Benjamin swiped at his forehead, sweat erupting from every pore. ‘I picked … the shipment up in Port Talbot yesterday morning, drove up to Holyhead and went over just after lunch. Dropped … it off outside Dublin, then came back with an empty. I was heading back to Cardiff when I, uh, ran into you.’
‘I didn’t ask you for the route. What was in the shipment?’
Benjamin mumbled something that Jason didn’t pick up.
Frieda slammed her hand down on the table, startling him up and away from the surface. ‘For the microphone, Mr Stock. Do not waste my time.’
Benjamin hugged himself. ‘I don’t look at them. Someone else loads them up and I just drive.’
‘Loads up what?’
He closed his eyes, as if he didn’t want to see, to remember. ‘Girls. Working girls.’
Jason had never disdained a prostitute, had been in awe of the right hook of quite a few when he was running around Butetown. But herding girls up from their homes, promising them a new life and giving them only ugly, sordid work in back alleys … He thought of Cerys in that position, a more vulnerable Cerys from only a year or two ago, and he wanted to smack Benjamin and all the other bastards until they bled.
‘Trafficking,’ Frieda said, and Benjamin flinched. ‘Call it what it is, Mr Stock. Ignorance is not a defence.’
‘When I first took it up, I thought it was dodgy tellies. Not girls. I didn’t agree to that. But once you’re in…’ He gave half a shrug, like a man afraid to move more than an inch in case the monsters in the dark should see him, catch him.
‘I am offering you a way out.’ Frieda’s voice was softer, kinder, as she slid into the seat opposite him. A friend in the night. She was playing both good and bad cop.
Benjamin nodded quickly, as if he was acting before he could take it back. Nye narrated it for the tape, the first words he’d spoken since the date and time of the interview. He was letting the master do her work.
‘Do your lorries carry anything else, besides girls?’
‘I told you – I don’t look. But I’ve seen boxes a couple of times. The others … they’re local to Neath and to here. They do smaller jobs as well, white van stuff. I don’t know what they’re moving.’
Jason’s ears pricked up. A valuable painting wouldn’t be stuffed on the back of a lorry full of women, but it might be part of a smaller haul. Jason itched to know the details of those local drop-offs, but Frieda had to weave her spell in her own sweet time.
She might be an ice-cold bitch, but Jason liked the way she worked. And he wanted to see a lot more of her in action.
Chapter 16
Hide and seek
Teenagers were a hacking goldmine.
They were power users of social media, always connected and sharing everything about their lives 24/7. A young person couldn’t eat a meal without taking a picture on Instagram, couldn’t stop at a shop without checking in on Foursquare. They exchanged cats on Tumblr and collected clothes on Pinterest, all while browsing Twitter for the latest unfiltered news.
Which made investigating a teenager something like child’s play to Amy Lane.
The first step was identifying the school uniform. After trying and failing to focus in on the badge, she turned instead to the colour scheme. She found the culprit – a Welsh-speaking secondary school in Cardiff.
Schools rarely networked their pupils’ information in a readily accessible way, but the pupils themselves were expert in shouting that from the rooftops. She found several Facebook users who had added their school, as well as some groups and events connected to it. But Facebook was fading in popularity with teens. If she didn’t find what she needed there, she had several other social media avenues to explore. Teens were all too eager to vomit out information, to be known, a habit rarely broken in their twenties and thirties.
She estimated the girl’s age as somewhere between thirteen to sixteen to narrow her search. As Amy got older, it was getting harder and harder to distinguish ages. No wonder aged shop assistants were IDing up to twenty-five. Not that Amy had ever been ID’d, but she’d heard Lizzie and Jason whine about it enough to know the score.
Scanning the pictures, she narrowed down a type – white, shoulder-length dark hair, no glasses, around five foot. But she didn’t recognise their suspect, and AEON couldn’t muster up more than a fifty per cent match on facial recognition. Perhaps teenagers involved in high-risk art heists managed their privacy a little better than the average social media user.
