Captcha Thief (Amy Lane Mysteries)

by Rosie Claverton

She had to be smart about this. She needed to solve the final cache, to give the impression of helping the killer, but she also needed to learn about him. As he hunted for the answers to the puzzles, so she would hunt him, more aggressively and savagely than before.

  The doorbell buzzed. She flicked up the monitor, expecting to see Cerys’ tufts of blonde through the camera. Instead, she saw something that made her heart stop.

  Frieda Haas was standing on her doorstep.

  Amy froze. Who had given her away? Had Bryn sold her out to save himself? Or did he really think her a criminal now? Did he blame her for Corelia’s wound?

  Or maybe Frieda was looking for Jason. She had discovered this was where Jason lived and was seeking him out. Amy wasn’t sure which scenario she liked least.

  ‘Open up, Miss Lane.’ Frieda looked directly at the camera. ‘You know who I am.’

  Amy’s mouth went dry. No, she was definitely looking for her. What did the National Crime Agency want with her?

  She scrutinised the image on the screen. Frieda wasn’t carrying anything except her handbag – did that mean she didn’t have a warrant and was merely trying her luck? If Amy ignored her, would she just go away?

  ‘I’m waiting, Miss Lane. Or I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow this house down. That’s what you think of me, isn’t it? The Big Bad Wolf.’

  Frieda wasn’t going anywhere and Amy had no one to call on for help – what could Jason, Cerys or Bryn do anyway? And she couldn’t call Owain, could never call on him again.

  Instead, she called up the old typing interface, something she had barely used since Jason became her assistant. She typed the letters that would appear on the simple digital display by the door, the only way she was willing to communicate with this unknown threat on her doorstep: WARRANT?

  The beep carried back through the camera’s speakers and Amy watched Frieda peer at the screen, shading it from the sun’s glare.

  Frieda looked back at the camera. ‘Let’s talk like civilised people. Not resort to threats and intimidation, hmm?’

  Amy smiled. Frieda didn’t have a warrant. Which meant she had nothing with which to procure one. This was a fishing expedition. She decided to wait Frieda out. Hopefully, she would just go away and leave her to get on with her work in peace.

  ‘Your parents send their regards.’

  And the world fell apart.

  Amy stared at Frieda’s smirking face, the agent flushed with the knowledge of total victory. If Frieda was here because of Amy’s parents, then this was nothing to do with the geocaching, Corelia, or the minor transgressions she regularly committed when aiding the police.

  She was here about the money.

  Amy had been naïve to think she’d get away with stealing five million pounds. But it had been over ten years ago and she’d thought they were in the clear. Except that Lizzie had made contact with their parents – was it that which started the cogs turning in their father’s mind, made him consider that his broken little girl could be a master thief?

  She knew there was no limit on time to prosecute such a theft, and for the millions she had stolen, she would face the stiffest sentence. All her current wealth stemmed from the proceeds of a crime, invested well – her profits from that day had bought this house, paid Jason’s salary…

  Jason.

  Oh God, she would have to confess to Jason.

  She needed a lawyer. She needed Joseph Treves to get over here and tell her what she could do, if there was anything that could save her. A police investigation, a trial, prison.

  She realised too late that her breathing was too fast, her face heated, her heart beating out of her chest. And Frieda was still on her doorstep.

  ‘You’re a smart girl. You understand now what it is that I know. Let me in and we can talk. Perhaps make a deal. Jason doesn’t have to suffer for your crimes.’

  Amy clutched at her T-shirt, clawing it away from her skin as she tried to breathe. Frieda hadn’t been following Jason because she liked him – she had used him to get to Amy. And now he was going to pay for her crimes, because he’d spent her stolen money on tea and biscuits.

  ‘Maybe you’d get away with a suspended sentence, but Jason? How many times has he been arrested now? Aiding and abetting a thief, a cyber criminal of your calibre – oh, I expect he and his friend Lewis might get out about the same time, if Jason’s lucky.’

