Code Runner (Amy Lane Mysteries Book 2)

by Rosie Claverton

  “Get him down.”

  Jason kicked out as he was lifted, but with a man on each limb and the unrelenting pressure on his throat, he was like a child in their hands. Mickey sauntered over, surveying his conquest as if he was a piece of shit on his shoe.

  “Let me show you, cupcake, how we deal with boys like him. Let me show you how we send a message.”

  The world was fading away, sparkles flitting across his vision, and Jason gasped for breath. You’ve had worse than this. Keep breathing. Keep living.

  One of Mickey’s lackeys pressed something into his hand and he smiled. “Perfect citrus blend. Like a good Lady Grey. Will you do the honours?”

  He held the object out to Stuart and Jason’s eyes struggled to focus on it. And his heart sank.

  A syringe.

  Stuart reluctantly took the syringe, and the hand on Jason’s left arm squeezed until it had cut off the blood supply. He had a nice vein on that arm. The pretty nurse at the GP always said so.

  “Night night, sweetheart.”

  The needle pierced the skin, and Jason screamed.

  Chapter Nine: Lost Boy

  When he opened his eyes, it felt like the world had ended.

  The light filtering through the slatted boards burned his retinas and it took several slow blinks to clear the spots from his vision. Something soft was pillowed beneath his cheek, a thick line of spittle trailing from his dry, swollen lips. He protruded his sandpaper tongue but it was parched like the desert.

  Somehow, he got his hand under him and pushed his body upright. His left arm smarted as he straightened it, a sticky red smear across the crease of his elbow. His skin throbbed with aging bruises, the reds turning to purple across his pale Celt’s skin. What had he done last night?

  The memory flared across his brain and, in an instant, he knew—the cocaine, the shop, Stuart, Rich, Mickey...

  The syringe.

  Jason clapped a hand to his elbow, scratching at it as if he could claw the drug from his veins. He felt sick and light-headed, fragile like the icy crust of a January puddle.

  “Get up, Carr,” he told himself and forced his legs under him. The rush of blood away from his head made him stumble and he retched acid onto a discarded blanket. Amy was gonna go spare.

  Jason shielded his eyes from the light and took an uncertain step forward. He had to find the door. He had to get home. Amy would know what to do. She’d Google it and everything would be fine.

  He cracked his eyes open to look for the exit.

  And then he saw him.

  He was laid out like a sacrifice, shirt torn and discarded around him in constellations of cloth. His arms and legs were spread, the bare skin mottled with bruises, jeans blooded and cast aside.

  But the most striking thing was the switchblade planted in the centre of his chest, straight through the breastbone. And all Jason could think was that it was odd how there wasn’t more blood. Killing a man with a knife like that—there should be more blood.

  But then how much blood could the body of little Dai Jones really hold?

  Jason hiccupped, his throat burning, and then a sob burst from him like a scab ripped from a wound.

  But he would not cry. He and Lewis had beaten that out of each other before they were ten. And when Dai had been old enough, they’d done the same for him. Catching him making daisy chains with Cerys had been the last straw.

  When he was able to force down the hot lump in his throat, when the pain grew a little less, Jason was lost. What now? What did you do when you woke up with a dead body?

  Jason wiped his nose on his wrist. Bryn. He would call Bryn. Or was it 999? There was no emergency—the worst had already happened.

  And slowly it dawned on him that this was something else entirely. It wasn’t a body dump. It was his penance.

  If he called the police now, they would see an ex-con beside a dead man and arrest him for murder. But if he didn’t call the police and they found out he’d been here...

  Bryn would believe him. Bryn and Owain, if no other copper. And Amy would. Amy would hack the Ministry of Justice until they came round to her way of thinking. And his mam and his sister would have his back, like they always did. They knew he wasn’t a murderer, that he could never do something like this—could he?

  A sick, cold feeling came over him. But what if he had done it? He’d heard about people doing all kind of things while off their head, starting a fight, pushing some poor bloke to the ground and him never getting up. What if he was that person, and Mickey had only fuelled him to do it?

