Don’t even think about trying to dispose of evidence before I get back.”

  “If there is no evidence, there is nothing to dispose of.”

  Sebastian reached inside his coat pocket and threw a plastic wallet into her lap. “Pity your assistant wasn’t quick enough to dispose of this.”

  Amy reached for the wallet without thought, a single sheet of notepaper with Jason’s scrawl all over it. I confess to the murder of David Jones...

  “Where did you find this?” she asked, helpless to explain it.

  “Still believe in his innocence, Miss Lane?”

  Amy thrust the wallet back at Sebastian. “I’m sure his lawyer told him to write it. That’s why I hired him a better one.”

  Sebastian’s furious look turned to one of pity. “Whatever helps you sleep at night, Miss Lane.”

  Diazepam. Lots of diazepam. She thought longingly of the little blue pills in the kitchen cupboard, more frequently consumed than usual during Jason’s time away. Her mind was quieter when he was around, the past locked behind dusty doors and the thick black night kept at bay.

  “Think it over, Miss Lane. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of this fight.” Sebastian headed back towards the lift, his uniform flunkies trotting after him.

  Bryn hesitated. “If you do know where he is—”

  “I won’t be telling you.”

  They stared each other down, Amy hostile and Bryn grimacing.

  “There are some things I can’t protect you from.”

  Righteous anger burned hot in Amy’s chest. “You really think he killed those men. And that I helped him do it. Get out.”

  “Amy—”

  “Get. Out.” She turned her back on him, but did not unlock AEON until she heard the lift doors shut. Quickly, she ensured the self-destruct protocol was intact and checked the backups were all synced. Her private server in Poland was going to come in very handy if the police persevered with this nonsense. An unexpected benefit of chasing digital criminals was appropriating their tech after they got sent down.

  As an afterthought, she removed Bryn’s and Owain’s voice imprints from the security system. Just in case they decided to return with a SWAT team at 3:00 a.m.

  She opened up her GPS tracker again. Jason was still moving, but his pace suggested he was on foot and walking at a slow to medium pace. His injuries would be hampering him and the weather forecast said it was due to storm. But she could do nothing to help him, couldn’t trust anyone else to help him either.

  Amy had to rely on Jason to survive until she could clear his name and persuade their friends to trust them again.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Fortune Favours the Wet

  His first priority was the handcuffs.

  While a man in a suit might walk through the rain while mummified with blood-stained bandages for any number of reasons, the presence of the metal bracelets would draw any passerby straight to the right conclusions—and lead to them immediate dialling of 999.

  Jason bloodied a couple of fingernails trying to prise a loose nail from a farmer’s fence, before giving that up as a bad job. He instead turned to a straggling end of wire and carefully shaped it into a loop, before guiding it into the lock.

  He remembered walking around for years with a couple of Cerys’s hairgrips in his pocket, just in case the fuzz slapped a pair of cuffs on him. But when it had come down to it, Jason had realised that running from the cop whose nose he’d bloodied would only add to the months he’d spend behind bars. Amazing how much a boy could grow up in one night.

  After a couple of attempts, the lock clicked and the cuffs fell off his sore wrists and into the mud at his feet. With a couple of stomps, the metal disappeared into the mulch with a soft gloop.

  With no idea of direction or destination, Jason followed the small brackish stream until it veered close to a caravan park. He turned away from it and headed out into the open countryside.

  No doubt they would be looking for him soon, when he failed to turn up for court. He had to find somewhere to lie low, change his clothes. Work out where the hell he was.

  Unfortunately, his plan to avoid houses and busy roads meant he was unlikely to find a signpost. The steady fall of rain turned the grass beneath his feet into a muddy slurry, coating his ankles as he struggled to make progress. The only advantage was that his footprints were obscured, the imprints filled immediately by water and within moments washed clean away.

  He could barely see three feet in front of him with the fog down low over the fields, and he almost ran into two hedgerows and a very disgruntled bull. It was more accident than design that he hit a wall of trees and realised he was in a wood, the perfect concealment from searching coppers and helicopters.

  It was warmer beneath the tree canopy, the ground more solid beneath his feet, and he could see some way in front of him. That meant a lot fewer branches whipping across his face, but it didn’t solve the problem of his soggy socks and the fact he stuck out like a sore thumb in his court suit.

  Suddenly, he heard voices up ahead. He hid behind a tree, debating what to do. It sounded like a man with a young boy—father and son, maybe?—talking about different trees. The voices seemed to be static and they didn’t move for the five minutes Jason waited.

  He couldn’t have been walking more than twenty minutes. With phone signal out
here being close to useless, it was unlikely these people knew anything about him. True, they might recognise him from the coverage after Damage’s murder, but it was unlikely. Amy always said something about people not noticing things when they weren’t where they expected them to be. So, he would be easily recognised in a police car but not in the middle of a wood. Or so it went in Amy’s world.

  The longer he left it, the more likely he was to be recognised—or, at least, people would be on their guard around a strange man. He’d have to take a chance.

  Adjusting his tie to make sure it covered the bandages around his neck, he’d have to hope that his other bruises went unnoticed—or, at least, didn’t strike the fear of God into anyone.

  Jason stepped out from behind the tree and wandered in the direction of the voices, trying to look casual. He stumbled into the clearing, where a man in an anorak was sitting beneath a tree with his son, sharing a thermos flask. They looked up at his approach and Jason feigned surprise.

  “Thank God. I thought I’d never see another human soul again!”

  The man smiled warily. “We weren’t exactly expecting company either.”

  Jason smiled an easy smile. “Look, mate, my car’s broken down and I’ve walked in completely the wrong direction. Could you point me towards the nearest village? Something with a Post Office or Co-op?”

  With an explanation at hand, the man relaxed and stood up to point through the trees to the right of where Jason had just come. “You haven’t gone far wrong. There’s a little village down by there—can’t remember the name of it, but I definitely saw a corner shop. About fifteen minutes, I’d say.” He looked at Jason’s clothes. “Though you’re not exactly dressed for it.”

  Jason laughed. “Headed to my cousin’s wedding—he’s gonna kill me if I’m late.” A brainwave suddenly struck him and he leaned closer, whispering to avoid the young lad overhearing. “Already got a bit wild on the stag.”

  He gestured to his injuries. While a “lad” image wasn’t exactly endearing, it fitted with his bandages and muddied suit.