  Lewis – what the hell did Lewis have to do with any of this? The non sequitur threw her enough for Amy to take a breath, and then another. She had to regain some control.

  ‘Yes, I know all about Lewis. I imagine his transfer to Cardiff Prison will be unexpectedly delayed, probably indefinitely. After all, he’s been providing information to a known criminal, hasn’t he?’

  Consequences. Frieda was laying out all the consequences of Amy’s impending incarceration. Amy forced herself to breathe through the weight crushing her lungs.

  ‘And Cerys Carr … well, that’s one promising police career over before it’s begun. Her brother’s indiscretions were forgiven, but now she’s tied to you? Good luck weathering that storm. As for Owain and Bryn, they might keep their jobs, but I don’t think they’ll let Owain keep Cyber Crime, do you?’

  A small, bitter part of her felt it served Owain right for betraying her, but Cerys? Bryn? He had been nothing but kind to her, held her up when she was drowning and given her a purpose in life, shown her there was more than merely existing from day to day. He had given her these investigations and now he was going to pay with his job.

  ‘Do you understand now, Miss Lane? Make a deal with me and we can limit some of the collateral damage.’

  Frieda looked up at her, meeting her eyes through the cold camera lens. ‘But remain silent? And I bring hell down on them all.’

  Chapter 43

  500 miles

  The steady rhythm of the train should’ve lulled him to sleep, but Jason was wide awake.

  He couldn’t shake the image of that smart-mouth girl from his head, the teenager willing to go toe-to-toe with Amy Lane over some ridiculous geocache. Did she remind Amy of herself? Pushing at all the boundaries and willing to go to any lengths for her independence? Independence now shattered by one blow.

  Jason had picked up a knife in Glasgow. It wasn’t difficult to find, following the decline of the streets until he found the rough heart of the city. They charged him tourist prices, of course, but he felt safer with some protection. His mam would kill him if she found out he was carrying again.

  He hadn’t heard anything from Cerys, and Amy hadn’t answered her phone. She had texted him a couple of minutes later, just as he was about to place a 999 call – she was fine, Cerys was on her way, don’t worry. At least, that’s what he thought it said. He was getting better at deciphering Amy’s texts, but he could never be sure.

  The Glasgow geocache had been easy to solve, in the end. He’d sat through hours of classical music before the final bow, slipping unobtrusively down to Row B of the Front Circle to seek out Seat 58. On the underside of the seat, a small black oval was stuck in the centre, difficult to distinguish unless you knew what you were about. And Jason had been briefed by Amy Lane – he knew what he was looking for.

  He’d pulled out his phone and scanned the raised spot, which yielded a short alphanumeric code. The cache was his.

  Sending the code back to Amy Lane, she’d replied with a short acknowledgement text – ty @. Jason tried not to be offended that he’d only warranted three letters in response to the greatest solved mystery of his admittedly short career.

  But the taste of victory had soon faded, leaving him to think about Corelia, about Amy, about the thief and murderer who was desperate to solve these puzzles. For Jason, it was a game, but for the killer, it was worth taking a knife to a teenager.

  They were missing something. But what?

  His p
hone rang with his boss’ song, ‘Someday I’ll Be Saturday Night’ by Bon Jovi disturbing the quiet of the sleeper train. He fumbled to answer it with fatigue-induced clumsiness. ‘Amy?’

  ‘Frieda Haas was here. At our house.’

  Jason’s mouth went dry. ‘Looking for me?’

  Amy paused, before a soft sigh came down the line. ‘No. She was looking for me.’

  With all the horror of a ticking time bomb reaching zero, the past few days slid into focus with absolute clarity. She hadn’t been hunting Jason at all. She had used him to get to Amy.

  ‘This is about … computers?’ he said vaguely, looking about him for eavesdroppers even as his mind reeled away from him. Frieda had used him.

  ‘I have something to tell you,’ Amy said. ‘It’s about my parents.’

