Binary Witness (The Amy Lane Mysteries)

by Rosie Claverton

  They had more time now, with Carla out of his hands. Though they also had no idea what he’d do next. Would he try to get her back? Or would he kill more women to lure her back to him? Jason’s brain hurt just considering the possibilities, and he was glad he wasn’t the profiler Bryn had talked about.

  There was a ringing in his left ear and he realised he still had the headset in. He tapped it. “Amy?”

  Bryn smiled and walked away, returning to coordinating their efforts on the riverbank.

  “Why did you have to run where there are no cameras?”

  “It wasn’t exactly my decision,” he reminded her, but she launched into a tirade about better provision of CCTV for the greater good of the city and she would tell Bryn exactly where he could get off unless he made sure she had more eyes in alleyways. Jason leaned back and closed his eyes, letting her voice wash over him as she groused about how the police helicopter didn’t even have a camera.

  “Are you even listening?” He made a vague response to indicate he was paying attention. “Don’t fall asleep in the police car. They might mistake you for a crook. Come back home.”

  “In a minute,” Jason said drowsily, then shook himself awake. “I’ll have a word with Bryn, check he doesn’t need me. Then I’ll be over, all right?”

  “Get a lift or a taxi,” Amy said. “I mean it.”

  Sometimes, she was more like his mother than his boss. Jason disconnected and walked over to where Bryn, Owain and the mysterious woman were discussing the escaped killer.

  “If, as you say, there is a path all the way down the river on this side, I imagine he would stick to it,” the woman was saying. “His disguise is recognisable now, his cover blown. We put it out on the ten o’clock news—your girl works very fast, doesn’t she?”

  “She does at that,” Bryn said, nodding to Jason as he approached. “This is her assistant, Jason Carr. He was the one chasing the suspect this far. Jason, meet Dr. Eleanor Deaver, the profiler from London.”

  Eleanor held out her left hand to shake his and he smiled as he clasped it with his good hand. “A fine chase, Mr. Carr. I’m surprised you got so close. He’s as slippery as an eel, and only predictable to a point. The best ones always are.” She sounded tired, more than the fatigue of an all-nighter or two. Jason guessed she’d seen a lot of death, met a lot of killers. It must change a person.

  “What do we do now?” Jason asked, but Eleanor and Bryn simply looked at each other, wearing the same dissatisfied expression.

  Bryn checked his watch. “Call it at a day at midnight.”

  Three and a half hours after the original chase was nearly time enough to get to Newport on foot. It was more likely he’d gone to ground in his own house, relying on Carla being too addled to remember its location.

  “Get some rest.” Eleanor looked at Bryn with an almost-fond expression. “We can start fresh in the morning.” She paused, then added, “If the searchers don’t find him.”

  They all nodded, with the tacit understanding that it was all but impossible.

  “Detective!” Rob Pritchard hurried over, looking significantly less grouchy than the last time Jason had seen him, despite the late hour. He was holding up a large paper bag and waved it excitedly. “He’s dumped the disguise!”

  Bryn went to take the bag, but Rob held it out of his way like a childish game of keep-away. “Don’t contaminate it, Hesketh! It was under the next bridge down, stuffed in a bag. He probably scrambled the entire distance in five minutes if the state of the bank is anything to go by. And then just wandered down the road, pleased as punch, wearing whatever was under the damn coat.”

  “Any clue from the inside of the coat?” Bryn asked.

  Rob shot him an indecipherable look. “Yes, I just did complex fibre analysis with my iPhone and my portable chromatograph.”

  It took Jason a moment to realise that Rob was being sarcastic and couldn’t actually do those things on the move, and from Bryn’s scowl it was clear that he had also been taken in.

  “Hilarious, Pritchard. Well, get on it then. Owain, tell the searchers that the description is wrong and that he surfaced at...Clarence Road, is it? Probably would’ve got lost in the south end of Grangetown rather than the Bay?”

