by Paul Gitsham
‘And she’s also protecting this young woman, “Annie”, assuming that’s even her real name,’ added Hutchinson.
‘I agree,’ said Warren, ‘but I think she’s torn. I think her first loyalty is to her nieces, so she’ll pin the blame on this Annie, but at the same time, she isn’t going to help us find her. We need to know who this woman is. Why is Silvija willing to risk her and her nieces’ freedom to protect her? Could she be family also?’ Warren looked over at Grayson. ‘Can you get onto the Foreign Office, Sir, and see if somebody can speak to the sisters’ family about whether they know somebody called Annie?’
‘I wouldn’t hold your breath,’ said Grayson.
‘That’s why I asked you,’ said Warren. ‘You command more respect than me.’ There were a few chuckles around the room.
‘Of course, we don’t know that she is protecting her,’ said Richardson. ‘If her nieces were responsible for Stevie Cullen’s murder, then this Annie is a convenient scapegoat. If any of what Silvija Wilson told us is true, then it’s not hard to imagine her convincing an illegal worker that the last place she needs to be is at the heart of a police investigation. The two nail technicians have already scarpered, now she just needs to get rid of the only remaining witness.’
‘Then we need to track down all three women,’ said Warren. ‘Wilson implied that Annie lived some distance away. Hutch, get a team together to check with the bus companies, and see if we can work out where she got on. Question regular passengers waiting at the bus stop and see if any of them recognize her. If we can figure out where she was living, we might be able to work out where she’s run to.
‘The same goes for those two nail technicians. Mags, go back through all the security footage we have and get the clearest face shots available. Hutch, arrange for the drivers to be questioned. Even if we can’t pick them up on the CCTV, two young Vietnamese women catching the bus each day might jog a few memories.’
‘What if they didn’t catch the bus?’ asked someone from the rear of the briefing room. Warren couldn’t remember their name.
‘Then spread out into the local area around the massage parlour. See if any of the residents or business owners recognize them, Sergeant …?’
‘Jameson, Sir.’
‘Should we release their pictures to the press?’ asked another detective. ‘DC Henderson, by the way.’
‘Not just yet. I don’t want to spook them any more than we need to. The last thing we want is for them to go into hiding.’
‘We should prioritize identifying those mobile phone numbers that Wilson called before she went to the train station,’ suggested someone from the back. ‘I’ll bet she was calling friends and trying to find somewhere for Annie to go. I can’t believe she just took her to the train station and waved goodbye.’
‘Good suggestion. Rachel, get on it; work with the phone companies. Whilst you’re at it, contact the train station. She may have bought her ticket before she travelled. Failing that, they may be able to work out which train she caught.
‘Next up, murder weapon. We’ve not found it at the massage parlour, or in any of the bins nearby. Nothing yet in the sisters’ flat. We don’t even know what it looks like, since they aren’t speaking. The smart money is on it being in that black bin bag that Silvija Wilson was carrying.
‘Those who know me, know that I try not to underestimate human stupidity, but I can’t believe that this Annie clambered on a train with a bloody knife and her soiled uniform stuffed in her backpack. She – or Silvija Wilson – ditched them somewhere. If they didn’t do it at work, or the sisters’ flat, then it either happened en route to the train station, or when Silvija Wilson went for her calming little drive.’
‘Could she have disposed of them on the train? You know, chucked them out the vestibule window or something?’ asked another voice.
‘Let’s hope not. Depending where she went, that’s a lot of track to search,’ said Warren. ‘We’ll cross that bridge when we’ve identified the train that she caught. If the CCTV cameras in the carriages are working, we should be able to catch her in the act.’
‘If they are working, it’ll be the only bloody thing that does work on those trains,’ said a different voice, to scattered laughter.
Warren smiled; he knew that a number of officers from Welwyn were regretting their decision to travel up by train that morning.
‘Could Wilson have disposed of them at home?’ asked another voice.
‘Like I said, I try not to underestimate human stupidity, so there are teams searching her house and garden, and that rather nice car of hers,’ replied Warren. ‘We have enough to extend Wilson’s custody. I don’t want her going anywhere near a phone until we’ve tracked down this “Annie”. I don’t believe she has no idea where she went.’
Chapter 32
Pymm had spread a series of photographs across the table. ‘These are the photographs containing the mysterious young woman that Shaun identified in the background of the pictures he retrieved from social media.’
‘OK,’ said Warren.
‘These are scene photos taken from the search of the house that Biljana and Malina Dragić lived in. What do you notice?’
Grimshaw spotted it first. ‘All of the social media pictures are taken in the house.’
‘Isn’t that what we’d expect?’ asked Martinez. ‘We know that these photos were all taken at house parties. Presumably, Aunty Silvija’s place was the place to hang out.’
‘Not all of them were taken at parties,’ said Pymm, pulling over one.
The photo was a selfie, Biljana’s arm stretching out towards the lens. She and her sister were clearly playing with Instagram filters, their images overlaid with cartoon bunny ears and noses. In the background, the unknown woman had her hand up, trying to avoid being in shot.
‘So?’ Grimshaw looked confused. Martinez shrugged.