  Jason collapsed back to the floor and vomited, green bile and acid, his whole body shaking. No, he couldn’t believe that. He was not a murderer. He could never do that to Dai, even wasted on brown.

  And he couldn’t leave him here. His mam deserved to know he was dead. And whoever had done it had intended to stitch Jason up for it, and that meant they would grass him up to ensure it went down the way they planned.

  He had to make the call. And brace himself for the hell that would follow.

  * * *

  Through the hazy midmorning sunlight, they came.

  Jason stood outside the shop, barely keeping his feet, but intent on facing this like a man. A man his father could be proud of.

  A man facing a murder charge.

  One car screeched up to the pavement, blues and twos blaring, its twin close behind. The first cop took one look at him and reached for his handcuffs, but his older partner put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Where is he?”

  When it came to it, Jason didn’t have the words. He gestured to the door behind him, shuffling aside to let them through. So much for being a man.

  He must’ve looked fit to drop, because the young officer suddenly grabbed hold of his shoulder. “You’re frozen.”

  The cold suddenly sunk in, right to the bone, the warm palm on his goose-pimpled shoulder reminding him that human skin shouldn’t be blue. Before he knew it, he was wearing the copper’s jacket, the hi-vis yellow emphasising the deathly white of his hands.

  “Call the detectives and SOCOs. We need a perimeter.”

  Jason didn’t have the energy to jump at the voice behind him, as the older officer emerged from the shop, gesturing to the other pair of uniforms hovering by their car.

  The man looked at him, his face inscrutable. “You sleeping rough here?”

  Jason wanted to laugh—or cry. “No, I came here. Last night.”

  “Quite a party. You know the victim?”

  Jason wanted to rage that a child was dead, but Damage wasn’t a child anymore. He had been twenty years old, the invincible years, and he wanted the status his brother had. He’d wanted to earn a badge like armed robbery, but someone had stuck him with a knife before he could go to prison.

  “—you hear me?”

  Jason’s eyes took a few moments to fix on the officer asking questions. He heard the young one mutter something about an ambulance, but his concerns were brushed aside.

  “David Jones. Lives over in Butetown.”

  “When did you last see him alive?”

  His brain was sluggish, struggling to put together the facts. “Eleven, maybe midnight? Don’t own a watch.”

  “And where were you after that?”

  The lie almost tripped off his tongue, before he could stop it, but he’d resolved to tell the truth. Justice—Elin Jones deserved justice. “Here,” he choked out. “I woke up and he was dead.”

  The older officer winced, and Jason knew he was done for. “I think we’d better take you down the station. Official-like.”

  Jason held his wrists out, obedient, and the metal was hot against his skin. Shock, you’re in shock. “Lawyer,” he said, numb. “I need a lawyer.”

  “I reckon you do, son,
” the officer said, and they led him to the car, like a meek lamb to the slaughter.

  Chapter Ten: Deal or No Deal

  When Jason did not come home, Amy did not panic.

  The squeezing, clawing pain filled her chest, her heartbeat loud in her ears, but she took a deep breath and told the pain to fuck off. It laughed at her, squeezed harder.

  She took another breath. She told it to fuck off.

  It turned tail and fled, and she could breathe again.

  She tapped into the CCTV cameras near Dylan’s garage in Canton, fast-forwarding the feed while she ran a trace on Jason’s phone. No one entered or left the building until Dylan locked up—alone—at 8:00 p.m. The phone trace came back as out of range.

  Jason had lied to her.

  Next, Amy checked Gwen’s house—and there he was, barely half an hour after he’d left her. Why would he deceive her if he was only going to visit his mother? But an hour after that, he was out the door and looking so strange that Amy hardly recognised him. What was he up to?