  He looked to Eleanor for confirmation, but she frowned. “If he was confident his new appearance would go unnoted, he’d take the most direct route to his safe house. If he had to continue to hide, he would go for the least-populated area with the most opportunities for concealment, and he would look far more suspicious.”

  Bryn looked unhappy and Jason could understand why. They didn’t know the most direct route to his safe house, because they had no idea where he lived. And now they didn’t know what he’d been wearing either. “Jason,” Bryn said, turning to him, “ask Amy if she’s got eyes on that bridge.”

  “She said there weren’t many cameras,” Jason said hesitantly, but at the look on Bryn’s face, hurriedly nodded. “I’ll ask her. I’m going over there now—”

  “I’ll give you a lift,” Owain said immediately. Jason frowned but accepted, catching the look that passed between Bryn and Owain. Maybe they thought they had to look after him after his race through the city streets with his broken arm. He didn’t feel quite one hundred percent, it was true. He’d be glad to get back to the stuffy, close environment of Amy’s flat.

  “I’ll call you after,” he said and Bryn nodded, returning to his worrying and strategising. Once again, Jason was glad he was only an amateur and could walk away. He’d seen more than enough of this night.

  Chapter Forty-Seven: A Murder of Magpies

  When Jason walked into her living room, Amy inspected her assistant as thoroughly as a pathologist, tugging off his coat and looking him over with a clinical eye. She distantly heard Jason asking Owain if he wanted a cup of tea, but the young detective declined, returning to the riverbank.

  When the door closed, Jason touched her hand. “I’m all right. Just tired.”

  Amy was sceptical to say the least. “You shouldn’t run with your arm like that. You might displace it and need an ORIF.”

  Jason laughed, startling her. She didn’t see why major orthopaedic surgery was funny. “Have you been reading about my broken arm on the internet?” he asked, clearly amused by the idea.

  Amy sniffed and returned to AEON, reviewing the CCTV footage of Jason chasing the killer from the station. Instead of lying on the sofa as she expected, Jason came to stand behind her, watching his pursuit through the car park.

  “I watched it live,” she said quietly, remembering the acrid taste of fear in her mouth as she’d seen this fool of a man run after a serial killer in the middle of the night with flimsy backup.

  “Pritchard reckons that he left the riverbank at the next bridge down. Bryn said to ask you about cameras.”

  Amy had already considered the downstream and upstream exit points, and focussed in on that bridge and the cameras on the Grangetown side as well as ones in the Bay, which were far more numerous. It always seemed odd to Amy that the more affluent areas had the most cameras, despite being the least likely to host crime. The paranoia of the rich.

  “What time did you lose him?” she said. In the answering silence, she perceived that wasn’t the most tactful way of accessing the information, though it was the most direct. She glanced up at him, but he seemed to be thinking, not brooding.

  “Um...Bryn can tell you exactly. I’d say it was about five minutes after we left the station, maybe less.”

  “I’ll take it from the last time we sighted you on camera.” Amy checked the timestamp and moved the footage to the correct point. “We won’t miss him then.”

  The lighting was reasonable in this area because of the approach to the Bay, so they had a fairly good chance of seeing his face. It was barely ten minutes after the station departure time tha
t a figure appeared beside the bridge, turning his head left and right, before strolling onto the road. He was dressed smartly, wouldn’t be out of place in a restaurant, and walked into Cardiff Bay.

  “The glasses are an irritant.” She cursed their reflection and obfuscation of his face. It was the top half of his face they were missing, at least until Carla could identify him properly in the morning.

  She followed him from camera to camera across the entire Bay until he crossed over Lloyd George Avenue, the main road connecting the Bay to Cardiff proper, and she lost him in the expensive housing estate. Cursing him, she picked up the surrounding camera streams but he didn’t reappear in a fifteen-minute window on any side where she had eyes.

  “I can make a composite,” she said, reassuring herself that she had enough partial glimpses of his face to attempt to reconstruct the whole. She moved to begin the arduous task, when Jason’s hand rested over hers on the mouse. She realised he’d come to stand beside her, looking down on her with an indescribable look. Almost affection. Like he cared.

