Binary Witness (The Amy Lane Mysteries)

by Rosie Claverton

  “Milk. Sugar if it’s there.”

  Jason laughed silently at her response. When was the last time she’d even looked in the cupboards? It was odd, how much he gave a damn, because what was she to him? But there was something pathetic about her, like a stray cat that needed a can of Whiskers and a blanket. God, his mates would have a field day if they saw what a girl he’d turned into.

  “You need dishwasher stuff.” He brought through her tea, chocolate digestive balanced on the rim, and set it on an old newspaper. She demolished the biscuit, still not looking at him, and cradled her mug close. Jason perched on the edge of an old armchair that was in need of a shampoo and sipped his tea. The flat wasn’t that bad really, underneath it all. Once it was cleaned up a bit, it would look quite homey.

  He made a couple of rounds of toast—after emptying half a loaf of crumbs out of the toaster—and hunted around for something to put on it that didn’t consist entirely of mould. It turned out that peanut butter could survive anything and he spread it thickly before taking it through to her. Amy had returned to her computer but nodded when he set down the plate at her elbow. He watched her for a moment, as she picked up the toast without looking, her eyes never leaving the screen and her right hand continuing to dance over the keys. Her hair was wet from the shower, but it was drying to a mousy brown, sticking to her porcelain skin in thick knotted clumps. Little rivulets of water were running down her pale neck and under her dressing gown collar, but she didn’t even flinch.

  Feeling like an intruder, Jason returned to the kitchen and continued to wage his war on the washing up. The doorbell rang. “Expecting someone?”

  When she didn’t respond, he wandered back into the living room, to see her peering at a pair of grainy faces on one of her monitors. So the camera’s in the buzzer box. One of the figures held up a police badge to the camera.

  “It better be interesting,” she said mysteriously and pressed a button under the desk.

  The door opened downstairs and Jason wiped his hands with the teacloth, twisting it taut. Had he somehow broken parole? Were they coming to tell him that the board had changed its mind and he was going back? He couldn’t help the nervous sweat that broke out over his back and shoulders, as he took out his anxiety on the poor tea towel.

  However, the two plainclothes officers ignored him completely, approaching Amy at her keyboard. “Toast and peanut butter, eh? Did you scrape off the mould?”

  Jason felt himself rile at these officers insinuating that he’d let Amy eat mouldy food. But then his brain caught up and he realised that one, they didn’t know he’d made the bloody toast, and two, they knew Amy well enough to comment on the state of her cupboards.

  “I have an assistant now,” Amy mumbled, and the lead officer turned to face him, clearly sizing him up.

  Jason returned the favour, taking in every inch of a well-built man who had let himself go. His hair was greying but still thick, and the suit he wore was old and creased. He had a couple of inches on Jason, who wasn’t used to a man having the advantage of him.

  The younger cop was eyeing Jason with interest, better dressed than his partner, and leaner too. Jason looked away, uncomfortable with the scrutiny from the cop’s piercing blue gaze.

  The lead officer shook his head. “An assistant, eh? Poor sod. What’s your name, son?”

  “Jason,” he said, holding out a wary hand to shake.

  The policeman shook it with a small smile, obviously taking in the logo on his shirt. He didn’t offer a name in return, just took a seat on the chair closest to the computer and stared at Amy. “How about you fetch us some tea, Jason?”

  Realising he was being dismissed, Jason returned to the kitchen and refilled the kettle. However, he kept half an eye on what was going on in the living room. The younger cop handed an envelope to Amy and she tipped the contents over her keyboard. There was a glossy printout that looked like a photograph and Amy held it up. “Looks real. Where’d you get it?”

  “Internet forum,” the young guy replied and Amy nodded. “Explains the quality, I guess. The camera’s not all that. But this could be anywhere. Why are you interested?”

  “It’s the missing girl—Melody Frank.”

  Jason nearly dropped the mug. The second missing girl, the one who’d never returned from a night out. She’d only been missing a few days. But why were the police coming to Amy with her photograph?

