Very diplomatically phrased, Jason thought. “I don’t know.”
“We brought it along.” The young guard produced a black electrical cable, tied in a tight circle which had been roughly severed. “It’s the lead for the photocopier.”
Jason winced. No wonder his neck felt like it was on fire.
“And when you found him, he wasn’t swinging up high?”
The image made him feel sick, but the young guard shook his head. “No, he was sitting on the floor. It was tied to a door handle.”
“Well, let’s have a look.”
The doctor carefully sat him up and removed the collar. From the look on his mam’s face, it was bad. Donning a pair of gloves, the doctor prodded at the skin and Jason tried not to cry out. It felt like the time he burned his wrist getting Amy’s roast chicken dinner out the oven, the edge of the baking tray seared into his skin.
“We’ll need to clean and dress that up for you.”
The doctor checked over the back of his neck, Jason confirming there was no pain over the knobs of his spine, before he went to fetch antiseptic and bandages.
Jason sat in silence with his mam, her holding his hand and him trying to move his head as little as possible. He tried to think through the pain, a litany of questions competing for his attention. Why had those men tried to kill him? Why did they make it look like suicide? Who, in fact, were those two blokes? And who had raised the alarm that saved him?
For the last question, at least, the answer was easy enough: Amy. He’d known his guardian angel was watching over him and this proved it. Which meant that she likely had footage of events leading up to his hanging and could identify the two men. Except that, with the time this A&E trip was taking, he probably wouldn’t have opportunity to call her before the hearing tomorrow.
“Mam?”
“Yes, bach?”
“When you get home, can you call Amy for me?”
Gwen was hesitant. “Are you sure you want to go worrying her about this? She’s a very delicate girl, Amy.”
“Very delicate girl” was an understatement, but Jason was certain she already knew.
“Will you just tell her? Please, mam. I don’t want her finding out from the news.”
And it probably would be on the news—if not tonight, then when he showed up in court tomorrow with a bloody great bandage around his neck.
“All right, then. If you insist.” Gwen still didn’t seem best pleased about it, but Jason knew she would do as he asked.
Suddenly, Cerys burst through the door, out of breath and staring at him as though he’d risen from the grave. “Oh, you’re all right.”
The young guard moved to bar her way, but she just walked straight past him. She looked strange, wearing a black trouser suit with a red shirt underneath, and all her piercings had disappeared save for a single stud in each ear.
“What are you wearing?” Jason croaked.
Cerys ignored him, talking to their mam. “I came soon as I could. There’s a whole load of press outside. The news is reporting he tried to kill himself.”
“Well, I didn’t.”
Cerys shot him a withering look. “I know that. But they’re trying to shape it up like you couldn’t bear the guilt of it, Dai being dead. Stupid bastards.”
“Language, Cerys,” Gwen said absently.
Jason had forgotten, in the midst of everything, that Cerys had grown up with Damage too. She was only a year younger than him, and the two of them had often hung out together with a PlayStation while their big brothers were off setting fire to things. Jason had long suspected he’d been her first kiss, awkward and shy pre-teens testing out the theory. Not that he wanted to think about his baby sister kissing anyone, but at least Dai Jones was better than Stuart bloody Williams.
“So, where have you been in that get-up?”
Cerys ignored him again, turning as the doctor came in with a trolley full of cotton wool buds and sterile water. “I’ll get out of your way. Good luck tomorrow, Jay.”
“Ta, Cerys.”
She gave him a little wave and disappeared out the room.
Gwen finally released his hand. “I’d better be going too, if they’re almost done with you.”
“Bye, mam.” Jason gave her an awkward one-armed hug, before she followed Cerys. The next time he saw them, he’d be back in the dock. He didn’t know if that was better or worse than a hospital bed.
The doctor held up the first swab. “This might sting a wee bit.”