Amy slipped down into the next layer, the bowels of Facebook’s machinations, but even the locked-down accounts didn’t yield a positive match. Next she turned to Instagram, hoping that the glut of photographs would widen her window into life at the school – and let her find her mark.
Of course, the uniform could be a ruse, getting in under the radar by appearing as an innocent schoolgirl. However, given the general suspicion around teenagers in society, the girl was more likely to be watched in that uniform than if she’d dressed older, more like a college or university student.
Instead of searching by school identifiers, Amy looked at the upload location for the photos, narrowing it down to the area immediately around the school. Even if the pupils weren’t allowed mobile phones in class, the teachers could never keep them locked down during break and lunch.
The pictures were mostly of food – what else? – and selfies, groups of friends, laughing and chatting. Some pupils were more artistic, playing with composition and filters, but replicating supposedly ‘unique’ experiments that Amy had seen repeated a hundred, a thousand times.
She found her by accident. Skimming through one user’s detailed account of the first day of term, Amy caught sight of a face in the background and stopped. She was out of focus, but she fitted the type exactly. Amy browsed photographs around that time and caught her turning towards the camera, a frown at the antics of the girls taking selfies, as if she was above all that.
The girl had her phone clamped to her ear. Amy itched to trace the outgoing call activity for the timestamp, but the school would be a hive of connectivity – the likelihood of locating that specific signal was miniscule. She tried to narrow down the make or model, but it was a rectangular smartphone in black, surrounded by hundreds like it.
Amy browsed the likes and shares for the photo series, making a note of the usernames that cropped up frequently. She checked out those accounts, but they seemed like hangers-on for this particular Instagram fanatic rather than huge content producers.
Rubbing her forehead, Amy blinked away the blurring of her vision and reached for the red wine bottle. Unfortunately, only the dregs remained, standing next to its empty twin. Perhaps it was time to return to the coffee.
She stumbled to the kitchen, legs made of jelly and the floor constantly moving away from her. She made a strong cup of filter coffee, digging out some chocolate digestives to accompany it. She needed fuel if she was to find this girl, and keep out the thoughts about what could’ve happened to her assistant.
The doorbell buzzed. Amy frowned, milk slopping from the carton in her hand onto the countertop as she instinctively turned to look towards the door. Who the hell would ring her doorbell in the middle of the night?
Amy looked at the clock on the microwave: 09:07. The night had sped by, but it was still bloody early for a Sunday. She set down the milk and crossed to AEON, flicking up the external camera feed. It was Bryn, reaching up to buzz again. Amy opened the door and waited for him to come up in the lift, her mind racing through a hundred possibilities of why he was there, every one of them terrible.
She called up the GPS locator – nothing. Where was Jason? She had a police officer at her door and her assistant was missing. She tried to breathe.
The lift doors opened and Amy leapt towards the corridor, but Bryn had already held up his hand. ‘He’s fine. He called to tell me because he couldn’
t get through to you.’
Amy had disconnected the landline, to ensure Lizzie didn’t disrupt her work. She’d forgotten her mobile was still busted open on the coffee table.
‘He said he would call you when he was in a hotel.’
With that woman. Amy scowled and went back to the kitchen to fetch her coffee. Bryn followed her, helping himself to a mug.
‘Anyway, I thought I’d better check in on you.’ He looked at her with his sharp detective’s eyes. ‘You haven’t gone to bed, have you?’
Amy retreated back to the living room, her sanctuary under AEON’s protective shadow. ‘I am not a child. I don’t need a nursemaid.’
‘You do have an assistant, though. Who isn’t here.’
‘Jason doesn’t own me. I go to bed when I please, I work when I please. You don’t ask questions when I deliver results.’
Bryn held up his hands in surrender. ‘I’m not nagging. I came to bring you some more titbits.’
‘Since last night?’
‘Last night?’ Bryn looked at her blankly.
