A Price to Pay

by Paul Gitsham

‘What happened next?’

  ‘Well it all went quiet for a while, and I thought “show’s over”, so I carried on doing the cryptic crossword in The Times.’ He scowled. ‘I’d nearly finished it when you lot turned up. I should have took it with me.’

  ‘What then?’ Warren prompted.

  ‘This middle-aged woman comes running around the corner, all huffing and puffing and legs it in through the back gate. She’s in there maybe ten minutes? A bit less? Then she comes out with the dark-haired girl, who’s all sobbing and that.’

  ‘Where did they go?’

  ‘Down the alley again, towards the road.’ He thought for a second. ‘They turned right at the end. The same direction the older woman came in.’

  That would have taken them away from the main road, which explained why nobody had seen Silvija Wilson’s car parked outside the massage parlour. She was certainly a cool customer, thought Warren.

  ‘Again, I thought, “show’s over” and went back to my crossword. Then about ten minutes later, I heard loads of sirens. I figured something was happening and so I decided to take a wander out to the road and take a look-see.’ He glared at Warren. ‘If I’d have known that you lot were going to tape the alley off, I’d have taken everything with me.’

  So far, McGhee had confirmed what they already knew. Nevertheless, he figured he could probably fudge it so that McGhee could claim a reward from Crimestoppers; it was the least they could do, after they took away his clothing and bedding.

  ‘Did you see anything else suspicious that day? Did anyone else come by?’

  McGhee frowned in concentration, before snapping his fingers. ‘There’s a northern bloke that comes by every so often. He arrived that day a couple of minutes after the older woman turned up. He didn’t go in the gate, but he spoke to her when she came out with the dark-haired girl, and she handed him something.’

  ‘Did you see what he gave her?’

  McGhee thought for a moment. ‘It was small and black. Could have been a mobile phone or something.’

  Warren felt his pulse rise; Cullen’s business phone was still missing.

  ‘What did he say to her?’

  McGhee frowned. ‘I didn’t hear most of it. I was trying not to be seen, you know. I figured something was going down, so I buried myself in my sleeping bag.’

  ‘What did you hear?’

  ‘Something like “just do everything I said, and I’ll sort it”.’

  ‘What did the woman say?’

  McGhee shrugged. ‘Dunno, the girl was making a right bloody racket.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘The woman and the girl walked down the alley. The bloke hung around for a moment, then walked off the same way.’ He paused. ‘It looked like he didn’t want to be seen with them.’

  Warren felt a stirring of excitement. Silvija Wilson hadn’t mentioned meeting anybody else, and it looked as though the man had done his best to avoid being seen on the security camera. If McGhee was correct, the man had been a regular visitor to the massage parlour. Why?

  ‘You said you’d seen the man before. Can you be more specific?’

  McGhee looked into space. ‘He turns up every few weeks. He never goes in, but the middle-aged woman comes out to speak to him. She usually gives him something.’

  ‘Like what?’

  McGhee shrugged. ‘An envelope or something. I don’t really pay any attention.’

  Warren was starting to have his suspicions. Silvija Wilson claimed that both ‘Annie’ and her illegal nail technicians had simply walked in off the street, and she’d offered them a job, or let them rent a nail station. But what if they weren’t self-employed? Could Wilson be paying a middleman?

  ‘Would you be able to describe the man to a police sketch artist?’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t really pay that much attention. He usually wears a hoodie, so I can’t see his face. I’m not great with English accents, but I know he’s a northerner.’

  It was certainly worth a go, decided Warren. If the man was some sort of fixer, then if they tracked him down, they might be able to locate the nail technicians. Warren had a feeling that they might be vital witnesses. He wondered if Organized Crime might be able to identify him?

  Suddenly, McGhee sat bolt upright, looking over Warren’s shoulder at the clock.

  ‘Shit, is that the time? They’ll be out of food.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Sikhs. They serve food at this time of night.’ He got to his feet. ‘I’ve got to go. If I hurry, there might still be some food left …’ He swore again. ‘It’s curry tonight as well.’

