Captcha Thief (Amy Lane Mysteries) by Rosie Claverton

and wrapped her arms around him, snug and warm at his back.
    Riding out of Rhayader, not knowing where this journey was leading him, Jason felt like a king.
    Cerys turned up just after Jason left and retreated to the kitchen with Owain, where they pointedly did not argue, exchanging the bare minimum of words required to cook dinner.
    Amy had struggled to settle after Jason left. She wanted to work, to distract herself, but she kept returning to the GPS tracker that showed him moving farther and farther away from Cardiff. When the mobile signal gave out entirely, she shut down the programme and went to the kitchen, where there was light and people and a different kind of tension.
    Cerys made a passable macaroni cheese, even if it was nothing like Jason’s, and they ate in tense silence.
    ‘How’s the investigation going?’ Cerys asked the table, but she looked at Owain.
    Owain looked at Amy, but she was not in the mood for chat and stuffed another forkful of pasta into her mouth.
    ‘There’s a lot of CCTV to go through,’ he said.
    Cerys waited for him to elaborate and, when he said nothing more, she tried a different tack. ‘If you need any help, I have nothing else to do tomorrow.’
    Amy refused to meet Owain’s pleading gaze. If he did not want to spend time with Cerys – and Amy had no idea why that might be, apart from the fact that all Carrs were infuriating and irrational and should probably be shot – then he would have to tell her himself. Amy was not a creator of excuses.
    ‘That would be … good. I think there were some things Amy needed at the museum.’
    ‘You should both go,’ Amy said. ‘Take in the galleries. Make notes.’
    ‘It’s not a date,’ Owain said quickly.
    ‘We don’t need a date,’ Cerys said, her voice sharp, acid. ‘We’ve been going out for five months. We live together!’
    ‘I know that,’ Owain mumbled to his plate. ‘I meant … it’s work, isn’t it? Not for fun.’
    ‘You can have lunch,’ Amy said, magnanimously. ‘All work and no play, et cetera. Come back in the afternoon.’
    Amy left the table and returned to AEON, itching to remove Cerys and Owain from her space. She wanted to rant, throw cushions, play screamo at top volume. She wanted to open a bottle of cheap red wine and swipe the books from Jason’s shelves.
    But she wouldn’t do those things. She would watch more CCTV footage and research North Walean gang connections, and try not to refresh the GPS tracker every five minutes to see if it had picked up a signal again.
    And she would find out more about Frieda bloody Haas.
    The National Crime Agency staff database was easy to infiltrate, but its employee information was sparse. Where could she find more intel on Frieda Haas? She seemed to shun social media and Amy couldn’t even construct a basic family tree from the scraps found through Google. The woman was a ghost.
    Amy went back through Jason’s phone data, looking for significant interactions around the time he’d first met Frieda. She got a hit off Cerys’ phone, then an unknown, and then a flurry of data including Owain’s number. Therefore the solitary unknown must be Frieda’s phone.
    The number was unlisted, unsurprisingly, and registered to the NCA. Of course, it was currently in the wilds of Mid Wales, so interrogating its data was pretty much impossible.
    Amy returned to the CCTV. But after five minutes, she knew she wasn’t seeing much of anything, the museum’s visitors passing in a blur before her tired eyes. She was getting too old for all-nighters, twenty-five years weighing heavy on her bones. She brought up the calendar – twenty-five years, eleven months and twenty-two days. Would Jason be back for her birthday?
    She wanted to curl up on the sofa and take Jason on a guided tour of early noughties alt music, or watch him watching a
Die Hard
movie or some other mind-numbing action flick.
    But Jason wasn’t here. And there was a murder to solve.
    She checked her