He was so close now. Home was just a few steps away, but prison could follow soon after. And this time, there would be no chance of bail and he would be at the mercy of whoever was trying to kill him.
He had to take a chance.
Jason casually checked the cars as he passed, but he recognised most of the vehicles and the couple he didn’t were definitely empty. He approached their gate and grimaced at the thought of what he had to do. Reaching up on tiptoes, he hooked his fingers over the top of the gate and hauled himself up.
His ribs screamed and he could feel something shift in his chest. He desperately threw one arm over, getting the top of the gate under his shoulder. He heaved up his leg, water streaming from his sodden suit trousers, and let himself fall over the gate.
He landed in a huge muddy puddle, the gravel beneath stinging his palms. It was an effort to get his feet under him again, his energy reserves at rock bottom, but he somehow stood again and approached his next challenge.
A large skip was positioned beneath Amy’s balcony, but there was a fine net covering the outside space and she’d put a new lock on the French doors only recently. Jason heaved himself up into the skip and landed on the remnants of an Indian takeaway. At least she’d been eating.
Holding his breath, he rummaged beneath the fresh rubbish at the top, looking for something he could use to get through the net. He emerged triumphant, holding a broken pair of nail scissors. Amy had tried to open a tin of baked beans with them when she couldn’t find the tin opener and bent them beyond salvage. That was exactly what he needed.
Clambering up onto the lip of the skip, Jason stretched up to seize the balcony rail and stand on the edge. The barbed wire pierced the soles of his dress shoes, but it was a minute’s work to slice through the edge of the net and slide through, landing awkwardly on the balcony.
Jason limped the last few feet and contemplated the lock. He opened up his mac and dug out the badge Amy had given him, the thin plastic pin jammed in the lock with one of the scissor blades.
His fingers were numb and clumsy and it was a long two minutes before the lock finally gave. He pushed aside the door and stumbled across the threshold, the heat of the house hitting him like a wave. He could’ve cried.
Carefully, he drew the door closed and—almost ran straight into a samurai sword.
Amy, pale and clad in her pyjamas, held her authentic hand-forged Japanese katana in front of her as if she was well versed in how to gut a man with it. “Stay where you are.”
Jason laughed, a helpless release of emotion. “Amy...” he rasped.
“Jason?”
Instantly, the sword was thrown carelessly on the bed and she surged forward, grabbing hold of his arms and looking up into his eyes. “It’s you. Oh God, it’s really you.”
“Mostly in one piece, too.” Jason wanted nothing more than to collapse on the floor of Amy’s bedroom, but she tugged insistently on his arm, refusing to let him stand still for a moment.
“You’re soaked. Come on.”
He allowed himself to be led, the warmth delicious and soothing to his exhausted body and weary mind. Amy opened the bathroom door and encouraged him to lean on her shoulder as he stepped shakily into the bathtub.
She leaned across him and turned on the shower. The hot water was a shock and he began to shiver violently, his body slowly coming back online.
“Off—off with this.” Amy hauled the mac off him, his suit jacket following, and threw the clothes in the sink.
Jason fiddled with the shirt buttons before tearing it, Amy taking that off him too. He prised his shoes off on the edge of the tub, his swollen feet both relived and agonised at their release. His trousers and boxers were kicked away, and after a few moments of soaking in the warm water pooling at the bottom of the bath, his socks were peeled away from the raw skin they covered.
The water ran red, the pain coming soon after, but Jason just revelled in the warmth of the water and scrubbing away the mud that had infested every part of him. From behind the shower curtain, he could hear Amy squeezing out the water from his clothes and forcing them into a bin liner. Smart girl.
Eventually, he’d had enough of being wet and he turned off the water. He drew back the curtain to see Amy holding up a large fluffy towel, the kind he usually disdained for being girly. He gratefully embraced it, drying himself off with slow, awkward movements, like an old rusted automaton running out of juice.
When he was vaguely less damp, he stepped out of the tub on wobbly legs, to find Amy holding her off-white dressing gown and trying to wrestle him into it. Jason was too tired to protest and while the sleeves were far too short and the front didn’t close, it was warm and soft and smelled of Amy.
“Bed,” she said, and Jason found himself leaning heavily on her as he staggered back towards her bedroom, avoiding the muddy puddles on the floor and leaving bloody footprints instead.
She had thrown back her thick bedclothes, pressing him down into the space she had not long left, and the heat soaked into him. She fussed about his feet for a second, winding long white bandages around them until they looked as if they’d been mummified.
“That’ll do,” she said to herself, before hauling up layer after layer of sheets, duvet and blankets until he was cocooned beneath a heavy press of material and totally immersed in her warmth and her scent.
“I’ll take care of everything,” he heard her say, before he closed his eyes and finally took his rest.
* * *
Jason Carr was still at large.
Stuart and Mickey had both, separately, expressed their dissatisfaction at this turn of events. Zook publically urged patience to all his tribes but privately seethed at the injustice of that little weasel’s continued survival.
