Code Runner (Amy Lane Mysteries Book 2) Page 9

  Which left Madhouse Mickey.

  Michael Doyle. Born in Dublin, moved to Swansea with his family in the 1980s, now living below the radar in Cardiff. No known address, no phone number, no email address. He existed only in arrest records and legend.

  How did you even begin to find a man who didn’t have an address or a phone? She dug out an old passport photograph and set up AEON to compare his image to the array of CCTV captures she had of the night of Damage’s murder, but she wasn’t hopeful.

  The rest of the evidence had her stumped. She could do nothing to trace needles or syringes, to analyse fingerprints or interrogate witnesses. Without Jason to scare up leads, she was at a loss.

  She flicked back to the news feed, pausing the video on Jason’s pale and tortured face. She needed her errand boy. She needed to find hope for herself.

  Chapter Fourteen: Bang Up

  Before he left the courthouse, Joseph handed Jason an envelope. “A care package from your employer.”

  His escorting officer rifled through it before holding up a yellow plastic badge in amusement. It bore a cartoon of a bumblebee and read Don’t Worry, Bee Happy. “Someone’s got a sense of humour.”

  “My boss,” Jason said, weakly. Had Amy lost her mind? He hurriedly stuffed it in his pocket.

  He had a van all to himself, the faint strains of Red Dragon FM filtering through from the front seat. He examined the rest of the envelope’s contents: one hundred quid; two pouches of tobacco, filters and papers; and an A4 printed sheet with the names, addresses, phone numbers and dates of birth of his mam, Cerys, Dylan and Amy. He didn’t recognise the number beside Amy’s name but it looked like a local Cardiff landline. It would’ve been bloody useful to have this the last time he was in, where it had taken weeks to work out how his mam and sister were going to visit him. It seemed Amy had it all figured out, except how to clean the bathroom and make any food more complicated than toast.

  The trip down the M4 was over too soon. Jason, stuck in his jacket, was boiling in the back of the van, his shirt plastered down with sweat. It would be a relief to breathe fresh air—and then it would be snatched away. Joseph had said he could expect to see Crown Court Tuesday or Wednesday, but that was too long by far. One hour alone would be excruciating.

  The last time he’d been in Swansea, he’d been the smart-mouth joker. The screws had been amused with him, teasing. Now they were grim as the grave, taking his details with blunt efficiency.

  The holding room had a couple of boys in already, but they shut up as soon as they saw him, regarding him with hostility and a touch of fear. He wore the label murderer now. He wouldn’t enjoy any friendly banter now, except with the men who were in here for the same crimes, wearing ten, twenty years like a shroud.

  Jason let the room wash over him, trying to pull together his thoughts. Amy thought he was innocent and was cooking up something to prove it. What had happened that night? Anything he could give her, any hints of what might’ve gone down in the hours he was missing, might help her find what she sought.

  But his memory was stubbornly blank. The last thing he recalled was the needle in his arm and thrashing against the restraining arms of the boys holding him down. And then...nothing, until he woke to find Dai Jones’s body.

  Just thinking about it made him feel sick. He hadn’t eaten any breakfast, and had barely touched his dinner. The nausea wouldn’t leave him, tied up with the anxiety pooling in his stomach. Is this how Amy felt all the time? He wouldn’t wish that feeling on his worst enemy.

  And, right now, his worst enemy might be Lewis.

  Jason had never been certain, but he had always suspected Lewis of arranging the beating that had landed him in the prison infirmary last time he was inside. In a way, Jason owed him for that—the beating had led to his transfer to HMP Usk, and out from under the cosh of those inmates who were gunning for him. Come to think of it, they had all been lifers and were probably still haunting the cells of Swansea Prison.

  Jason shuddered. He wouldn’t have to face them yet. He should be in the induction wing for a bit, hopefully until the Crown Court hearing and, if Joseph could work some magic, he might get bail. He only had to survive a few days in here. He had to think of it like that.