  Despite the circumstances, Jason felt his heart quicken in anticipation. He’d gleaned bits and pieces about Amy’s mysterious past, but never enough to weave a cohesive whole. A small part of him wished she could’ve told him without being forced, but it was too late for that now and he hadn’t the energy to dwell on it when so much was at stake.

  ‘When I was first … ill, Lizzie was at boarding school. Our parents went travelling and left us with our grandmother. She was … her memory was poor. She couldn’t do the things she needed to anymore. She went into hospital and never came home. Lizzie and I needed to get out. We needed to hide from Social Services, because I was underage and I was ill and they would take me away.’

  Jason could hear Amy labouring with her speech, the tale tumbling out of her in a hurricane of words.

  ‘Breathe. I’m not going anywhere.’

  She took a breath. ‘I stole from them. I stole from my parents. I hacked into their main bank account and I emptied it. I … I left them just enough for the flight home, to come back for us, but … they never did. They got insurance, or used their savings, I don’t know – I don’t care. I used it to buy our house and make new identities, to send Lizzie to university and then to Australia. That’s why Frieda’s investigating me.’

  Jason closed his eyes. He’d always been suspicious about Amy’s unlimited funds, especially in light of her estranged parents and a spat he’d witnessed between Amy and Lizzie over them. But to know it was stolen? From her own family? That was hard to swallow.

  ‘How much money are we talking?’

  ‘Five million pounds. Not that they missed it. My father always invested wisely.’

  Fuck, that wasn’t a handful of petty cash. A theft like that made Jason and Lewis’ planned gold exchange heist look like a raid on piggy banks.

  ‘Say something,’ Amy pleaded.

  Jason realised he’d been silent for a couple of minutes. But what the hell could he say to that? ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’ve called my lawyer.’

  Jason was well acquainted with Joseph Treves, who had defended him during his most recent run-in with the law. Jason didn’t know how Joseph had come to work for Amy, but he knew his stuff when it came to mounting a defence.

  ‘Why hasn’t she arrested you?’ Jason wondered aloud, before realising that was a question more likely to rile Amy than soothe her.

  Yet she answered calmly. ‘I don’t think Frieda has hard evidence. If she gets access to AEON and the basement server files, she’ll be able to find the proof she needs. I can erase as much data as I can, but it always leaves a trail. My hacking skills weren’t up to much in 2003, so it’s a pretty obvious one.’

  ‘Will she get access?’

  ‘She needs a warrant. If she could get one, she would have one by now. She’s waiting for me to fuck up.’

  Jason knew the perfect way for them all to fuck up and they were right in the middle of it. ‘Amy, these geocaches—’

  ‘We owe this to Corelia,’ she said, immediately, voice hard like iron. ‘I’m seeing it through to the end.’

  ‘If it gives Frieda the proof she needs, we’re sunk.’

  ‘I will worry about Frieda,’ Amy said, adding the NCA agent to a long list of anxieties that Jason had watched her buckle under for months. But not break, never break. He never wanted to see that.

  ‘And me? What can I do, Amy?’

  ‘Come home,’ she said.

  Chapter 44

  Twist the knife

  With the National Crime Agency holed up in the detectives’ office and his best detectives in a little unit of their own, Bryn was at a loss. Until poor Leah Martinez was stabbed at Cardiff Central Station.

  The scene itself was a write-off, already trampled before someone had thought to put up a cordon, and he sent his one remaining ally – Cerys Carr – with a uniformed copper to fetch the girl’s personal effects and clothing, for Indira to go over.

  He should be sending Cerys back to college, away from this mess, keeping things official. But he needed someone on his side right now and if she was all he’d got, he would take her over a hundred uniforms who might have loyalties elsewhere. At least, with Cerys, he knew her loyalties lay in several opposing directions and he could wager that she felt as bad as he did about the whole bloody mess.

  But when she returned from the hospital, she dumped the evidence with Indira and scarpered. Bryn made his way down to the forensics lab immediately, despite the clock ticking over to midnight, sensing that this hadn’t been some random stabbing. Leah was mixed up in the bigger picture somehow.