  He dug out a tray and brought through the tea with a small plate of biscuits—proper brain food—and set it down on the end table. The young guy smiled and thanked him, but the older officer just took the mug without a word. Peering over Amy’s shoulder, Jason got a look at the photograph. It was slightly blurry, but he could make out a young blonde woman sleeping, bare shoulders showing above the white sheets of her bed. The shot was close, nothing visible of the rest of the room, except for a wooden headboard. And the girl was Melody Frank.

  “See something you like?” Jason jumped as the older cop sneered up at him. “Get back to your scrubbing.”

  “Leave him alone, Bryn,” Amy said, returning to studying the photograph. Jason was glad he’d brought her another cup of tea.

  Bryn, however, continued to look at him like he was less than dog shit. “You stay, you shut up. And if I see this in the papers, I know where to find you, all right?”

  Jason simply nodded—he had no desire to get a bad rep with the cops. Not again. He still remembered the shattered look in his mam’s eyes at the trial, how she’d fidgeted with the cuffs of her worn black jacket. The one she’d worn to his father’s funeral.

  Finally, Amy sat back in her chair and sighed. “I’m not a pathologist—I can’t tell you how she died.”

  The reaction was instantaneous, Bryn leaping to his feet and staring at the photograph. “What? How can you tell she’s dead?”

  Amy pointed at Melody’s neck. “The human body can’t sustain that angle. Asleep or drugged, she wouldn’t lie like that. She’s dead.”

  Bryn blew air through his lips. “I didn’t want to believe it. Owain, call the boss and tell him we’ve got a murder.”

  Chapter Six: UPPERCASE, lowercase, numbers

  Amy’s gaze discreetly followed Owain as he left her flat and went outside to make his call, her cameras picking him up in the lift and as he crossed the threshold. Outside. Out of her domain.

  She set the photograph to one side, her eyes fixated on the dead girl before she tore them away. “Where did you find the picture?” She pulled herself together and pulled up her browser.

  Bryn flipped open his notebook over his fingers, worn wedding ring outside the shield of soft black leather. His ex-wife must be speaking to him this week. He read out the web address as she typed, and it loaded in seconds.

  “Band fan forum. Nu metal.” Generic BB template, basic customisation—poor effort. She could’ve knocked together a better site in fifteen minutes.

  She could feel Jason leaning over her shoulder and tried to control her urge to tense, to move. He was a big guy, intimidating, a skinhead with old-fashioned tattoos wound around both his arms. But he could’ve been any guy, really. It didn’t take much to spook her.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she watched him scan the text, tongue slightly protruding from between pink lips. He scratched absently at a smattering of light brown stubble on his chin—he was probably one of those guys who had a five o’clock shadow at midday. His dark brown eyes flickered across the screen faster than she expected. The educational attainment of the prison population wasn’t exactly renowned.

  “Crash and Yearn? They’re more punk pop.”

  Bryn looked at him with amusement. “This is what you bring to the table, boy?”

  Jason scowled at him. Amy felt like the referee on some bizarre American wrestling show.

  “The original post is down,” Amy said, scan
ning the forum. “Not the ‘dead naked girl’ types. I’ll find the archive—you got that before it went dark?”

  Her simple yet thorough methodology for profiling and password trawling involved a lot of social networks and a bit of hacker’s intuition. The old science fiction trope of advanced technology seeming very like magic unfolded before her audience, and she caught sight of Jason’s gormless expression in her monitor reflection as she uncovered the identity of one of the forum’s moderators.

  To complete the trick, she returned to the band forum and logged in. The forum greeted her as “flyangeldust” and Amy opened up a set of moderation options, scrolling through them at speed.

  “I’ll pretend I didn’t see you break into that boy’s account,” Bryn said mildly.

  Amy couldn’t resist a smile, the temptation to show off a little and gain another inch of respect in this man’s eyes. “She’s a girl. Her name is Fiona and her boyfriend’s name is Michael, which is also her password. With a 1 instead of the i. Child’s play.”