  Warren cursed the bad timing. He knew that the Sikh community centre served langar to the homeless community every evening. The centre was on the other side of town; McGhee would need to get his skates on, if he was going to make it in time.

  ‘Perhaps I could get you something to eat?’ suggested Warren.

  McGhee looked away. ‘Nah, you’re all right. Got to see a mate first.’

  It was obvious why he needed to see his ‘mate’, and it wasn’t exactly something Warren could help him with.

  ‘Will you be able to come back tomorrow?’ he asked. He desperately needed McGhee to help him identify the mysterious man. ‘I’d really like to help you earn that money from Crimestoppers.’ Warren hoped that the sweetener would ensure the man returned.

  McGhee shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

  The man’s focus was clearly elsewhere now. Warren could hardly blame him. He’d lost pretty much everything; getting a bellyful of food was probably next on his agenda, after scoring his fix.

  Warren walked him out of the interview suite and back to reception to sign out.

  ‘What’ll you do if there isn’t any food left?’

  ‘Dunno. I might be able to beg and get enough money for some chips.’

  Warren looked out of the window; he could see the rain pounding the window. A sudden gust of wind picked up a carrier bag and blew it across the car park.

  ‘Where are you staying tonight?’

  ‘I might be able to scrape enough to get into a shelter.’ He shrugged. ‘If not, I can probably find somewhere to kip down by the arches.’ He grunted. ‘I could really do with that sleeping bag, right now.’

  Warren looked at the man in front of him. He was potentially a vital witness in the case; they really needed to look after him. But more than that, the man was living on the very edge, even more so now that the police had thoughtlessly taken away his shelter. Again, Warren wondered what McGhee’s story was. How had he fallen so far? He claimed to regularly do the cryptic crossword in The Times, so he was no intellectual slouch. What had gone so wrong in his life?

  For a moment, he considered fabricating a charge that would get McGhee a place in a cell for the night. It would be warm, he’d be fed, and the police doctor would come by and at least change his dressings. He dismissed the idea as soon as it occurred. There was too much paperwork that could come back and bite him, and he couldn’t ask the duty sergeant to bend the rules that much. Besides, it was increasingly obvious that McGhee needed more than a hot meal.

  ‘Hold on a minute,’ he said, as McGhee headed out the door. The man turned in exasperation, clearly desperate to go.

  Warren took out his wallet. Tucked amongst the receipts and shopping lists, he found two ten-pound notes, a twenty and a fiver. He held out the wad of notes.

  ‘Get yourself some food and a bed for the night,’ he said.

  McGhee looked at the money in surprise, before taking it and shoving it in his pocket.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, yeah?’ asked Warren.

  McGhee nodded. When he spoke, his voice was thick. ‘You’re all right for a copper.’

  Warren wasn’t sure how to respond to that, as the man gave a half-wave, and walked through the door.

  ‘You know he’ll just spend it on drugs, don’t you, Boss?’

  Shaun Grimshaw was standing at the edge of the reception area.

 
Warren shrugged; he didn’t have the energy to argue with the man. ‘Well, that’s just a chance I’ll have to take.’

  Chapter 34

  There was a frisson of excitement in the main briefing room after the interview with Joey McGhee, although Grimshaw seemed to be doing his best to dampen the mood.

  ‘That’s the last you’ll see of him,’ predicted Grimshaw.

  Warren disagreed. ‘He still needs to claim his reward from Crimestoppers. From his perspective, it’s easy money.’

  ‘He could just call it in to the tip line,’ countered Grimshaw, ‘then it’s anonymous. They give him a code and he takes it to the bank.’

  ‘He’s already turned up to the station,’ said Pymm. ‘Why would he suddenly decide he wants to be anonymous?’

  Grimshaw shrugged. ‘He already walked out of here with a wad of cash.’

  ‘And you don’t think he’ll want a second bite of the cherry?’ said Pymm, barely trying to hide her irritation at her colleague’s obtuseness.