  “Jason Carr.”

  Jason stood at his name and left the holding room, the last occupant. The screw on the other side of the door confirmed his details again and Jason handed over the cash and the contact list Amy had prepared for him. In return, he got his prisoner number, the same albatross as was hung round his neck two years earlier. As if the day couldn’t get any better, he went into the next room for his strip search.

  It was as dignified as he remembered, but he didn’t give anyone lip, and they let him dress up in his new scratchy clothing. They’d offered to let him keep the suit, but until his mam could bring up something comfortable, he didn’t want to draw attention.

  Jason took Amy’s absurd gift and stuck it through the waistband of his trousers. There must be something about it, he reasoned. Or she had finally cracked.

  He was shown to his first night cell. There was already a bloke in there, who spat on the floor when he saw him. He was enormous, almost as wide as he was tall, with bulk on his shoulders and the rest around his middle. He had a tattoo of a swastika on the top of his bald head and Jason knew the prison gods were having a laugh with him today.

  Jason said nothing to him, just made up his bed quietly and stashed his cheap plastic cutlery.

  “You killed that child.”

  Jason gritted his teeth. Damage might have been twenty, but he was baby-faced and had had no fucking clue what he was about. “I didn’t.”

  The tough guy laughed. “Save your fibs for the jury, precious.”

  Jason said nothing and lay down on his bed. His new friend continued to trash-talk him for ten minutes, but then gave up in favour of biting his nails.

  There was nothing to do but wait.

  * * *

  Amy woke up to find her notes full of nonsense and the imprint of the space bar on her left cheek. It had been months since she’d last fallen asleep on her keyboard, her mouth dry and her stomach rumbling. Jason had been gone three days and she was falling back into bad habits.

  It was tempting to crawl into bed for a few hours, catch some real sleep, but she didn’t think she would rest. Owain had dropped round earlier to restock her fridge, so at least there were some ready meals and milk. The oven shelves were still on the draining board, and Owain had finally shut the oven door when he’d made the tea.

  Distracting herself from Jason’s absence, Amy returned to the one piece of evidence that might yield a lead—the weapon. It definitely wasn’t Jason’s—manufactured in 2012, first released while he was in prison, and he wouldn’t have bought it since his release out of fear of his mother. Who, then, did the knife belong to?

  It was an illegal switchblade, imported from China, with a red enamel handle. Dozens of kids on Cardiff’s streets were probably brandishing them. But as their import was so restricted, might they be part of the same shipment? Perhaps even limited to the same gang?

  Amy searched police records for recent arrests, cautions and searches involving switchblades. She counted four in the past month, and twenty-six in the last quarter. Before that, however, there were only a sporadic few. For the most part, the knives were confiscated and no further action was taken. She noted one record of a stabbing—a fifteen-year-old boy slashed at a seventeen-year-old with a switchblade. The knife was dropped and the kid legged it, but the victim couldn’t—or wouldn’t—identify him.

  Amy plotted the incidents on an Ordnance Survey map and found they centred on Butetown and Canton—Stuart Williams’s territory. Some of the stop ‘n’ search targets had also been found in possession of a small amount of cocaine. Perhaps these knives were a present from the boss?
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  Stuart Williams was not on Facebook, but Dai Jones had a locked-down profile which included his imprisoned brother, Lewis. Jason and Lewis were still Facebook friends, probably because neither had been able to unfriend each other from behind bars. Also, they had more visceral ways of displaying their animosity.

  Amy was afraid for Jason. She called up her GPS tracker and checked. Induction wing cells. He would be safe there—for now. Unfortunately, there were no cameras directly on his cell, but she would be able to track him with a high degree of accuracy in the communal areas. She hadn’t quite managed to gain control of the antiquated alarm system but it shouldn’t require too much wrangling now she was inside the cameras.