  “You just guessed that girl’s password?” Jason said. “In one go?”

  And she would never make the Magic Circle. “Her only topic of conversation—him and the band. My next guess would’ve been their first big single. People need to pick stronger passwords. Cracking them is boring.” Amy rummaged through the moderation queue and located the Trash folder. “Not one but two posts from your mysterious photographer.”

  “Two posts?” Bryn said. “There’s another photograph?”

  Amy loaded the picture: another blonde woman, young and sleeping—or dead. The sheets were blue this time and there were faint marks around her neck.

  “Kate Anderson,” Bryn said bleakly. “That’s her bedroom. Those could be signs of strangulation, not that we can prove it... God, what a mess.”

  Amy looked up at Bryn. He was frowning, all the lines of his forehead deep as chiselled stone. She had never seen him look so sad. “You know both these girls?”

  Bryn looked at her as if she was completely mad, but Jason got there first. “The missing students? Kate’s been missing for over two weeks and Melody went out Friday night. You don’t know about this?”

  “I don’t watch the news. It’s depressing. Case in point.” She could imagine enough fears—she didn’t need reality to augment them. “Anyway, they’re not missing anymore.”

  “Their bodies are,” Bryn said grimly. “We didn’t even know Kate was killed at home. And we don’t know where Melody died—her bed was all pink, and we know she never made it back there. Her friends waited up for her.”

  “Could be the killer’s home,” Amy said, “or a hotel. This is your area. I can’t believe you’ve brought me my first murder.”

  “You could sound less excited,” Bryn said, but he wore a small smile.

  Amy echoed his expression. She would never tire of solving problems for him—this work, police work, made it all seem worth it. For a little while.

  From that first knock on her door—which no one had approached for months, years—when she’d refused to let him in, to even acknowledge his existence. He’d waited outside her door for half an hour, talking about CCTV and this old man’s shop that had been vandalised, and wouldn’t it be great if they could find the bastards who did it?

  When he returned, she let him in after seventeen minutes. And then grilled him on how he’d found her in the first place. It seemed grateful mugging victims liked to stick it to the coppers who’d failed them.

  The work intrigued her. It was a mental challenge, and it allowed her to forget that she was the one in need of protection. It was the unseen, the victims with thin voices, who benefitted most from the evidence obtained from metal eyes. And, of course, the meagre income from her consulting work provided some explanation as to how she maintained her flat and kept up her supply of biscuits.

  The door buzzed and Amy’s eyes flicked up to the monitor. The spike of adrenaline was still ingrained, conditioned, and she felt her heart rate soar before registering it was really Owain and letting him in. “I can look at these forum posts. They don’t log IPs, but I can find something. This guy must have more of an internet trail than this. Are the girls linked at all?”

  “Not that we know of, but we weren’t particularly treating them as linked before,” Bryn said, as Owain came to stand beside him.

  “Linked?” Owain asked.

  “Amy found a photo of a Kate on the forum. Possibly strangled. We started the day with two missing persons and now we’ve got two murders. That’s bad for statistics, that is.” Bryn scrubbed at his face. “I’ll have to call the local bobbies to deliver the news to their parents.”

  Amy had two Facebook screens open, and another window with scrolling computer code: her cross-referencing algorithm was exceptional, but Facebook’s clunky servers would only work so fast. “A few mutual friends but that’s not surprising. Cardiff isn’t a big city and they were both students. But worth checking out.”

  The printer spat out a list of half a dozen names and Owain bent down to retrieve it. “You could’ve emailed it. Saved the trees.”

  “And give you my email address?” Amy clicked idly through some more forum posts. She didn’t hope to find anything in particular, but she needed to distract herself from the ugly code. “How did you find this forum?”

  “Anonymous caller,” Bryn said and Amy looked up at him, before her gaze skittered away again. It was too intense, staring for long. He would see her, really see her. And then this would be over.