Of course, they might yet find him dead in a barn, having succumbed to pneumonia, but as the hours rolled on, it seemed more and more likely that he had managed to escape the countryside and reach a place of safety. Theoretically, the police had covered all those eventualities, but Zook wasn’t holding his breath.
In the meantime, he could not wait any longer to proceed with his machinations. The time was ripe, even if the Carr inconvenience had not yet been dealt with.
In three days, Stuart would officially run out of cocaine. Even if he cut it again, he had little over a week before his market share evaporated. Mickey was, of course, flush with cocaine but Zook had persuaded him to wait. To encourage desperation in the punters.
But now Zook’s delivery was here. This was the beginning of the final phase.
With reverent hands, he removed the protective packaging and slowly drew out the first batch. The shiny black cards glinted darkly, the bright white graffiti tiger and URL obvious immediately. He tilted the card, and the repeating embossed pattern—the words white tiger—gleamed, over and over again.
Beautiful, simplistic. Enough of a puzzle for the students to think they were smart and for the police to be unable to prosecute on the advertising alone. And when they did, eventually, find a card and follow the URL, it would be the work of a moment to move house and issue a new set of cards.
And that was before the text and email marketing campaigns began. His guerrilla marketing team were already at work, scrawling the web address on toilet walls and stencilling the tiger in subways and under bridges.
This was the empire he had dreamed of, that they had concocted together in the small hours of the morning waiting for the dawn to relieve them. “What if...” Morris had said. “What if you could hand out these things from a place of total safety? What if the drugs and the money were in the hands of the Royal Mail or some other mug? What then?”
Zook still remembered his reply. “Then it would be worth getting into.”
But Morris was gone and Zook was on his own now. They’d moved beyond the Royal Mail, moved on to a far b
etter future where a man didn’t need a PO Box, didn’t need anything at all but a laptop and someplace to cut.
Zook held the future in his hands. He wasn’t going to let it go over some little shit like Jason Carr.
Chapter Thirty-Two: Granny’s House
Amy couldn’t afford to rest.
She left the bin liner in the bathtub to drain off the worst of the water before inspecting the mess in the corridor. This was going to take a little more than water.
Turning to the internet, she searched for how to remove mud and biological stains from the carpet and uncovered a wealth of cleaning information. She would have to direct Jason online in future, to prevent him spending all afternoon on the oven.
She poured cold water over the bloodstains and dabbed up the worst of the mud with kitchen roll before hauling out the vacuum cleaner. She was grateful they didn’t have any immediate neighbours as she hoovered up the mud from her dark green carpet, carefully avoiding the dark red stains.
She inspected the cleaning solutions under the sink, before moving on the cupboards. She removed the baking soda—why did they even own this?—and applied a paste to the stains, exactly as the article suggested. Maybe she had a career in crime scene clean-up ahead of her. Or, rather, she could develop the techniques and drum up business and Jason could go out and do the actual cleaning.
After an hour’s work, the stains were entirely removed from the carpet and Amy was satisfied that it would pass the inspection of the detectives who would be darkening her door very soon.
In hindsight, she should’ve removed Jason to his own bedroom, or Lizzie’s old room, but she had been so worried that he would fall over and she wouldn’t be able to lift him. The sky was lightening and she had no idea when Bryn and Sebastian would be back. As much as she wanted Jason to rest, she needed to make sure he was safe first.
Creeping back into her room, she checked she’d locked the French doors before gently shaking Jason’s shoulder.
He jerked awake, breathing harsh in his throat, and lurched upright to cough into his fist. Amy worried about how long it took him to catch his breath, the rattle in his throat. She would have to check her medicine cupboard for antibiotics once she’d got him settled.
“What...what time is it?”
“You’ve only been asleep for an hour. But I need to move you. Bryn said he was coming round with a warrant.”
Jason nodded vaguely, clearly still mostly asleep, and Amy helped him to his feet. The bandages weren’t soaked through, so her newly cleaned carpet went unmarked. Amy, still in her pyjamas, steadied him as they walked towards the concealed lift at the back of the corridor—one that had, until recently, only been used to access safety in an emergency. After all, a whole panic floor trumped a panic room any day.
The doors opened and she left him standing there, while she ran back to the bathroom and retrieved the muddy, bloody clothes from the bath.
They descended to the ground floor and Amy guided him towards his bedroom.
“They’ll find me here,” Jason said quietly. “Bryn knows—”
“Wait and see,” Amy said, her heart quickening at the secret she was about to share with him. Only two people in the world knew about this—her and Lizzie—and Jason would make three. But she would do anything to protect him, even laying open her past.
She sat him down on the edge of his bed, the narrow single that had once been hers, before approaching the bookcase. Her things had been packed away in a little cardboard box to be replaced by his action DVDs and motoring magazines (and the lads’ mags sandwiched between them that Jason thought she didn’t know about).
But Amy leaned around the sides of the case, looking for the little hooks that fastened it to the wall. She unhooked them and slowly pushed the bookcase aside. The castors had sunk into the carpet but they gave after a shove, revealing a small closet with a couple of large winter coats.
“Are we going into Narnia?” Jason sounded amused and Amy poked her tongue out at him.