  Reassured, she went back to Facebook. She hesitated half a second before attempting to crack Damage’s account. She had some measure of respect for the dead, but if she was to catch his killer—and exonerate Jason—she had to skirt a few moral grey areas.

  Damage had a network of local friends with whom he exchanged messages in a kind of ungrammatical code that was half textspeak and half American gangster. She’d love a chance to decipher it, like a digital anthropologist, but she had more pressing matters to attend to.

  She found a closed group on his profile called Canton Boys—innocuous at first glance, but once she was inside, the beast revealed its nature. She scrolled through pictures of naked girls in various sexual positions and states of intoxication alongside members of the gang, and an indecipherable exchange in the same gangland argot.

  And then, there they were. Laid out in a spiral, the red-handled blades gleamed in the flashlight. Amy checked the photo’s metadata—uploaded from a Samsung Galaxy logged in to Dai Jones’s Facebook account. She noted the number and flicked to the police inventory of the body. No phone. She idly ran a GPS trace, not expecting anything, and unexpectedly got a hit. The phone was moving at speed through Splott.

  Amy tapped into the local cameras and tried to get eyes on the road. The streets were busy with school traffic and the GPS was only accurate within a few metres. Suddenly, the phone stopped at a junction. Amy accessed the traffic cameras and brought up the feed on one monitor, with the GPS in the centre, and the data feed recorded on a third monitor to the left.

  The lights changed. A Land Rover crossed the junction, followed by a blue Volvo. A red Porsche waited to turn right, while another Volvo went straight, a white Transit van turned left, and a BMW, VW Polo and Mini went over. The GPS updated: left turn.

  Amy followed the Transit van across Splott and into Canton before it finally came to a stop. She pulled up the feed but, as she clicked the location, she already knew what it would show.

  Dylan’s garage.

  Her sense of betrayal was immediate, churning in her guts like acid, bitter like bile. How could Jason’s friend be involved in this? How could Dylan do this to him?

  She watched the feed in horrified fascination, barely remembering to screen-grab the license plate. Two men got out of the van, both heavyset and wearing dark clothes, and a figure she recognised as Dylan came out to meet them. He shook the driver’s hand and then circled the van, gesturing to the tyres and yanking on the back door. It opened immediately, causing Dylan to stumble back into the street. He shook his head and closed the door again. What was he doing?

  The driver handed over the keys. Had Dylan supplied them with the van? Or...were they merely dropping it off for an MOT or whatever cars needed? Too many questions.

  The driver shook Dylan’s hand again, as his mate grabbed a holdall from the back, before they set off down the street together. Amy frantically looked for the adjoining feed, but they followed the path Jason and Dylan usually took to the pub and she had that covered.

  Then she lost them.

  Amy cursed herself and circled through feeds around their last definite location, but the streets were full of teenagers and locals with shopping bags. She paused and cycled the feeds more slowly.

  “Gotcha.” They had ducked into a shop doorway next to a crowded bus stop, waiting for a number 15, 17 or 18 bus.

  Amy’s signal wavered. Was the battery dying? Would she be able to follow a bus across the city, and then accurately follow them home without GPS? What if they got off at different stops?

  In an instant, she made a decision—and dialled Damage’s number.

  It started ringing. The driver gestured at his mate with the holdall, who checked his pockets and withdrew a phone. He replaced it and swung the holdall to the ground, reaching for the front pocket and drawing out a phone.

  The call terminated. The GPS signal vanished. The man replaced the phone and slung the holdall back over his shoulder. Amy took a picture.

  The bus arrived and the two men got on. Amy followed it as best she could, but it terminated at Cardiff Central bus station and the men vanished. Had they taken a train, or were they lost in the St. Mary’s Street crowds?

  The DVLA search on the license plate returned. The van was registered to a painter and decorator in Roath, who had reported it stolen three weeks earlier.