  “Can you get me the tape?” she said.

  Owain shrugged and looked to Bryn. “I guess. Why?”

  Amy rolled her eyes. Amateurs. “Because the caller saw the picture and realised that the girl was missing. Which means she probably lives in Cardiff. A Crash and Yearn fan who lives in Cardiff and happens to visit the forum before the post is taken down? It’s a bit of a coincidence.”

  “Wait,” Bryn said, “how do you know it’s a woman?”

  Amy shrugged. “Most men would try to peer through the sheet. A woman would look at her face.”

  “Bit sexist,” Jason said. Amy just caught his mumble: “And those sheets were pretty opaque.”

  “Well, it was a woman,” Bryn said, “and we’ll get you a copy of the tape.”

  “You’d better get going then,” Amy said. “Some of us have to catch a killer.”

  Chapter Seven: Man About Town

  Jason didn’t stay long at Dylan’s. The garage was the local area’s gossip hall and everyone had something to say about Kate Thomas and Melody Frank. Was someone holding them hostage? What must their parents be going through? And what if they were...you know...?

  Well, they were “you know” and Jason knew about it before anybody else. Maybe it was true that ignorance was bliss because he sure as hell didn’t want to know this in a crowd of his mates not-knowing. It wasn’t his right to tell them neither, so he got out of there and made his way to the next job.

  It was a gig at one of the large nightclubs on St. Mary’s Street—Koalas, the Australian place. Jason remembered huddling in front of one of their big screens for the Rugby World Cup semi-final, beer in hand at nine o’clock in the morning, and his heart breaking into a hundred pieces as his beloved Wales lost to France. Gutting it was, and the ten pints he’d downed after had done nothing to ease the pain.

  Several of the cleaning boys were going to help out at the club after a large party they’d hosted the night before—medical students, apparently. They really knew how to tear a place up and had been banned from several venues across the city, including Cardiff Castle. Something about someone pissing on a three-hundred-year-old tapestry.

  Jason showed up a couple of minutes late but the others were right behind him, so they just got a bit of an eye roll from the manager before the mops and brooms were handed out and they go
t to work. The place appeared like a vaulted cavern when empty. The top floor overlooked the basement below, where most of the action happened, and where the big screens dominated the main wall. It was weird to see them dark and dormant instead of showing rugby or some obscure late-night athletics. Of course, the stickiness of the floor was the same as always, and Jason wished he’d worn his old trainers for this job. The place was worse than Amy’s for unknown organic substances covering the surfaces.

  Jason, as the new kid, got men’s toilets, and he was amazed yet again at how piss really did get everywhere. The place looked like it had been flooded, and he figured it would take a couple of go-overs with the mop before it was anything like usable again. And a week of washing to get the awful stench out of his clothes.

  While he was waiting for the floor to dry, he snuck out for a cigarette and bumped into a couple of bar-backs also outside for a crafty one. They nodded to each other, a mutual understanding established, and concentrated on their fix.

  “You heard anything about Kate?” one heavy guy said, frowning down at his mate sitting astride a keg. Jason’s ears pricked up.

  “Nah, nothing. Police are still looking, but they’re fucking useless.” The man threw down his cigarette and tugged anxiously at his goatee. He looked haggard, but he couldn’t have been more than thirty. He was Australian, but a hint of South Wales had slipped into his accent. “It’s been two weeks, Dan. How can she still be alive?”

  “You can’t think like that, Pete,” Dan said, shooting a glance at Jason to see his reaction. Jason straightened, taking it as an invitation.

  “You talking about Kate Thomas?” They both turned to look at him. “You know her, then?”

  Pete stood up, looking like he might be cruising for a fight, but Dan just shrugged. “Yeah, she worked with us. Was meant to work the Saturday shift but never got here. Naomi thought she must’ve missed her at home, but she could’ve gone at any time. Naomi’s pretty cut up about it—housemate going missing like that, from right under your nose.”