Binary Witness (The Amy Lane Mysteries)

by Rosie Claverton

  “Well, that explains why you were bothering so much with that Amy. She didn’t sound like your type of girl at all.”

  For some reason, that statement stung him, though he had no idea why. True, Amy was nothing like the girls he chose to hang about with, but she wasn’t bad and he thought maybe he would’ve liked to see her, even if he wasn’t getting paid.

  “What are you going to do now, bach?”

  Jason had no idea, didn’t want to think about what he might do next, how much he wanted to go back to Amy and help her find the bastard who was murdering girls in his city.

  But before he could answer, Cerys hurtled through the door, slamming it behind her. She’d been crying and Gwen stood immediately, taking the girl into her arms. “Whatever’s the matter? Hush now, don’t cry.”

  Jason rose to his feet, torn between terror and anger. “Did somebody hurt you, Cerys?” Gwen looked at him over Cerys’s shoulder, eyes wide, clutching her little girl tighter to her.

  “It’s Stuart,” Cerys bit out between sobs. “H-he’s been cheating on me.”

  Jason subsided back into his chair. Ah—another loser boyfriend bites the dust. A look of guilty relief passed over Gwen’s face, as Cerys continued to cry into her mother’s neck.

  “Now, do you know that for a fact, bach?” Gwen said.

  Jason rolled his eyes. Cerys did have a tendency to overreact, but it wasn’t like the dumping of the boyfriend was a great loss. He didn’t know why his mother couldn’t just let things lie.

  “He’s covered in her...marks! Scratches all over him.”

  Alarm bells started ringing in his head, and Jason remembered Laurie’s hands, the red beneath her nails—her struggle to take her killer down with her. “What’s his name?” Jason asked. “Where can I find him?”

  Cerys looked up, face blotchy and startled. “I don’t need you to go beating him up,” she said, scoffing. “He’s bigger than you anyway.”

  “I don’t want to fight him,” Jason said, slowly uncurling the fist that had formed of its own accord. “Just get some answers.”

  Cerys looked at him strangely, and he saw the realisation in his mother’s face. “You’d better tell him, bach,” she said. “It could be important.”

  And Cerys, confused and unknowing, told him everything: “Stuart Williams. From that Canton lot. You know him, don’t you?”

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Rat and Mouse

  Bryn had hit a brick wall. The post-mortem findings on Kate and Melody confirmed what they already knew—Kate strangled, likely with her shower curtain, and Melody suffocated, with a match between the fibres in her lungs and the fibres from the hotel pillowcase. The lake had washed away most of the useful trace evidence, but the medical examiner confirmed that neither girl had been raped. That fitted Amy’s idea that Laurie’s sexual assault had been an escalation, but didn’t otherwise help them.

  The media were getting bored of the case now, having interviewed everyone they could think of and paying Teresa Danvers five hundred quid to dish dirt on Jason. However, she hadn’t given them much of a story, clearly having calmed down enough to realise he wasn’t the killer and that the whole thing just made her look bad.

  But that meant the whole case was losing momentum. He had three bodies now, three murder scenes, and no excuse as to why he hadn’t caught the killer. He didn’t even have a convincing suspect. Amy said something about a server in Poland, but he fully expected her to get swallowed whole by the tech or take to her bed any day now. She was already fraying around the edges, and Bryn was starting to regret sending Jason away.

  It had been the right decision at the time, every media outlet breathing down their necks, but now that the whole thing had subsided after the weekend, he should be calling the boy up and telling him that Amy needed her assistant back. And yet he didn’t, because as much as he liked Amy, it was her decision at the end of the day who she wanted in her house, and she was perfectly capable of fetching him back herself.

  Meanwhile, he had nothing to go on. And no idea when the bastard might strike next.

  * * *

  Jason’s first idea was to go down to old Tiger Bay and pound the living shit out of Stuart until he talked. But he needed to be smarter than that. The only way he knew to be smart was to call Amy.

  But Amy had made it clear that her work with the police was more important than him and he could respect that, knew what was at stake. So he’d have to do this alone. He’d have to find out what Stuart was doing and work out from there whether he was the killer. To do that, he’d have to follow him.

  The Nissan Micra was not a car built for stealth, stakeouts or guys over six foot. But for all his complaints, it wasn’t a bad car. It had never let him down yet and, despite the tendency for the driver’s side window to fall inside the door and the complete inability to climb a hill, it could eat up a Valleys road. He just wished it looked less like a girl’s car.

  Huddled inside his thickest winter coat, watching his breath mist before him and condensation freezing on the inside of his window screen, Jason peered out at the gloom of a Cardiff night. The Taff lapped up against the bank, swollen by the autumn rain, and a group of lads sat around in the light of their souped-up Puntos, smoking and drinking cheap cider. Jason liked to think he’d had a little more class at that age, but he was probably kidding himself.

  He’d been sitting there for two hours and hadn’t learned anything remotely useful except that these boys could drink and liked to play pissing games in the Taff. Having asked around all yesterday, he’d found out that Stuart had worked his way round all of Cerys’s friends, liked a bit of MCAT and diazys, and was mixed up in something with his Canton boys but no one really wanted to find out what. It was the older members of the gang he was hanging with now, roughly the same age, same type, and Jason couldn’t really see them being up to much.