  ‘Well we’ll just have to see,’ said Warren, calling an end to the debate before Pymm and Grimshaw started arguing again; he knew that Grimshaw took a perverse pleasure in winding up his workmate.

  ‘Our priority at the moment is to follow the leads he gave us. If the two nail technicians were being dropped off each morning, it would explain why we can’t find them on public transport. Mags, get your contacts in Traffic to see if we can identify the white van.’

  ‘I’ll get on it, but it won’t be quick,’ she warned. ‘There are no ANPR cameras near the massage parlour, so the area we’ll be looking at will be huge, especially if we don’t know which direction they came from, or the make and model of the van. There are also several builders’ merchants and other businesses in that area, so there will be plenty of white vans pottering about the area at that time.’

  ‘McGhee thinks they were dropped off the same time each morning, so you should be able to trim the list to those vehicles that appear at the same time each morning,’ suggested Warren. ‘Do what you can. See if you can get it prioritized.’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  ‘And what about this man with a northern accent?’ said Warren. ‘When McGhee returns tomorrow, I’ll try and get a better description from him. If he is a fixer, then Organized Crime might have some intel. They might even have some headshots we can shove under his nose.’

  ‘I’ll take that,’ said Martinez. ‘I know the team in Welwyn.’

  ‘What about the phone that McGhee says he thinks Silvija Wilson handed him?’ asked Hutchinson.

  ‘Could it have been Cullen’s business phone?’ asked Warren.

  ‘We have the location data for the burner phone that we think Cullen was using,’ said Pymm, ‘and its last location before being turned off was in the massage parlour, shortly after we believe he was killed.’

  ‘I suppose it’s too much to hope that the phone has been turned back on,’ said Hutchinson.

  Pymm shook her head. ‘No. Nothing since then.’

  ‘It’s probably at the bottom of a river somewhere,’ said Grimshaw.

  ‘What about trying to trace Northern Man’s phone?’ asked Richardson. ‘For him to have arrived so quickly, presumably somebody called him?’

  ‘There are a number of unaccounted-for phone numbers on Silvija Wilson’s call logs,’ said Pymm.

  ‘Start there then,’ said Warren. ‘If he was her fixer, then presumably she called him periodically, so focus on numbers that she called on more than one occasion and the window of time between the killing and her leaving.’

  ‘Well that’s easy,’ said Pymm. ‘Almost all the traffic on her phones was between her and her nieces. Off the top of my head, there’s only one number unaccounted for in the half-hour after the killing, an unregistered pay-as-you-go. She actually placed Malina on hold briefly to call it.’

  ‘That has to be the one. Raise a warrant for its phone logs, and its records.’ Warren pinched his lip. ‘And I think we have a good enough case for a real-time intercept. I’ll go and see DSI Grayson and see what we can do.’

  The excitement level in the room had suddenly changed. In the course of the last few hours, they had not only had the sequence of events on that day confirmed by an independent witness, they also had a new suspect, and potential leads for the two outstanding witnesses.

  Warren just hoped that Joey McGhee didn’t let them down.

  ‘Silvija Wilson used her credit card twice on the day of the murder,’ said Pymm. ‘She drew out five hundred quid in cash from a cash machine in the newsagent’s at Middlesbury station. She must have been desperate; it’s one of those dodgy private ones that charge you two quid to get your own cash out. Plus, the interest payments on cash withdrawals for that card are eye-watering. I’m requesting CCTV from the card machine provider, to check it was her.’

  ‘Wilson admitted to giving Annie some cash. What was the second transaction?’ asked Warren.

  ‘It looks as though she bought a train ticket, for £154.45. I’m raising a warrant to get the train operator to release the details of the ticket, but it’ll take time, there are so many bloody train companies, nobody’s even sure who processed the payment.’

  ‘Great. Any ideas on how else we can work out where she was going?’ asked Warren.

