Captcha Thief (Amy Lane Mysteries)

by Rosie Claverton

  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 mean
t … 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.

  How did such bungled surveillance lead to such a successful heist?

  Chapter 13

  River deep, mountain high

  The bike was like a temperamental stallion – barely tamed, constantly trying to kick out and wanting to show off exactly how fast he could run.

  Jason felt Frieda laughing against him as he understeered again and clipped an overgrown hedgerow. They were in the middle of Snowdonia National Park, now less than an hour from Bangor, and the exhilaration of the journey was morphing into the nerves of reaching their destination. One hotel room or two? One bed or two? And how exactly did he feel about those options?

  And what the hell was he thinking? He’d agreed to accompany a woman he barely knew on a trip across the country to investigate a crime by … what? Asking questions? Surveillance? Breaking heads? He’d had a lot of time to think on this journey, and he was no closer to figuring out what he was doing here.

  As they neared Mount Snowdon – not that he could tell much of anything in the dark – Jason was forced to slow down. The midnight air was cold and thick with a descending mist, the bike’s driving lights only illuminating a few short yards ahead. Jason crawled through the fog, the bike barely topping thirty miles an hour in the dense clouds that were forming around them.

  He had the sense of being watched, as if the towering yet unseen mountains were looking down and judging him. He shivered from the chill, or maybe just the creeping feeling over his spine, like someone was walking over his grave. The silent forests and majestic lakes rang with the magic of King Arthur’s court, age-old monuments to a former glorious time when knights fought dragons and women rose from the frigid waters to present the one true king with his almighty sword.

  The stone edifices absorbed all sound, so that all he could hear was Frieda’s breathing and his, out of step and harsh in the night air. If he could see more than a few feet in front of him, he was sure the view would be breathtaking. As it was, he was confined to predicting the curves of the road ahead and not falling through the flimsy-looking barriers preventing them from a drop into God knows what.

  A sudden chill swept over him, a strong breeze blowing from the right. Jason glanced over, but he could see nothing but inky blackness shrouded in swirls of mist. He fought to keep the bike’s line, cornering into the wind. Frieda’s hands shifted on his waist, and he felt her fingers flex through the leather as she leaned with him.

  The lorry came out of nowhere.

  The horn blast warned him a few seconds before impact. Jason swerved the bike to the left and braked hard, but the bike fishtailed and he felt the rear wheel lift as if a weight had been thrown off. Frieda.

  The bike toppled, skidding across the lorry’s path and taking him with it. The asphalt tore up his leathers, the agony in his trapped leg fighting to be heard over the death knell in his head.

  Inches from the front wheels of the lorry, Jason closed his eyes.

  And jerked them open, as the heavy lorry whistled past his head and the bike slammed against solid rock.

  Jason flew through the air, an ungainly ostrich in flight, and plunged into the lake.

  Amy couldn’t sleep.

  The coffee had done nothing for her, and the red wine chaser made her heart beat unpleasantly fast
, her face flushed and too hot. Where was Jason? Bangor had plenty of mobile phone signal but his GPS locators all remained off-grid. Her mind supplied the 1001 ways that he could die in the Middle of Nowhere, Wales, but she tried to fight away those thoughts.

  He was fine. He had to be fine.

  Unable to monitor Jason’s wellbeing, she sought out a distraction. When flash games and Sporcle quizzes failed to hold her attention, she indulged in her favourite loathed pastime – checking in with her parents.

  The bank account opened up for her easily enough. It was her father’s third new account in six months, which deepened her suspicion that he was involved in something unsavoury. Tax avoidance or money laundering for the obscenely wealthy. Something else she could hate him for, while he remained blissfully unaware.

  From their recent transactions, they were in Monaco. Expensive restaurants and wine by the case and private casinos. Amy wondered if Lizzie was going to join them, play happy families without her. She had forgiven her sister for reaching out to their parents, but something about the image still stung.

  Lizzie remembered living with their parents better than Amy did. Lizzie had lived with them in their beautiful Whitchurch house, while Amy clung to her grandmother’s skirts and stayed in the little Cardiff terrace, away from the light and the outside. Of course, when they’d abandoned their children to see the world, Lizzie had been forced to share Amy’s attic and the burden of Gran’s fading mind.

  It was the theft that set them free. Amy had watched their travels for months, yearning for some connection to them when the postcards and calls dried up. Taking the next step had been difficult only because it crossed a moral line – the child who stole from her parents.

  Her phone buzzed. She pounced on it but was disappointed to see Owain’s name staring back at her. He’d added a few more names to their rogues’ gallery. Amy matched a couple to faces she’d flagged, and added the others to her list.