‘They’re wearing pyjamas,’ said Pymm, impatiently.
‘Oh.’ Grimshaw paused. ‘Slumber party?’ He smirked. ‘I’ve read about those.’
Pymm sighed, but Ruskin beat her to it. ‘Look which room it’s taken in. It’s in a bedroom; you can see they’re sitting on a bed. But look at the walls; no posters or pictures, so it’s not Biljana’s or Malina’s room.’
Grimshaw squinted at the picture. ‘That’s the sofa bed in the living room.’
Meera Gupta’s report from the search of the flat confirmed the team’s suspicions.
‘The sofa bed in the living room was definitely used recently,’ said Gupta. ‘There were dents on the carpet that correspond to the fold-out legs.’
‘Could it have been from someone staying over occasionally?’ asked Martinez. ‘We know that the house was a bit of a party destination.’
‘Perhaps, but there were a lot of overlapping fingerprints, mostly from the same person, on the mechanism inside the sofa. I’d say that the bed was opened and closed regularly. The same fingerprints also appear all over the bathroom, the kitchen and the crockery and cutlery, alongside the girls’ prints and a few from their aunt.’
‘It could have been a regular visitor,’ countered Martinez. ‘Presumably their guests used the bathroom, and if they ate there would be using plates and bowls.’
‘The fingerprints were on clean crockery and cutlery in the drawer. Unless the guest also regularly washed up and put things away in the cupboards, I can’t see how they would have left their prints behind.’ She smiled tightly. ‘And who invites a guest over and gets them to wash the rolling pin and chopping board?’
Grimshaw smirked at his friend’s discomfort. Martinez was rightly playing devil’s advocate, but Gupta wasn’t having any of it.
‘We also looked in the bathroom. The medicine cabinet has three shelves, one of which is empty and has marks suggesting bottles have been removed. The wire basket hanging over the back of the shower stall also has room for more bottles. It’s not exactly a spacious bathroom, and there was a bag with different, half-used shower gels and
shampoos tucked next to the loo, with Malina and Biljana’s fingerprints on them. Why wouldn’t they keep all those bottles to hand in the shower or the cabinet?’
Martinez looked as if he was about to object again but thought better of it.
‘And the kicker, we found evidence of a third person’s hair in the shower trap.’
She pushed a high-resolution image across the desk. ‘At first we though that the hairs belonged to one of the girls, but when we looked under the microscope, you can see that there are three distinct hair types.’
The picture was clear: a blonde hair labelled ‘Malina’, a dark brown hair labelled, ‘Biljana’ and another, darker hair, with a thicker shaft, labelled ‘unknown’.
‘DNA?’ asked Warren.
Gupta shook her head, ‘No, none of the hairs we’ve found so far have a follicle, so we’ve nothing to extract.’
‘Then any idea who the prints belong to?’ asked Hutchinson.
‘Nothing in the database, so they’ve not previously come to our attention.’ She smiled. ‘But they do match some prints found in the kitchen area of the massage parlour, and on the handle of the wheelie bin that belongs to the business.’
‘Annie,’ said Warren and Richardson immediately. The mysterious young woman who only appeared in the background of the sisters’ selfies was living with the two sisters.
Chapter 33
‘Sir, we’ve got a witness who saw people coming in and out of the rear of the massage parlour on the day of Stevie Cullen’s killing.’ David Hutchinson looked excited.
‘Where did they turn up?’ asked Warren, in surprise. Over a week had passed since the killing. In the days following the murder, Hutchinson and his team had scoured the local area looking for witnesses from that day, as well as looking for evidence and the murder weapon. They had been unsuccessful, and when the CCTV from the rear-facing cameras had been restored, and it had become apparent that the masked intruder was a myth, the search had been wound down.
‘He walked in off the street,’ said Hutchinson. ‘Apparently he’s a rough sleeper by the name of Joey McGhee, and he kips down in the rear alley behind the massage parlour.’
‘Why has he only just come forward?’ asked Warren. ‘The murder was a week ago.’
‘Well the first thing he mentioned was the reward put up by Crimestoppers.’
‘OK, to be fair, that’s what the reward is there for,’ allowed Warren, trying not to sound disappointed. The rewards were a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they were sometimes the catalyst that could convince a person to come forward with vital evidence, but on the other hand, they increased the number of fantasists and chancers wasting police time. Hutchinson knew all this, but he still sounded excited and he wouldn’t have brought it to Warren, unless he thought it had merit.
‘We found an empty sleeping bag, and some clothes lying in the alleyway the day of the murder. The CSIs examined it at the scene, to check the killer hadn’t tossed the knife in there, and took away the clothes to check if they had been worn by the attacker.’
Warren remembered the detail from the report; nothing of value had been found.
‘So, where does our witness come in?’ asked Warren.
‘He said that he’s been sleeping down there for ages; he’s found himself a little hidey-hole behind some bins and some bushes. It’s out of the way and he reckons that as long as he keeps his head down, he’s out of sight of most of the people living and working in the area, and nobody bothers him.