  Amy followed him around his home territory of Butetown, jumping from one camera to another, until he was done wandering and headed into town. She lost him in the middle of Canton and slammed her palm into the table, cold coffee spilling over onto the desk beside AEON’s mouse. Was he meeting Dylan for a drink? What pubs did they frequent? What bars? Amy had suddenly discovered a gaping hole in her knowledge of her assistant and no immediate way to plug it.

  She returned to the feed for Gwen’s house, but there was no activity except for Cerys returning home at midnight, exiting a stranger’s car. Amy screencapped the number plate of the dark sedan, just in case.

  As light crept round the curtains, Amy was no closer to discovering Jason’s whereabouts. His phone was still stubbornly out of range and she didn’t have enough suspicion to bother Bryn. He had probably gone to meet up with the girlfriend he thought she didn’t know about. Amy wasn’t jealous—she just expected a basic level of attentiveness from her assistant.

  And knowledge of his whereabouts.

  She must have dozed off, because the next thing she started as her phone trilled beside her, the sun blazing through the threadbare curtains.

  “‘lo?”

  “Amy, it’s Bryn. Don’t panic now, but...”

  There were no worse words in the English language. Amy sat up ramrod-straight, instantly awake and terrified. “What’s happened? Where is he?”

  “Jason...he’s been arrested.”

  Amy placed a hand to her temple, trying to forestall the headache building there. “Is this about the bloody cocaine? I tried to warn him—”

  “It isn’t. Amy...it’s for murder.”

  She couldn’t have heard that right. There was a mistake. The line was terrible. “Say that again.”

  A heavy sigh carried down the line. “Murder, Amy. A gang kid’s been stabbed.”

  “He didn’t do it.” The response was automatic, instinctive. Jason was as much capable of murder as he was of flying. “You’ve got it wrong.”

  “He’s only been arrested, all right? I’m sure the interview will clear him, or the forensics. But you need to sit tight.”

  A bubble of hysterical laughter formed in her throat. Where could she possibly go? She couldn’t even look at the French doors in her bedroom.

  “You’ve got food? Milk? Owain will drop by to see if you need anything.”

  “That won’t be necessary. Jason will be home later.”

  Bryn hesitated. “These things can take time.”

  “He’ll be home. Keep me informed.”

  She hung up, her hands diving to the keyboard. It was imperative she find him on camera, track his movements exactly. She would prove he couldn’t have done it.

  She would bring him home, where he belonged.

  * * *

  The handcuffs bit into his wrists, metal rubbing against the bruises left by Mickey’s enforcers. Jason watched from the back of the police car as the paramedics carried Damage’s body out of the shop, shrouded in a red emergency blanket.

  A crowd had gathered to take pictures, official press and people filming on their mobile phones. He hadn’t been around for this bit for the bodies found at the beach. He wondered how Amy was getting on with that, if she’d found the bastards yet. If anyone had told her he wasn’t coming home.

  He’d caught sight of Owain earlier, but the detective hadn’t acknowledged him. Probably for the best, really. Jason didn’t want special treatment—he wanted this to be all above board, so that when they cleared his name, it stuck.

  Two uniformed officers got in the car, said nothing at all, and drove him to Central Police Station. It was surrounded by elegant marble buildings in the middle of Park Place, rubbing shoulders with City Hall, the National Museum and a handful of Cardiff Uni buildings, but it didn’t hold a candle to its grand neighbours. The hulking building had too much glass and dirty white brick and Jason recognised it for the cold, unfeeling place it was.

  Jason skipped to the front of line—it wasn’t every day they entertained a murder suspect. He was booked in, his property catalogued and confiscated, before he was led to a doctor’s office in a police cell. Two fresh, unsmiling officers flanked him and Jason tried to look as nonthreatening as possible.

  A short bespectacled man shuffled into the room, regarding him dispassionately. “Mr. Carr? I am Dr. Meade. I am here to decide if you are fit to plead and tend to any injuries.”

  Jason nodded but said nothing. He was wary of police doctors, had known too many who ignored his wounds and were happier to pack him away to HMP Usk for vulnerable prisoners rather than acknowledge his bruises.