  Pymm raised an eyebrow, and he apologized. It wasn’t her fault. He took a deep breath to calm himself. The mysterious Annie had fled the scene a week ago. If she was an illegal worker, she probably went straight to the airport and flew back to Serbia. A few more hours’ delay would hardly matter.

  ‘I looked at the trains that were leaving within an hour of her arriving at the station,’ said Pymm. ‘In rush hour the train companies might take the piss and charge a hundred and fifty quid for a forty-five-minute train journey to central London but there are so many different permutations, there’s no way I can figure out where that fare would have taken her, especially if the ticket was a generic “London Terminals”. All the other destinations were to smaller, local stations, so a ticket costing that much would mean she then took a connecting train.’ Pymm sighed in frustration. ‘Then she could be anywhere.’

  ‘Do we have CCTV yet from the platforms?’ asked Warren.

  ‘Mags has a team on it, but we’re struggling with resources at the moment.’

  Warren was all too aware of the pressures on the video evidence team down in Welwyn; he’d received an email from the head of the unit that morning, with the exact same email forwarded to him again from John Grayson ten minutes later. As usual, there were multiple operations across the region, all with video footage that needed analysing, and Warren was being asked to consider the immediacy of his ongoing requests. Warren was starting to worry that if the case began to lose momentum, his team would find its jobs sliding down the priority list.

  Tuesday 10 November

  Chapter 35

  Dawn was breaking as Karen Hardwick sat in her tiny kitchen, Oliver lying against her chest. The smell of his warm skin mingled with the scent of his freshly laundered Baby-gro. She took a sip of her tea. The letter from the university sat on the table. She cursed herself again for leaving it out in plain sight when her parents had come around the previous day. She hadn’t even folded it up, so she couldn’t accuse her mother of snooping when she’d read it and then passed it to her father.

  They had been hurt that she’d not told them about the interview, and even more distressed when they realized that she must have told Gary’s parents where she was going. Karen had had no choice. Gary’s parents were her only links to Nottingham and so they had wanted to know why she was leaving Oliver in their care for the day and going into Nottingham dressed in her best suit. She’d downplayed the importance of the visit, but they hadn’t been fooled.

  Her mother had been upset when she realized that if Karen did accept the studentship, not only would she definitely not be coming back to stay in her grandmother’s old flat, she would also be moving even further away fro
m them than she was now.

  And then there was the complex range of emotions that the previous day had awakened in her.

  Revisiting Middlesbury CID had been hard. The team had moved on; she understood that, but she feared that her return had reopened old wounds. Colleagues that she hadn’t seen since the funeral had approached her, although none seemed quite sure what to say. The table in the corner of the canteen where she and Gary had eaten lunch had been taken over by a group of uniformed constables, none of whom she recognized, although of course they all knew who she was; she could tell by the way their conversation became stilted as she walked past. Would that ever change? Would she always be ‘poor Karen Hardwick’ the woman whose fiancé was killed on duty; who heard every detail of his sudden death as she spoke to him on his mobile phone?

  And what about the people she would be working with every day? Even aside from the influx of seconded officers working on their current case, the core team had changed. Pymm and Ruskin appeared really nice, but it seemed strange without Tony Sutton. Warren Jones had become less awkward as the day had worn on, but still the station was filled with memories of her and Gary; his ghost seemed to haunt the office the same way that it haunted the flat.

  Yet despite everything, she’d felt the pull of the job again. She’d known little about the case beyond what she’d seen in the papers or on the TV, but she soon found herself being sucked into the drama of the investigation. Live video feeds from the interview suites meant that she had experienced the thrill of watching DCI Jones picking apart Silvija Wilson’s story, and her eventual, partial capitulation.

  She’d forgotten the surge of adrenalin you experienced when the pieces fell into place; she’d been with Pymm and Richardson when they realized from the photos that ‘Annie’ had been living with the two sisters.

  That was what she loved about policing. Could she give that up?

  She needed advice, and she could only think of one person she trusted enough to give it to her. She looked at the clock. It was too early to call now, but as soon as it was a decent hour, she’d pick up the phone.