‘Owain was here. Before he left with Cerys.’
Bryn’s confusion faded. ‘Oh, right. This is privileged stuff, you understand? Need-to-know.’
Amy wasn’t surprised that the right hand had no idea what the left was doing. But Bryn and Owain were close – it must be awkward not telling his team what was going on behind the scenes. Like Jason deciding to go to Bangor with a total stranger without discussing it with Amy first.
‘I’m listening.’ She pushed Jason away from her head and hoped the coffee would sober her brain enough to listen to Bryn. She was out of practice with red wine, and her body left her control easily, even if her mind stayed sharp enough to dig up evidence.
‘Before she left town, Frieda was convinced that this couldn’t be an inside job, but I’m not so sure. They seem the folks most likely to have means and opportunity.’
‘Why steal the swipe card if you already had access?’
‘What better way to deflect suspicion? In fact, start with her. Talia whatsit. Nothing says professional like breaking into your own car.’
Amy gestured at her computer. ‘I have my own angle here.’
Bryn crossed to take a closer look at the monitor. ‘Schoolgirls?’
Amy pointed to her suspect. ‘She was hanging around the museum, checking the frames and statues. Had a confrontation with an older man in the hall.’
‘Amy, this is a professional operation. They’re not hiring kids for this.’
She folded her arms. ‘Owain believes me.’
Bryn sighed. ‘Can we concentrate on the museum employees for now and look at this kid later?’
‘What if Frieda’s right?’ Amy said obstinately. ‘What if you’re wrong about this?’
Bryn’s mouth settled into a hard line. ‘Maybe I am. But I need you to look down those alleys for me. Frieda’s got a hundred NCA bods working for her back in London. I’ve got you.’
‘And what are you going to be doing?’
‘I’ll interview the museum staff, cross-reference my answers with what you find, press their weaknesses.’
‘Make sure you ask about secret passageways and hidden doors.’
Bryn looked at her incredulously. ‘Seriously?’
‘We have no evidence the painting left the museum. None. Either it’s still in there somewhere or there’s a secret door we don’t know about.’
‘Secret door or not, someone must’ve seen something unusual, at least.’
‘None so blind as those who will not see.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
Amy looked at him pityingly. ‘If one of your colleagues was doing bad things under your nose, would you want to know? Or would you look away?’
Bryn’s jaw tightened. ‘You know the answer to that.’
Amy hesitated, before her months-old grievances came to the fore. The police force was rebuilding after a spectacular collapse, where officers had lost their jobs and others their lives. She knew Bryn was doing the best he could, but sometimes it didn’t seem like enough.
‘Will you help me?’ he asked, a note of pleading in his voice.
‘Only if you trust my instincts. I’m going to keep hunting down that schoolgirl.’
Bryn grinned. ‘I expected nothing less.’
Chapter 17
Post hoc ergo propter hoc
The next two hours were tedious for Jason. Dates and times of past shipments, the ships they came in on at Neath, descriptions of people Benjamin saw at either end of his journey, any piece of information they might have let slip, officials who were in on it, any hints of corruption within law enforcement in Wales or in Ireland.
By the end, Benjamin, Nye and Jason were exhausted, but Frieda was a machine, powering through her questions and demanding exacting answers in return.
‘I need the names of any other truckers involved in this. And I need the name of one white van man operating locally.’
Jason roused himself from his slouched position and forced himself to pay attention again. Benjamin gave the names of four truckers like him who operated around Port Talbot, Holyhead or Dublin, but not necessarily between them.
‘And the only man I know what does small work up here goes by Jonah Fish.’
‘Jonah Fish?’ Frieda repeated incredulously. ‘Is that supposed to be a joke?’
Benjamin scrubbed a hand across his face. ‘It’s not his real name, like. He’s a Fish but his mates named him Jonah when he was little, after he almost drowned in Colwyn Bay. His brother pushed him off their dinghy.’
‘Charming family. Where can I find him?’