  “Have you taken any alcohol or illicit substances last night?”

  Jason held out his arms beneath the jacket, the dried blood at his elbow undisturbed. “Someone injected me with something. Don’t know what it was.”

  Dr. Meade looked sceptical. “Well, what effect did it have on you?”

  “Dunno. Think I fell asleep. Woke up in the morning.”

  “And you remember nothing in between?” Dr. Meade made small, neat notes on his clipboard in a shorthand Jason couldn’t hope to fathom.

  “Nothing.”

  “And alcohol?”

  “None.”

  “You won’t mind taking a breathalyser and giving a urine sample? Standard procedure.”

  Jason held his hand out for the pot. It was handed over—and nothing.

  “No need to be shy, Mr. Carr. Nothing I haven’t seen before.”

  Jason awkwardly stood up and twisted his body to conceal himself from the police officers. Unzipping his fly was awkward as hell with cuffs on but he produced a tidy sample on demand.

  The doctor exchanged the specimen pot for a breathalyser and encouraged him to blow until he felt exhausted and breathless. The machine beeped. Dr. Meade’s eyebrow raised.

  “Want to change your story, Mr. Carr?” He showed Jason the reading. “Point-eight. Double the legal limit.”

  Jason stared at his hand, struggling to think. Could they have tipped it down his throat? That might explain the rolling in his stomach. “I don’t remember...”

  “Well, the drug screen is positive for opiates and faint positive for cocaine. This evidence is admissible in court, and contradicting it could be considered perjury.”

  Jason ground his palm into his eye. “I told you...I don’t remember...”

  “Well, you’re in no state to be interviewed like this. Sleep it off and they can ask their questions this afternoon.”

  Suddenly, Jason remembered there was something in his favour, something he could use. “I’ve got bruises.”

  Dr. Meade looked disapproving. “Oh, is this a police brutality allegation?”

  “No, no, the police were...it’s
not that. I was held down, see. Before they injected me.”

  Jason could tell Dr. Meade didn’t believe a word of his story but was willing to humour him. “Okay then, show me these bruises.”

  Jason shrugged off the jacket. The bruises glared in the fluorescent lights, two rings of purpling marks around his upper arms and beneath his cuffs. “There are more under my jeans.”

  To his credit, Dr. Meade was the epitome of professionalism, measuring and photographing every mark on Jason’s body. At least no one could say he didn’t cooperate, that he withheld anything. These photographs could be the only thing that corroborated his story if Stuart and Mickey went underground.

  After they were done, he was changed into whites, his clothes carefully bagged and tagged like his discarded overalls at a crime scene. Jason shuffled along between two officers, his whole body aching with fatigue and the beginnings of an awful hangover. His cell was small but solitary, and Jason slumped down onto the mat in the corner, glad to be free of the cuffs. He would just close his eyes for a minute...

  He woke to the clatter of the grill being let down, and someone peering through the hatch hollered at him. “Jason? Your legal’s here. Get up now.”

  Jason clambered to his feet, feeling weak and unsteady. He made his way to the door, where a bored-looking man in a dark suit was checking his watch. “Mr. Carr? I’m Karl Yapp, your solicitor. This way.”

  With his ever-present bodyguards flanking him and back in handcuffs, Jason followed Karl down the corridor and into a small, bare room holding only two chairs and a wonky table. Jason sat opposite Karl and waited for the officers to close the door.

  “So, what happens now?”

  Karl looked faintly amused. “I’m surprised you don’t remember. This is hardly the first time you’ve been arrested.”

  “Yeah, but not for murder.” Jason ran a finger under the cuff on his left wrist, trying to take the pressure off the bruises-on-bruises he now sported.

  Karl opened up his folder. “It is murder they’re going for. We might be able to argue for manslaughter on account of diminished responsibility, given the amount of drugs and alcohol in your system, but I’m not confident.”