It stung. Oh, fucking hell, how it stung. Jason gritted his teeth and suffered the torture in silence, before it was finally over and he was bandaged up tight for the journey back to HMP Swansea.
All he had to do was keep himself alive until the bail hearing tomorrow. How hard could it be?
Chapter Twenty-Four: Airtight
Screw Bryn, Amy thought, I’m going after the prize.
As soon as Gwen called her, Amy said she’d heard it on the news but thank you, etc., etc. She hung up and immediately sent an email to the governor purporting to be from the prison’s private security agency with the camera positions and time stamps of the incident in the library.
She didn’t bother to contact Bryn. One, this was a prison matter and she doubted the governor would involve the local bobbies; and two, she still hadn’t forgiven him for warning her away from Jason’s case.
As to why two random men had attacked him in the library, Amy did not believe in coincidence. Jason might be a trouble magnet, but it was always very personal trouble he had, or was perceived to have, provoked.
She identified the men easily enough from the screencaps. Both lifers, Cardiff boys, ran with the same gang five years ago—prior to their arrest for armed robbery. Amy double-checked they weren’t related to Jason’s crew’s ill-fated gold exchange theft, but no, they had knocked over a series of corner shops while wielding carving knives. The aspirations of Cardiff’s criminal underclasses were frankly pathetic. Dream a little bigger, darling.
What was interesting about them was that they’d both gone to school with Stuart Williams. It seemed there had been four men who had robbed the shops, but only two of them got caught. They all wore balaclavas, so the identity sketches were hardly conclusive. If Amy squinted, she could convince herself that one of the missing men was Stuart.
Perusing the prison records, the men had been involved in a number of assaults—always together, like conjoined twin assassins—and they had a series of large regular money orders coming into the prison from their old mate Stuart. Their reward for keeping schtum? He could undoubtedly afford it, headlining a roaring trade in cocaine.
All she needed to do now was link Stuart to the heavies with Damage’s possessions and it would all add up perfectly for a jury. However, from their arrest records, those men ran with a neo-Nazi gang originally out of Liverpool, who had migrated to Cardiff via Wrexham to deal drugs and incite racial hatred.
According to Sebastian Rawlings’s notes, the command ranks of the gang were hidden away and might even still be based in Liverpool, like the heroin traffickers who had sold to Swansea before cops infiltrated their number and took them down.
Suddenly, Amy remembered that she had never identified the third man at Ramon’s. Lizzie’s visit had flustered her and she had forgotten her half-finished work of the night before. He could be the key to link the heavies to Stuart.
She looked through AEON’s search records before finding the results of the comparison of the CCTV image to the mugshot database. Eighty-five possible matches—but a ten-minute perusal knocked that down to fourteen. Of those, ten were banged up and one was deceased. The remaining three had no links to Cardiff gangs, arrested for domestic violence, drink-driving and fraud.
In a fit of inspiration, she pulled up Madhouse Mickey’s passport photo. She coul
d persuade herself of a resemblance, ignoring the hair and adding on years of hard living. She ran the picture through an aging algorithm and the resulting image was much more distinct. She was ninety percent confident that the third man was Mickey Doyle.
Except now it all made even less sense. Why would Mickey and Stuart both be after Jason? The two men had met the night of Damage’s death, so they weren’t strangers, but they were at best rivals and at worst mortal enemies. Were they both trying to do away with him for separate reasons?
Amy did not believe in coincidences. Something else was at work here and she intended to find out what.
* * *
Zook was a man who hated loose ends.
No self-respecting criminal had any excuse for leaving a piece of intelligence floating out there for all to see, not unless it could be turned to a high purpose. Eduardo Días’s body, for example. That telling scene had reaped dividends.
Stuart’s cousin Gerry was an inconvenient loose end, but Mickey wanted his cocaine and his supplier. By folding him into the operation with a carrot-and-cudgel approach, Mickey could keep the details of the affair from leaking out before the rest of the ragged seams were neatly sewn up.