  Indira had laid out the clothes on a tabletop in the shape of Leah’s body, two large monitors in the corner showing radiological images in cross section.

  ‘The hospital sent over their CT scans,’ she said, waving at the screens behind her. ‘It will allow us to reconstruct events without access to the original wounds.’

  Bryn prayed they would never get that access. ‘Cerys left in a hurry.’

  Indira wordlessly gestured at the small pile of personal effects, not yet relevant enough to the investigation to consider processing for fingerprints, DNA or trace.

  Bryn donned a pair of gloves and inspected the items. The plane ticket stubs immediately caught his eye and his heart sank. Return tickets to Belfast? What would a Cardiff schoolgirl be doing in Belfast, and why would that information have Cerys vanishing into the night?

  This had Amy Lane written all over it.

  ‘Very shallow wound,’ Indira said, calling Bryn’s attention back to the room.

  She had altered the CT image so that it displayed a close-up of a spinal bone, pointing at the screen with a plastic probe.

  ‘The tissues have collapsed back where the assailant removed the weapon, but you can see by the mark on the vertebral process that the blade must’ve reached the spine.’ Indira moved the image on several layers. ‘Yet there’s no corresponding mark on the superior vertebra.’

  ‘Which means…?’

  ‘Which means the knife was asymmetrical. A shallow, asymmetrical knife. Where have we seen one of those recently?’

  Bryn inhaled sharply. ‘When the thief took the picture from the frame.’

  ‘It would all be conjecture at this point, were it not for the clothes.’

  Indira returned to the table, spreading out the back of Leah’s jumper. The material had been hastily cut down the front and was flaking dried blood, but the tear just to the right of centre was still obvious.

  ‘Pass me a swab.’

  Bryn handed over a thin plastic-handled swab. Indira gestured for him to hold the material taut, as she ran the swab over the edges of the entry point. She held up the end for inspection and, among the rust-coloured bloodstains, little flecks of lilacs and green sparkled in the light.

  ‘I don’t think that’s your ordinary DIY emulsion. I think this will be a proof-positive match to a certain Renoir painting.’

  ‘So the murders are linked,’ Bryn said, his suspicions confirmed.

  ‘The at
tacks are linked,’ Indira corrected gently. ‘Leah Martinez is still alive.’

  Bryn coloured. ‘Of course, that’s what I meant.’ He had worked too many homicides recently for a small-town cop. ‘Anything else you can tell me?’

  ‘Count the ticket stubs.’

  Bryn returned to the tray – four stubs, two out and two back.

  ‘She was with someone.’

  ‘I’d check the hospital, if I were you. I think you’ve got an eyewitness.’

  Trying to find an anonymous mail server was like following a breadcrumb trail after the birds had feasted on it.

  After several dead ends and ghost routes, Amy tried to look for other sites accessed via the same route, a technique that had previously landed her a backup server in Poland. However, it seemed the thief only used anonymous email and not an IP spoofer. Which meant the rest of the trails were all out there somewhere, unencrypted and waiting – except Amy had no idea where to start.

  She examined the raw traffic data for the UK Treasure Hunt website, narrowing down the index of search to Cardiff – if the perpetrator could make it to Cardiff Central with less than an hour’s warning, they had to be local. She saved the previous month’s data to a database and set AEON to match up public and not-so-public information with the IP addresses. They might be able to narrow down the list by the known demographics of the assailant.

  Not that there were many. An approximate height was all they knew for certain, and that could easily be altered by footwear. Amy could only hope something would stick out when she had the list completed.

  The last geocaching clue was the only thing left to work on. She hadn’t looked at the lines of poetry since Corelia’s call. Amy veered her mind away from thoughts of Corelia and tried to focus on the task in hand.

  She brought up the lines of poetry alongside the original poems’ titles.

  Yesterday was St Valentine: ‘Valentine – To Lizzie Siddal’

  Water, for anguish of the solstice: – nay: ‘For A Venetian Pastoral’

  Oh! May sits crowned with hawthorn-flower: ‘Fior Di Maggio’