‘I only met him once. We were stopped with some other truckers in a pub by Menai Bridge – just having a steak, we were. And he came in, sat down with us, because he knew one of the boys from doing jobs. Let a few things slip when he had a few in him, but that’s all I know.’
Frieda nodded and sat back in her chair. ‘That will be all for today.’
Benjamin looked up, hope in his eyes. ‘Is it enough? Will I … am I all right?’
‘I’ll hear from London shortly. You’ll remain here until then.’
He nodded, defeated, as Nye signed off the interview and Jason went to meet Frieda at the door.
‘Nice work in there,’ he said, admiring despite himself.
‘You would know,’ she said. ‘Faced many opponents like me?’
‘None like you.’
She smirked and walked away, as Jason cursed his traitorous tongue. He still fancied her, and that was a huge problem. Not least because she could turn on a hairpin – one moment mysterious ice queen, and the next raving harpy. That combination did not make him want to try his luck.
Yet he followed like a faithful lapdog as she stood with Nye in front of the incident board, brandishing a marker pen and noting the most relevant details for the two cases.
‘London will dispatch an agent from Organised Crime Command to deal with the trafficking issue. Jason and I will continue to pursue the painting angle.’
‘The white van men,’ Jason chipped in, eager as a schoolboy to please Miss.
Frieda wrote WHITE VAN? in a box on the board. ‘We need to find Jonah Fish.’
Nye laughed, startling them both. ‘Oh, that’s not hard. We know Jonah of old. Thieving, mostly, and drunk ’n’ disorderly. We can lean on him easy enough.’
‘We need to do it discreetly,’ Frieda said.
‘If the higher-ups get wind he’s been rumbled, they’ll scarper,’ Jason agreed.
‘Though a hold on their operation could work in our favour, we have no way of knowing what they’d do next.’
‘That pub by Menai Bridge? It does a good carvery of a Sunday. That’s where he’ll be,’ Nye said.
‘Lunch, boys?�
� Frieda said with a smile. ‘My shout.’
Bryn was surprised when the curator confirmed that most of the fine art and pottery experts were in the museum on a Sunday.
‘They’re running a children’s workshop on conservation,’ Lucila explained. ‘It’s the end of our summer programme.’
While the gallery remained sealed off, the museum couldn’t afford to close for another weekend day. Entry might be free, but the gift shop more than made up for it. As Bryn passed the packed shop, he noticed the sticky notes stating that all postcards of La Parisienne had run out. People were grabbing their mementos in case they never saw her again, like mourners at a funeral.
In one gallery two experts on archaeological conservation were explaining their processes to a few bored children and keen college-age students. Bryn interviewed them in turn, but they knew very little about the comings and goings of the fine art department. They might share a lab space but they inhabited different worlds.
Slipping behind the scenes, Bryn made his way to the security office, where the guards had nothing new for him. Paul was a nice guy, but they didn’t really know him. He loved his work, loved the paintings. He would be heartbroken at the disappearance of ‘The Blue Lady’.
Finally, Bryn popped his head round the door of the conservation lab, not really expecting to find anyone. Instead, he was greeted with three overalled conservators, two women and one man, surrounding a familiar empty frame.
‘You’re letting in a draft,’ one complained.
Bryn dutifully shut the door and approached cautiously, peering over the shoulder of the nearest person to get a closer look. They were dabbing at the ragged edges of the painting with cotton buds, painstakingly removing every drop of blood.
The nearest woman turned to him and Bryn recognised Talia Yeltsova from her photograph. ‘Yes?’
‘Detective Inspector Bryn Hesketh,’ he said, holding up his warrant card. ‘I have a few more questions.’
Talia sighed impatiently. ‘We are grateful to have our lady back, Detective – what’s left of her, anyway.’ The man flinched and looked at her as if she’d murdered his mother. ‘But every moment we leave this … stain on the oil, the more risk to the work beneath.’
Captcha Thief (Amy Lane Mysteries) Page 9