  Of course, no one had thought his friends up to much until they’d tried to rob the gold exchange. It was a genius plan, really, right up until the point where their getaway driver came off the road. Kid was seventeen, just got his license—he was no Jay Bird. He landed Lewis in hospital with his arm broken in two places, handcuffed to the trolley in A&E because he was under arrest for armed robbery. And Jason hadn’t been there.

  Jason was ashamed of the fact that some days he regretted running with those boys, and others he regretted not going down with them. They were fucking musketeers, him and Lewis. It had been their plan, but Jason had only gone and got himself arrested the week before, trying to get hold of the getaway car. But Lewis hadn’t rolled on him, just resented him from his prison cell, and set his little brother on him. Jason had known little Dai Jones since he was two years old—he wasn’t going to hurt the kid.

  Stuart and the Canton boys finally got bored of the riverside, got back in their cars and headed off down the street. Jason started the car, rubbed at the misted-up windows and followed them. Stuart broke away from the others, heading back towards Butetown, and Jason followed at a distance, hoping he was doing more than taking a trip to his mam’s.

  He was paying such close attention to not losing the car in front that, when Stuart finally stopped, it took Jason a moment to realise where they were—outside his house.

  Jason got out the car, striding ahead to cut Stuart off before he got anywhere near his front door—and his sister. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  Stuart sneered. “None of your fucking business. This is between me and your sister.”

  “It’s between you and my fist.” Jason pulled himself up to his full height, glowering down at this jumped-up little shit who thought he could interfere with Jason’s family and get away with it. Stuart just laughed, starting to turn away, then throwing a vicious right hook.

  It landed full on Jason’s cheek, pain exploding across his face. But he recovered quickly, landing a thump o
n Stuart’s shoulder, grabbing and twisting his arm up and behind his back. Stuart howled, sinking to his knees and crying for release. Pathetic.

  “Stay the fuck away from her,” Jason spat. “Do you hear me?”

  Stuart whimpered and Jason pushed him to the pavement. He heard the front door unlock behind him. “Go inside, Mam. I’ve got it under control.”

  But it was his sister who ran past him to comfort the poor darling on the pavement, looking up at her brother as if he were Satan himself. “What did you do to him?”

  Jason decided he’d had enough of this crap for one night and turned back to the house. Gwen stood in the doorway, taking in the scene with alarm, but Jason easily pushed past her. “Try to stop her getting killed,” he said and went upstairs to bed.

  * * *

  Amy stared at the monitor, hand poised over F1. Another tense minute passed.

  Then, finally, Cerys Carr left her ex-boyfriend on the pavement and went back inside with her mother. Amy breathed a sigh of relief and, moving the feed to another monitor, went back to looking for the serial killer.

  It wasn’t that she was nosy or interfering. It was just that crime was so easy to prevent. There were cameras all over the city and, while that was very useful for catching thieves or vandals after they’d committed their crime, if someone would just watch them live, they could nip most trouble in the bud before a crime was even committed. It did sound a bit Minority Report but Amy could live with that.

  Monitoring the city’s criminal hotspots was easy enough, and required a simple nine-by-nine grid of camera feeds to her distant monitor. She had recognition software to detect potential threatening movements and then notified the police accordingly. Of course, now she had added Jason surveillance to her repertoire, but she’d only had to call the police twice. Given his record, she thought that was pretty good going.

  In her ongoing quest for the killer’s internet history, she’d hit mostly dead ends. A few forums of questionable morality, the type that advocated domestic violence and rape under the term “spousal discipline,” where one could learn about everything from beaters that left no mark to how to construct your own cell. However, she couldn’t find any active threads with his signature, which meant he was consuming, not creating, and that didn’t tell her anything specific about him.

  However, this current chain was more interesting, as it seemed to lead to a blogging site. Russian-owned, but very American in outlook, it was a hugely popular platform for fandom, bandom and text-based roleplay. Once Amy had navigated their mess of code, she would—ah, there it was. A personal journal with the name “yearntolove.” It had to be him.

  The posts were unremarkable, except for some attempts at poetry, awful even to Amy’s school dropout’s eye. And they were addressed to someone called “freebird.” She was the focus of his obsession, Amy realised, the one who drove him to murder those other girls. He was trying to make her jealous, lure her away from her man. It made a sick sort of sense—posting the photographs of supposedly sleeping girls to hint at a series of liaisons, to make the girl of his dreams jealous. The girl who was most likely their woman at the hospital.

  But his latest post was different from the others. He’d been following the news reports of their findings and he knew they were on his trail:

  I won’t let them get to me before I get to you freebird. You know now how far I would go for you, I know you feel the same way. We’ll be together soon freebird. I’m coming to save you. Pack a bag and I’ll be there.

  He was going after the woman in the hospital. She was his next victim.

  Chapter Thirty-Three: What’s Your Emergency?

  Jason woke with a splitting headache and the urge to punch something.

  His left eye was swollen shut and was sending pickaxes of pain into his brain. God, he hated Stuart and he hated his stupid sister for running to him like a moron. That was harsh—he didn’t hate her, but he did think she was an idiot.