Stuart had been in awe of Zook’s black eye and blacker mood, and had not probed further into how things had gone in Liverpool. With any luck, that particular relationship would quickly sour and, if it didn’t, Zook would help it along.
Rich Porter, however, was a string still flapping in the wind. Zook was hesitant about disposing of a cop, but everyone knew the boy pined for London and it would be easy to suggest he had flown back there, to hide among the great unwashed of the capital.
In hindsight, Rich had been a terrible choice for an informant. When all that bound a man to you was money and boredom, there were bound to be mistakes. He should’ve chosen someone with deep roots here, someone like himself. A Cardiff boy would understand, would know the ins and outs of the city’s history, its secrets.
Like, for example, the whims of the tide around Barry Island.
The important thing about loose ends was that you tied them up tight. This was not a time for granny knots. Of course, Plan A was to plant the seed of Mr. Porter heading for London and the disposal of his person in such manner as was unlikely to be discovered before he was bones, if at all. But there must always be a Plan B, and a Plan C never did anyone any harm.
Therefore, if Mr. Porter’s body were to float, say, or be discovered by fishermen, there must be an explanation that did not lead to the pointing of fingers. A tragic suicide, perhaps, fuelled by the shame of betraying his brother-in-arms down the local nick? Or a drunken stroll too close to a cliff edge and a calamitous fall into the seas below? Something of that ilk.
By the time they reached Barry Island, the boys had been plying Richard with cheap whiskey for a number of hours and he was well on his way to an alcoholic coma. It made things much more pleasant for all involved if there was a minimum of screaming.
They used a boat that belonged to one of the lad’s uncles—a man who would not miss it in the early hours of a Wednesday morning—and cruised into the Channel. Zook used a simple GPS tracker (generic brand, paid in cash), his black suede gloves cupping it to his chest. When they reached the required distance, he held up his hand for them to halt.
The dinghy inflated with minimal fuss and they laid Rich in the bottom of it, tucking the empty whiskey bottle in beside him. One of Mickey’s men scribbled a note in a childish scrawl: I’m sorry. He placed it inside the bottle, amber tainting the edges of the paper, before screwing the lid back on. It would suffice.
Zook tossed in the GPS tracker. It landed by Rich’s loose left hand, as if he had just let it fall from his fingers. It was a beautiful scene—a pity, really, that the ocean had to ruin it.
Finally, the unresisting Rich was stuck with a dose of intramuscular heroin—a far easier feat to accomplish while drunk than threading a delicate vein. The man responsible, who was practised with the needle himself yet not so far gone as to be entirely useless, then tucked the syringe into Rich’s right hand.
He stepped off the vessel and they all watched in silence as the little orange boat floated away—until some little wave upset it, and that would be that. There would be no struggle, the alcohol and heroin weaving their magic, and Zook reflected that there were definitely worse ways to go. It was said that drowning was peaceful, and with a blood-alcohol level twice the legal limit and a shot of pure heroin flooding the senses, he didn’t see how it could be otherwise.
It was a shame, really, that he couldn’t give Jason Carr the same peace. He had expected the boy’s old friends to take care of him, but it seemed they were still unblooded children, prepared to brandish weapons but not to use them. The second time, he employed professionals, but ill luck had Jason discovered before the final curtain. He bleated his story about being attacked, but no one had yet believed him. It was gratifying to know he was branded a liar so readily, yet Zook could not risk some gullible soul swallowing his tales.
They returned to Barry before they could be spotted by either pleasure cruise or Coastguard, the soft lap of the water a lullaby in the night. With the dawn came Zook’s last chance to deal with the Jason problem—he could not take the risk that the magistrate would grant him bail, however unlikely the prospect.
The only solution was to ensure he never arrived at court in the first place.
Chapter Twenty-Five: The Scenic Route
They placed him on suicide watch overnight.