“Come on, Aslan. Get in the cupboard.” Amy helped him up and into the small space, throwing the bin bag in after him.
“Amy, I can’t stay in here. I can barely breathe.”
Amy smiled, proud of her secret. “Just like the wardrobe in the Spare Room, this cupboard has hidden depths.”
She reached past him and pushed down the handle. The air beyond was stale and heavy with dust, but she shoved him through the coats and onto their adventure.
* * *
Jason stumbled out of the cupboard and into a spider’s paradise.
Great swathes of cobwebs crisscrossed the room, as if an overenthusiastic Halloween decorator had been given free rein. An old washing machine and dryer sat beside a deep porcelain sink with exposed pipework leading through a patched hole in the wall to the outside world. On top of the dryer sat a yellowing basket with a load of washing neatly folded inside, a frumpy jumper the topmost item, shrouded in dust.
A frosted-glass door took up one corner, the key still in the lock with a rusty metal key ring hanging from it and proclaiming that the owner loved Brighton.
Slowly, his brain still hungover with sleep, Jason realised they had crossed into the shabby, boarded-up house that was twinned with Amy’s.
“What is this place?” Jason muttered, mostly to himself.
Amy picked up a broom from the corner and started sweeping aside the cobwebs. From the collection of webs in the corners, someone had done this on a number of occasions. “My grandmother’s house.”
Jason looked at her incredulously. “Seriously? And...where is she now?”
Amy smiled at him, but it was shadowed, as she jammed her thumb towards the wall. “On the mantelpiece in the lounge.”
Jason felt like he’d been hit over the head. “You lived next door to your grandmother?”
“No, we lived with her.” Amy swung the bin liner up into the washing basket, dislodging a cloud of dust and setting off Jason’s cough again.
Before he could ask more questions, she took his hand and led him out of the utility room and into the dingy corridor beyond. “The power’s cabled in from next door, and I think the water’s still on. I haven’t tried it in a while.”
The downstairs looked like a typical Cardiff house, with the same tiling that dominated the student digs of Cathays and the terraces of Gabalfa. The front door had about eight locks across it and the weak dawn light seeped in around the edges of the corrugated iron that covered the windows. The doors to the other downstairs rooms were firmly closed, the spiders undisturbed for many years.
Amy brandished the broom in front of her like a sword, bringing back the image of his arrival and her determined little figure defending her territory. She continued dragging him on, up the stairs to the next floor, which was equally dusty and filthy.
“This place needs a deep clean,” he said absently, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other.
“I don’t come here often. Just to check the wiring every year or so, and sometimes when I need...” She trailed off, but kept tugging him around the landing, not allowing him time to catch his breath and interrogate her about this surprising turn of events.
She grabbed a hook from the corner and pulled down a loft hatch with a solid-looking ladder.
“After you,” she said, gesturing him up, and Jason placed his bandaged foot on the bottom rung. Bracing himself against the pain, he somehow made it up the ladder and narrowly avoided banging his head on a low beam.
Across the centre of the converted attic hung a ragged sheer purple curtain. On the near side was a low bed and a chest of drawers, with a combination TV and VCR covered in shiny stickers. A bare bookcase, also decorated in stickers, had a few hockey trophies balanced along the top. Light snuck through the gaps in a tatty blind pulled across the skylight.
&nb
sp; “This was Lizzie’s room. Come on.”
Lizzie...? Oh, Amy’s sister. She had mentioned her a few times, and all Jason knew was that she lived in Australia and had been the one who had hired him as Amy’s cleaner in the first place. That seemed like another life now, when Amy had refused to open the door and, when she had let him in, barely said a word to him.
Amy pushed aside the curtain, revealing a near-identical space beyond except for a large covered object in the corner. She picked up the duvet and shook off the thick layer of dust, before drawing a clean but threadbare blanket from the chest of drawers.
“Sorry it’s not much.”
“Considering I thought I was gonna spend the day in a cupboard...”
Suddenly, his stomach rumbled and he remembered he’d had nothing to eat or drink since yesterday morning.
Amy looked concerned. “I’ll get you some supplies. And painkillers. Oh!”
She opened the top drawer of the chest of drawers as Jason sat on the edge of the bed, watching her rummage through a truly frightening amount of paracetamol. “Damn it, these have expired.”
“We’ll clear them out later.” Jason started listing towards the pillows, before Amy snatched them from under him and beat out more huge dust clouds.
“I’ll get fresh linen later. And food, and pills. Stay here.”
Jason finally collapsed back on the pillows and allowed Amy to fuss with the blanket. “You know you’re harbouring a fugitive.”
“I’m protecting my friend,” she said simply, before dashing away down the stairs. Jason watched her go, feeling painfully grateful, and closing his eyes before he could cry tears of pure relief.
Chapter Thirty-Three: Separation Anxiety
Amy was shoving the bookcase back into place when she heard the doorbell.
“Excellent timing, Bryn,” she said, heading upstairs to AEON and throwing her hoodie on over her thin pyjama top.
Code Runner (Amy Lane Mysteries Book 2) Page 18