  Levering himself out of bed, he shuffled to the bathroom and inspected his face in the mirror. His eye looked ghastly, red and angry, and there was a bruise spreading over his cheekbone where Stuart had lamped him one. Jason soaked a flannel in icy water and pressed it to his face until he could prise open his eye. He took a long, hot shower, trying to dissolve some of the tension in his shoulders, before heading back to his bedroom to mope.

  His phone was flashing with a new message and he picked it up before considering whether he really cared about who was texting him. But the message brought a smile to his face, stretching the bruised skin.

  out of milk. @

  * * *

  When Jason arrived with the milk and a packet of chocolate digestives, Amy felt her face break into a smile—which swiftly faded when she saw his hideous black eye.

  “God, what happened to you?” Bryn said from the sofa.

  Jason shrugged, taking the milk through to the kitchen. “I walked into a door.”

  “That door’s got a good punching arm. You should watch it doesn’t catch you again.” Bryn sounded concerned. Amy knew exactly how he’d got the bruises, but pushed aside her worry and returned to her spreadsheets. She had to work faster.

  As Jason set down a mug of tea beside her, Amy placed a hand on his forearm and held up her surprise, printed on her best white paper. “Sign at the bottom. Bryn has a pen.” She turned back to her screen but watched him in the reflection, his lips moving soundlessly as he read through the contract. He would be her assistant—a real assistant, for “anything she deemed necessary.”

  “That can’t be right.” Jason had reached the line with the stated salary.

  Amy looked at the sheet anxiously. “Isn’t that enough money? I did research.”

  “Amy, that’s more than enough. Really.” Jason looked up, meeting her eyes. She struggled to hold his gaze. “Can you afford this?”

  “Yes.” She turned back to her computer. “You’re useful,” she mumbled, unable to find the words to convey exactly what it meant to have him there, beside her. Her assistant.

  For her ears only, he murmured, “I missed you too.”

  Her cheeks burned hot, but the feeling of the world righting was worth the mortification.

  He leaned on a clear space on her terminal, signed his name with the borrowed pen and passed the contract back to her. She admired it for a moment before placing it carefully on top of the printer. “I found the murderer.”

  “What?” he said, startled. “Where?

  “Online.” She brought up the webpage. “This is his blog. It’s mostly lovesick tripe but it has yielded some useful information.”

  “Such as what?” He peered over her chair and rested his hand on her shoulder. The last feelings of unease faded away.

  “He’s trying to make someone jealous,” she said, “and she’s his next victim.”

  “The caller from the hospital?”

  “That’s what I thought. But where is she?”

  “If she was a patient or relative, we’ll never find her,” Owain piped up from the sofa. “It’s like looking for a droplet in the tide.”

  “She went running at that alarm,” Amy said, thoughtfully. “That makes me think staff. I’ve only got a partial list of machines at UHW that have that alarm—”

  “We need to start now,” Bryn said, getting to his feet as if he was about to sprint to the hospital right that moment. “Maybe the machine’s on that list and maybe it’s not, but we’ve got to start somewhere. Time’s running out for this girl.”

  Amy printed a list of machines and where they could be found in the hospital. It was worryingly long—A&E, theatres, intensive care, paediatrics. “Does that correlate with my list of women?”

  Bryn scanned it quickly, but he was already shaking his head. “It’s none of them. I questioned them myself.” She shot a hurt look
in his direction, and he relented. “One in A&E and two in theatres. We’ll start there.”

  The two detectives got off the sofa and headed for the door, but Bryn stopped in the corridor. They all looked expectantly at Jason. “Well?” Bryn said. “Are you coming?”

  Jason looked to Amy. She smiled. “Sure,” he said. “I need to get this looked at.”

  * * *

  There wasn’t another moment to waste.

  He’d been patient long enough, waiting for her to realise, and she still hadn’t come to him. How could she be so stupid? He hit himself on the arm, scratched at it. She wasn’t stupid, idiot, she was perfect. He was stupid. He hadn’t made it plain to her, that he was waiting.

  Well, he’d make it obvious now. She wouldn’t be able to ignore him any longer. She’d notice him and then they’d be together. That was how it always worked, in the movies, on the telly, in his mind. The girl realised that the boy had been there all along and then she fell into his arms, happy and content.

  He felt himself fill with anticipation, a low burning desire forming in his belly. He was at the doors now, his heart hammering in his chest. This was it—he was going to see her again. He was going to make things right.

  “Can I help you, sir?” The receptionist smiled at him, a pretty thing with long blond hair—like his lovers, all beautiful and blonde, attracted to him. He remembered how they’d all come to him and smiled, how he’d known they were the ones. Like this one was smiling at him.

  But, no, there was no time for that now. Now he had come to finish this for good. He would have his real girlfriend now, the one he’d been waiting for all this time.

  “I’m looking for someone,” he said.

  * * *

  They split up in the concourse. “I’ll take A&E,” Bryn said. “Owain, go to the children’s hospital. Jason, start with theatres. They’ve got a few of them here, so I’ll join you once I’m done in A&E.”