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.