  “Why don’t we call it a night?” he said. “Carla’s out of trouble, the pictures will still be here in the morning. We’ve got a hundred leads now and he won’t leave without Carla, will he?”

  Amy suspected that last statement was more wishful thinking than certain knowledge, but she allowed herself to be drawn into the comforting lie. “You can’t sleep on the sofa,” she heard herself saying. “Not with your arm.”

  His expression held a hint of awkwardness and he stared at the floor. His fingers twitched on hers. “I can’t take your bed.”

  This tough ex-con was a bit of a gentleman and she didn’t think she’d budge him on that. “There’s another bed. Come on—I’ll show you.”

  She stood and led him through the flat, past both the bathroom and bedroom doors until she reached a dead end. There was a light switch on the wall and she flicked it.

  The wall slid back to reveal a second lift. Jason stared at the lift, then back at her. “Are you actually a Bond villain? Do you keep a white cat down there?”

  “I’m allergic to cats.” Amy got into the lift and Jason followed readily, so she assumed he didn’t actually think he was being led to his death. Good to know, she thought, pressing the button for the ground floor.

  “There’s a button for the top floor too,” Jason said stupidly.

  “Lizzie’s dining room, kitchen, lounge,” she said, the words coming easier than she’d expected. “I don’t go up there.”

  Thankfully, Jason didn’t question further, just followed her out of the lift and onto the dim ground floor. The heat and noise of the server hit her immediately and she’d forgotten how soothing that had been for the years she’d slept down here, lulled to sleep by its immensely powerful hum every night.

  She turned right into the room immediately below her bedroom. The single bed was stripped down, but it was otherwise as she remembered it—the white rug on the floor with the purple spot where she’d spilled blackcurrant squash, the faded Firefly poster on the wall, and the bookcase of outdated Year 9 SATs books and laughable PC World magazines.

  “This used to be your room.” Jason walked up to the bookcase and pulled a dog-eared copy of The Hobbit off the shelf. “I can’t imagine you reading a book.”

  “The last one I ever read,” she confessed with a small smile. “I was thirteen.”

  He replaced the book reverently and sat on the small office chair.

  Amy waved vaguely towards the door. “There should be blankets and sheets in the box room next door. They might be musty. They haven’t been out for five years. And the rubbish skip is outside your window, so that can get unpleasant in summer. I never open the French doors in my bedroom because of the smell. Actually, I don’t open any windows...” She was rambling, but Jason just shrugged with one shoulder, a gesture that was becoming uniquely his.

  “I’ll be fine. Cheers.” He hesitated, smiled up at her, open and honest. “You didn’t have to show me this. You could’ve kept me believing you only had the flat. I’d never have known.”

  “I don’t want to keep things from you. I want you to stay.” The words tumbled out before she’d thought them through, but he wasn’t running away and he didn’t think she was a freak. She’d been alone for five years and here was someone who wanted to stay with her—no, who she could pay to stay with her. It was a business relationship. He was replaceable, just like a broken lamp. Not like Lizzie.

  “We should get some sleep,” he said and she nodded towards the bed.

  “Can you...manage?”

  Jason laughed. “Are you offering to help me? Because I’ve seen your bed, Amy.”

  “You’ll do a better job with one arm than I would with two. Lizzie...” She trailed off, stopped. She wouldn’t tell him how much Lizzie used to help her. That would make it seem like she was aiming to replace Lizzie, and that was not what was happening here. She had been fine on her own. This just made it easier for her to work, if she didn’t have to worry about the washing up or whether the milk was off. He was useful to her work.

  She worried about him a little, but she worried about everything. She was one of life’s little worriers. That was what her mother had called her. Amy had done her level best to forget that, push everything her mother had ever said to her far out of her mind, but that phrase just kept coming back. “One of life’s little worriers”—it sounded so banal, so harmless. Not so crippling she could no longer walk through the front door.

  “Amy?”