Jason had patiently tried to explain to the forensic psychiatrist that he didn’t want to kill himself and that he had been attacked. The woman nodded sympathetically, wrote everything down, and then recommended the guards check on him every fifteen minutes.
A torch through the door flap four times an hour was not conducive to sleep. Eventually, he did fall into an exhausted doze, only to wake himself abruptly by twisting his neck. There wasn’t any part of him that didn’t ache, and between his cracked ribs, broken nose and swollen throat, the simple act of breathing more resembled an endurance test.
When he got up, he felt like he’d been hit by a steamroller. He washed around the various bandages and stitches before attempting to struggle into his suit. One of the guards, his ex-boxer buddy who’d come to his aid the first night in VPU, helped him with his jacket and tie. The guard also talked the nurse into changing the bandages on his neck so that he looked more like a victimised defendant and less like Frankenstein’s monster.
At the last minute, he picked up Amy’s ridiculous bumblebee badge and returned it to the top pocket of his jacket. For luck, he thought—not that it had been at all lucky so far. But then his luck had already taken a nosedive before she’d given him the silly yellow badge.
Jason fought down his breakfast before being cuffed and reintroduced to the world outside Swansea Prison. The custody escorts were just finishing up a smoke—one seemed no better for his tobacco fix, scowling at Jason and the prison guards, and the other looked like he’d been smoking something far better than tobacco.
“Just the one?” Grumpy said, throwing his cigarette at Jason’s feet. “Waste of bloody petrol.”
“In you go then,” said Dopey, letting him settle into the moulded plastic seat of his compartment of the two-prisoner van before checking his handcuffs. They wouldn’t want the dangerous violent criminal to sock ’em one, would they?
“We’re already late, you know,” Grumpy sniped at the guards, before the door was shut and Jason was insulated from the world outside. He could hear his escorts chatting about the upcoming Springboks tour, and he was tempted to offer an opinion but decided to keep his mouth shut. It wasn’t like they’d take pity on him and avoid all the speed bumps between here and Cardiff Crown Court.
About twenty minutes in, once The Wave radio had staticked out to be replaced by Red Dragon FM, he
heard them conferring. “The whatsit says traffic’s bad up ahead—some kind of roadblock,” Dopey said.
“Bloody brilliant. We’ll have to take a detour and get the van all muddy again.”
“I ain’t cleaning it!”
“Lazy bloody boy.”
Their new route had a lot more twists and turns, and Jason struggled to keep down his breakfast. Painkillers always upset his stomach but if it was a choice between a little nausea and going medication-free for his time in the dock, Jason would take the sickness every time.
The uneven road jarred his ribs and Jason winced. Where the hell were they going?
“Where is that bloody machine taking us?” Grumpy evidently had the same thought, and Jason heard the slap of hand against plastic.
“I don’t think that’s going to help.”
“Always works on my bitch.”
“Oh? I didn’t know you had a dog.”
“You stupid—oh bloody hell, what’s this now?”
The van came to a halt and Jason could hear the distinct sound of bleating from outside. He’d always had a deep mistrust of sheep, ever since he went on a farm visit with school and an old ewe had tried to gum him to death. That New Zealand zombie film hadn’t helped neither.
“Come on, boy—help me round them up.”
“I don’t know nothing about sheep.”
“It’s just a matter of being firm with them. Look sharp now.”
Jason wished he could see what was going on, because it sounded like it was priceless. Instead, he had to listen to the ineffectual efforts of his escort from behind the van walls.
Suddenly, something slammed against the side of the van, hard enough to rock it. All the doors immediately unlocked and Jason stood up, struck with terror. Another thud came from the front of the van.
Jason wasn’t going to wait around to find out what was going on. He pulled open the door with his cuffed hands—and was greeted by a man in a balaclava. It was pure instinct that allowed him to dodge the punch aimed at his head, jumping out of the van and into the mud of the country lane.
Code Runner (Amy Lane Mysteries Book 2) Page 14
