Warren couldn’t remember a day when he had less wanted to go to work. All he desired was to curl up in bed beside his wife and tell her everything was going to be all right. And one day it would be, of that he was certain. But it certainly didn’t feel like it today.
In the end it was Susan who had insisted that he go to work. She was taking the rest of the week off, but physically, she was mostly OK. Today she just wanted some time to herself. Warren resolved to keep his mobile handy; he would leave at a moment’s notice if she called. He hoped he was doing the right thing.
John Grayson had taken the hint and not enquired too much about the reasons for Warren’s sudden escape two days earlier, or his absence the previous day, but had made it clear that Warren could come and find him at any time.
Whilst Warren was gone, the case had continued to progress, with support from Bergen and the SOC unit, but there had been no significant breakthroughs. The Foreign Office had spoken to Malina and Biljana Dragić’s parents and confirmed that they didn’t have any other sisters, or indeed any close relatives that matched Annie’s description. That at least seemed to rule out one motive for their willingness to face trial to protect her.
For her part, Silvija Wilson had declined to say anything else. She refused to admit that Annie had been living with her nieces, and they too denied that she had stayed with them. Warren suspected Wilson’s solicitor had told her to keep quiet and wait out the custody clock. With no new evidence that Wilson had played a more active role in the death of Stevie Cullen, she had been charged with perverting the course of justice and released on bail, on condition that she didn’t contact her nieces. Grayson had arranged for a real-time intercept on both her mobile phones, and her landline, so if she did try and contact anyone, they’d know about it. His request for a surveillance team had been denied outright, but a block had been placed on her passport. Warren doubted she was a flight-risk; it was clear to him that she wouldn’t leave her two nieces to face the music alone.
‘They’ve had the metal detectors out, scouring the area where the bloody work clothes were found, but it’s looking less and less likely that she disposed of the knife in the same place.’ David Hutchinson sounded frustrated down the phone line.
Warren shared his disappointment. A good defence might be able to cast doubt on who was wearing the blood-covered overall at the time of Cullen’s murder, particularly if the three young women shared each other’s uniforms. To Warren’s eye, the three women were close enough in build that they might do so.
However, fingerprints or other trace evidence on the knife, linking it to one of them, would be harder to argue in court.
Hanging up, Warren chewed the end of his pen, as he worked through the sequence of events in the days following the killing. At some point, that knife had to have been disposed of.
Had Annie taken it all the way up to Manchester with her? Surely not. They had to assume that she might be stopped by the police, in which case the last thing she’d want is the murder weapon on her.
Forensics had finished searching the massage parlour and the sisters’ flat, and there was no sign of it. Similarly, Silvija Wilson’s house had been searched, with the same result. The problem was that there had been a significant delay between day of the murder, and the arrest of the masseuses and their aunt. That potentially left the three women ample time to dispose of the knife.
Warren pulled over his notepad, trying to order his thoughts. Whilst there had been plenty of time to dispose of the weapon, his gut was telling him that it had been got rid of quickly. Wilson had dumped the bloody clothes as soon as she could. Surely, hiding the murder weapon was an even more pressing concern?
The two sisters had been escorted from the massage parlour immediately after the police had arrived, and whilst the exact details of what happened during the unaccounted-for minutes between the killing and the police attending were still unresolved, it was obvious that neither woman had left the premises.
Then there were the two nail technicians. It seemed unlikely that they were involved, given the speed with which they left the scene of the murder. They were obviously terrified, and Warren couldn’t imagine them being persuaded to take the murder weapon with them.
Which left Silvija Wilson, and the mysterious northern-accented man that Joey McGhee had seen arriving minutes after the killing.
McGhee claimed to have seen Wilson hand him something after he arrived, and heard him promise to sort things out. Could that object have been the knife? McGhee thought it was probably a mobile phone, and that would certainly account for Cullen’s missing work phone. Could she have passed him the knife also?
It seemed unlikely. They knew that Silvija Wilson had left with a bin bag containing the bloodstained work clothes to dispose of. She was already incriminated in that respect. Would this mysterious northern fixer have been willing to take the murder weapon? If he had any common sense at all, he’d have steered well clear of it. Unless he and Wilson had a relationship that went beyond the professional, then it was hard to imagine Northern Man taking the knife off her.
Which meant it all led back to Wilson.
The mobile phone tracking data for both of her phones showed that she went directly from the massage parlour to her nieces’ flat. The search teams were confident that the weapon wasn’t at the sisters’ home. The route went straight through the busiest part of town. Could she have discarded it in a waste bin along the way? The data showed that the car only stopped for the briefest of moments at traffic lights. Even if Annie had jumped out, the contents of all the litterbins along that route had been seized by the search teams. Somebody could have returned at a later date and moved the knife, he supposed, but it seemed a bit elaborate, especially given the amateur way in which the bloody clothes had been disposed of.
Wilson then stayed at her nieces’ flat, presumably helping Annie pack and arranging for her to leave Middlesbury. It seemed that whatever personal items Annie had been unable to take with her to Manchester had been dumped alongside her bloody uniform. The phones then travelled to the train station. The same argument about a lack of opportunity to discard the knife en route applied here also.
Which meant that Wilson, if she still had the knife, most likely got rid of it on her drive to the area where she had dumped the clothes.
Warren traced the route that the phones took with his finger. A crude calculation of the car’s average speed showed that it was travelling a little below the speed limit. Did that figure show that she was travelling slowly, perhaps not to attract attention, or whilst she scoped out likely spots to dump her incriminating packages? Or did the low average speed mask a brief stop as she threw the knife out of the window?
Teams were scouring the verges, looking for a bladed implement that could have killed Cullen.
Warren continued to trace the route with his finger, before pausing, an idea starting to form. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it before.
He switched to Google Earth; the map replaced with an overhead satellite shot. Changing the display to Street View, he traced the path the Google imaging vehicle had travelled.
Hutchinson answered his phone on the second ring.
‘I know where she dumped the knife,’ said Warren. ‘According to the phone location data, she stopped for several minutes at a turning circle, before heading back along the road she had just travelled, taking a detour past her father-in-law’s care home to firm up her alibi. We assumed that she was just waiting for the call from Malina to her personal phone, pretending to tell her about the killing, before she headed back to the care home to firm up her alibi. But she received the call from Malina after she left the turning circle. She was at that circle for ages.’
‘We have a team up there searching, but no sign of it yet. Besides, there’s nowhere to dump the phone within the radius of the phone location data.’
‘She didn’t have her phone with her,’ said Warren. ‘We know it was paired to her car’s Bluetooth hands-free kit. She must have left it in her vehicle. I’ve just looked at Google Earth and it looks as though there’s an overgrown footpath that cuts through the treeline, about three hundred yards from where she stopped. That’s outside the radius of the phone’s location data. Looking at Street View, it doesn’t look as though it’s easily visible from the road, but if she was familiar with the area, which she probably is, since her father-in-law’s care home is along that road, she might know about it.’
‘Shit.’
‘Send a team down the footpath, and start searching,’ Warren ordered. ‘I’ll get onto DSI Grayson and get him to authorize an underwater search team. That footpath leads right down to the river Herrot.’