  She blinked and realised he was standing again, his hand hovering over her arm.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Just tired,” she lied, wondering if she would sleep, having opened old doors, old wounds. “I’ll let you rest. We’ll start at eight tomorrow?”

  “Eight’s fine. No commute, eh?”

  Amy smiled and wished him good-night, wondering what it would be like to have him always on hand. If constant exposure to her neuroses would wear him away quicker, force him to find somewhere new and away from her. Like Australia.

  With too many thoughts crowding her mind, Amy lay on top of her blankets, staring at the ceiling and wondering how she could be better. How to make the world outside safer, to make the world inside warmer. There were too many variables. Too much information. How was she ever to discover the answers?

  Like this case. There were too many victims. They had too many facets to their lives, places they might have intersected with the killer and yet none obvious. They had different friends, different courses, different jobs. Kate liked to have a quiet night in with an Indian and a beer; Melody liked to be out and loud with housemates, coursemates, workmates; and Laurie liked to save her pennies for weeks away with her girlfriend where she could form golden memories to carry her through the rest of the miserable, dull year. And then Carla was the anomaly, the chosen one, who had split from a drug-addled boyfriend and had a full-time job that made for crazy, high-stress hours at odd times of the day and night.

  Every little thing was a clue, a jewel of information fit for a magpie. But how could she put it all together to make a trail to this killer, this man who knew them all? The most useful thing was the timeline of Laurie’s life between Melody’s death and her own demise. She must’ve encountered the killer then and she was sufficiently connected to update her Facebook status, Tweet about it and check in on Foursquare for every active minute of her day.

  Unable to rest, Amy returned to AEON and brought up the timeline. Ten days. Ten short days in which so much had happened in Laurie’s life. The most striking thing had been the new job at the bar, but she’d met several friends for coffee and cocktails, gone to the cinema with Gina twice, and attended lectures most weekdays. Tomorrow, Amy would send Jason to every one of these contacts and find out if they knew the other girls.

  And maybe Carla w
ould wake up with the perfect sketch in her head, maybe the killer’s coat would yield some definitive evidence to Pritchard, and maybe some enterprising member of the public would recognise the killer at the bus stop and call it in. But Amy would still do her bit for these dead girls, her own threading of the jewels left behind, because she needed to be useful. She needed to have a purpose besides hiding in her flat and drinking Jason’s tea.

  And, for now, catching the Cardiff Ripper was her purpose. Before he came back for more.

  * * *

  He lay on her bed, wrapped in her blanket and surrounded by her gentle musk. Tears warmed his frozen cheeks and he sobbed into her pillow. How could he have been so careless? He’d had no idea they were so close to him, that they would snatch his beloved from under his nose.

  They had stolen her, and the nightly news, always so ready to tell tales, had shown new pictures of the two of them in their oversized coats and hats. They’d said only that she was being treated in a “secret location.” He would find her, though. There was no other option.

  He’d barely got away with his life. That man... He shuddered, curling in on himself. He’d chased him down roads he’d barely known until he’d got to the blessed spectre of the river. Down by the bank, he was at home, scrabbling through the soft earth as quickly as he could until he got to the bridge into Grangetown.

  Casting off the coat and itchy beard, he’d emerged with a bit of mud on his shoes and a shirt, tie and soft suede jacket. With his trembling hands concealed in his pockets, he wasn’t out of place amongst the late diners of Cardiff Bay, strolling along the waterfront as if he belonged there. He wanted to get out of the crowd, back home, but he couldn’t bear the thought of being there without his freebird.

  He’d walked slowly through Splott, returning to familiar streets and trying not to cringe every time the helicopter flew overhead. They were looking for him. They were casting him as a criminal.

  When he’d arrived home, opening up the house he’d never expected to see again, it had seemed wrong without her. The empty bottle of Bombay Sapphire on the table—only the finest for her, all the jewels of the Empire—reminded him of their bold caper, their heroic flight. They would’ve looked back on it in years to come and smiled fondly at how daring they’d been. But the scum had taken it from them.