‘On the day of the murder, he was in his sleeping bag eating his lunch. He said he knows most of the people who come and go each day by sight, but on that day, there was a lot of fuss around lunchtime, with people coming and going. He reckons he would recognize at least some of them if he saw some pictures.’
‘That could be useful,’ said Warren, ‘but where has he been?’
‘Well he says that he was watching all the activity but had no idea anything serious had happened. But when he heard the sound of police sirens, he decided he didn’t want to stick around, and went for a walk. When he came back later that evening, he found that the alleyway was all taped off.’
‘So, where did he go?’
‘Unfortunately, this is the bit the defence team will like,’ said Hutchinson. ‘He’s rather hazy on the exact sequence of events, as he had rather a bit too much cider. He’d lost his sleeping bag and the alleyway was still taped up, so he went for a wander and ended up in a fight. He’s spent the last few days in hospital. Now he’s out, and he says all of his belongings have gone and his shelter has been dismantled.’
Warren winced. The last thing that the CSIs would have considered was that they’d just dismantled a person’s home. Even if McGhee’s sleeping bag and belongings had been retained and not thrown away, they would be stored as evidence. The poor man had lost everything.
‘Where is he now?’ asked Warren.
‘Downstairs scoffing biscuits.’
‘Well let’s hope that he has something useful to say,’ said Warren. ‘That Crimestoppers reward money should buy him a new sleeping bag at least.’
Joey McGhee was a scrawny-looking man of indeterminate age. His hair was a dark grey colour, and the lower part of his face was covered by a thick, similarly coloured beard. A large sticking plaster covered his right eyebrow, with a smaller one attached to the bridge of his nose. The purple colour of his matching black eyes was fading to green. His bottom lip had scabbed over, where it had been split.
‘Looks painful,’ observed Warren.
When the man spoke, his Scottish accent had a whistling note from his missing teeth. ‘Bastard head-butted me. Never even saw it coming.’
‘Thank you for coming in,’ said Warren.
‘What do I have to do to get my reward? That sleeping bag was right comfortable. Some bloke gave it me, said he’d bought a new one to go climbing. It was much better than the ones they hand out in the shelter. And what about my clothes?’ He gestured to the cagoule he was wearing. ‘I spent ages finding that coat, now I only have this thing to get me through the winter.’
‘I’m really very sorry about what happened to your property. We were in the middle of a search, but we should have been more considerate.’
McGhee acknowledged the apology with a grunt.
Warren felt sorry for the man. He’d spent time with members of the homeless community on a previous case, and he knew how hard their lives were. On paper, there were enough spaces in shelters or emergency accommodation for all of Middlesbury’s homeless community, but in reality, the available places were unsuitable for many of those who found themselves on the street. Some didn’t feel safe living in such close proximity to complete strangers; others had complex mental health or social problems, such as addictions, that meant they struggled to cope in such a space. For many, sleeping rough was the best option available to them.
Warren wondered what McGhee’s story was. It was clear from his appearance that he’d been living on the streets for some time. He seemed reasonably alert and focused, suggesting that he wasn’t under the influence of drugs at that moment, and although Warren could smell stale alcohol, it seemed to be from the man’s clothing, rather than his breath. However, it was impossible to be sure.
‘Why don’t you tell me what you saw,’ said Warren.
‘At first, it was just a normal morning. There’s a pretty, dark-haired girl that turns up first; she opens the back gate. Mondays she drags the bins out. Then two little oriental girls turn up. I reckon they get dropped off.’
‘Why do you think that?’
‘They come up the alleyway from the direction of the road. A white van goes past the mouth of the alley a few seconds later. Happens every morning, so it ain’t a coincidence.’
Warren made a note. They hadn’t yet found how the nail technicians arrived at work. Was somebody dropping them off?
‘Can you describe the van?’
McGhee shrugged. ‘Just a van. I only see the sid
e of it. It’s white.’
‘Do you see where the dark-haired girl comes from?’
‘She comes the same way, walking. I can’t see if she’s being dropped off.’
That would fit with what the team already knew. It was obvious that Silvija Wilson didn’t want her illegal workers caught on the reception area’s camera. When she drove to work in the morning with her two nieces, she must have dropped Annie around the corner, so that she could go in via the rear entrance.
‘What happens then?’
‘Well usually, not a lot happens until about lunchtime. I normally do the crosswords in the papers from the day before. Then the dark-haired girl comes back out and walks to the road.’
That agreed with what Wilson had told them in the interview. Annie usually finished her duties by noon. The day of the killing, she’d been working later than usual.
‘What about the two oriental women?’
‘If I’m around, I see them leave about five o’clock.’
‘Do you see how they leave?’
‘They walk down the alley again.’
‘Do you know if they’re picked up?’
McGhee thought for a moment. ‘Probably. I’ve seen that white van go past afterwards a couple of times.’
‘So, what was different about last Monday?’
‘Well the dark-haired girl and the two little oriental girls arrived about the same time as usual, but I didn’t see the dark-haired girl leave at her usual time. Then about lunchtime, the two oriental girls suddenly ran out the gate. They were shitting themselves. They legged it down the alley and down the road.’
‘Did you see the van again?’ asked Warren.
McGhee shook his head.