  Amy scowled at the monitors. No matter. She returned to Damage’s phone data and hooked up with the O2 servers. If his phone had interacted with the phones of those two men—attempted Bluetooth connection, shared Wi-Fi, near field communication—she would have them.

  Like a cyber hound, she would pursue their scent through the network until she brought them to the ground with bloody teeth. These two men were the key to finding out who killed Damage Jones—and proving Jason innocent.

  Chapter Fifteen: Boys Don’t Cry

  He had forgotten the screams.

  The lights went out, and the nightmares emerged. Jason huddled beneath his too-thin blanket and did not close his eyes. He would wait until the shouting died away, so that his own disturbed dreams would go unwitnessed.

  The sky was clouded over, heavy with May showers, and the moon and the stars were blotted out. The emergency lighting did not allow it to be truly dark and there was a winking red light that Jason reckoned either came from a fire alarm or a camera. Perversely, he hoped it was a camera—that meant Amy might be watching over him.

  The screws made a half-hearted attempt to shut up the louder screamers, but most went unchecked. From the cell below, Jason heard someone crying themselves to sleep. It was a cold-hearted bastard who didn’t feel something at a grown man breaking down like that.

  Jason remembered his first time inside, how that first night ate away at him and he bit down on his fist to muffle the sobs. He had worn the broken skin on his knuckles for a week, and the other blokes thought he’d punched a wall to get the marks. He’d let them believe it, anything to get an edge.

  Two weeks later, he’d heard about Lewis and the boys getting busted. The one consolation to him was that they’d be together again—him and Lewis against the world. Except that, when Lewis set eyes on him, he had flown at him, clumsily swinging his left fist at Jason’s head and fighting to get his broken right arm out of its sling. When the guards had separated them, Jason had spat blood at his best friend and asked what the fuck he thought he was doing. And Lewis called him snitch, and that had been the end of Jason’s rep in prison.

  A small noise across from him jerked Jason from the past. His cellmate was suffering, small whimpers from beneath the blanket. Even though the guy was a hard man who considered him scum, Jason didn’t like to see any man reduced to that.

  Suddenly, the bloke sat up and gasped, a wheezing intake of breath. Some of their neighbours jeered and laughed. Jason tried to give him a little privacy, turning his back to him. But the man’s breathing didn’t slow, the wheezing gasps filling the cell.

  “Can’t...breathe...”

  Jason sat up, ready to call for a medic, but his cellmate lurched out of bed and rocketed to the tiny high window. He tried in vain to suck fresh air into his lungs, pushing against the walls
of the cell. “No...no...”

  Something in Jason’s memory stirred. He had seen this before, up close and personal, and he had moved before he’d really thought it through. “Mate, you need to breathe.”

  The man lurched to face him, face red and clutching at his chest. “Dying...”

  “You’re not. You’re panicking.” Jason was confident about that, at least. He had sat down with Amy and gone through the signs of a heart attack, coldly and logically. It was the only piece of therapy she’d ever bought into.

  The man looked at him as if he was insane. Risking taking a hit, Jason placed a hand on his shoulder. The huge bloke flinched at the touch but didn’t lash out.

  “Just breathe with me, yeah? In.” Jason gave an exaggerated inhale. “And out.” He blew air slowly through his lips, watching his cellmate struggle to match him.

  But he came round, their breathing marrying up until it was slow, steady and silent in the air between them. The bloke lumbered past Jason and sat down on his bed, scrubbing his hands over his face.

  Jason sat down opposite him on his own bunk, waiting to see if he wanted to talk. Amy never wanted to say much of anything after, just buried herself away, but Jason liked to stay quiet and close just in case.

  “Don’t like being closed in,” the man said, finally. “Never have done. Not since my da shut me in the basement. Deserved it, I did.”

  “Nah, you didn’t.”

  The bruiser looked up and Jason thought he’d need to dodge.

  But instead the man shook his head. “Nah, I didn’t.” He scrutinised Jason’s face. “How’d you know what to do?”