Monday morning, Anna arrived at the station and could feel the lack of energy in the incident room. Barbara and Joan were gossiping over their mugs of tea, and Barolli was standing in front of the incident board with his hands stuffed in his pockets. Anna joined him.
“Nothing came in over the weekend?”
“Nope. I had bloody sleepless nights. I’ve never been on a case that had so much work done and so little to show for it — bar the amount of stuff written up here. I tried thinking if there was anything we’ve overlooked, but Christ Almighty, Anna, look at how many interviews we’ve done, how much work the clerical staff has had to wade through, and having that John Smiley as our only suspect looks like a complete waste of time. So all that crap we’ve had to delve into about Swell Blinds has also been pointless.”
Anna looked at the photographs of the victims, the red arrows linking the girls, the Polish connection, the tattoo.
“I was thinking over the weekend, too,” she said. “In every case I’ve worked on, I’ve uncovered details about the victims’ lives, but with these girls, we’ve got blanks; we don’t know where they went after stopping work for the domestic agency — all we know is that Anika worked in a restaurant, but we don’t know where she lived. With Estelle, we have her working as an au pair, staying with a friend, and buying clothes from a charity shop, but we still don’t have a clue where she went for the three days before her murder. As for Dorota Pelagia, we have no information about where she worked or lived, nor do we know of anyone who knew her apart from the hideous Olga — so where was she four years ago?”
“Tell me something I haven’t thought about,” Barolli muttered.
“I think we should do one big press conference with all the victims’ profiles.”
“Listen, they’ve had them on the crime shows, they’ve done the news coverage over and over again, and what has it brought? Fuck-all,” Barolli grumbled.
Anna shrugged and went over to her desk.
“What did Cameron Welsh have to say for himself?” Barolli asked, curious despite his bad mood.
Anna gestured at the board but gave Barolli the gist of it, adding, “He also had a hard-on when he was telling me all this, so I suspect he was just wanking around.”
“Did he keep on about Margaret Potts?”
“Yes. He has a hatred of prostitutes and always refers back to her as holding the clue. He says she must have known her killer.”
“So what do we do? Go back yet again over all the information we have on her?”
“Well, we’ve been pretty thorough, and we’ve not found any connection.”
Barbara joined them, asking if they should return the boxes of receipts and contracts to Swell Blinds. Her desk was stacked high with them, as was Joan’s.
“The only stuff we didn’t check out were the orders for vertical blinds, as John Smiley didn’t fit that sort, and the company’s no longer got the contracts. Ones like that, not the wooden slatted ones.” Barbara turned and gestured to the incident room’s windows. “According to all these hundreds of calls, and there have been God knows how many interviews, every one of these orders that had John Smiley down as delivering or measuring have been checked out. We were told not to focus on the factory orders for hotels and other businesses that use vertical blinds. That includes the contracts they had for housing associations, schools, gymnasiums—”
“Go through them, Barbara,” Anna said suddenly.
“All of them?”
“Yes. Sorry. If John Smiley fitted them...”
“But he was only on the wooden slatted ones, wasn’t he?”
“I don’t know, Barbara, but just cover yourselves to make sure we’ve not missed anything.”
Mike Lewis then called Anna into his office, eating a sandwich as he gestured for her to sit. “Langton’s gonna pull out half my team, leaving me with just a handful, as he can’t get the finances to continue. We’ve had twenty-eight officers doing a lot of the legwork, and he needs them for other cases. Clerical staff have already been pulled, and he was going nuts about how much that bloody Polish interpreter cost.”
Anna said nothing, as she had expected it would happen.
“Do you know how many blue blankets were issued over the past eight years?” Mike demanded.
“No, I don’t.”
“Five hundred and fifty thousand!”
“So where does that leave us?”
“With as much chance of tracking down where the blanket came from as winning the sodding lottery. They’re in prisons, hostels, charity shops... it’s fucking impossible, and for her, that’s all we’ve got.”
“Any chance of her relatives coming over?”
“No. Besides, she’s been cremated.”
“Wouldn’t they want to take her ashes back to Poland?”
“We’ve not traced any family members apart from her sister. Besides, we’d have to pay, and with the budget out of control, I don’t have the finances.”
“But we might get something about Dorota’s background if we keep trying. We know so little about the victims, apart from Margaret Potts.”
“You talk to Langton. He’s bitten my head off once too often. Have you any idea how much this case has cost to date?”
“If they weren’t Polish, would—”
“Don’t even go there,” he snapped.
Anna decided to go up to the canteen for a coffee and bacon roll. Facing her was a window with vertical blinds. She stared at them as she finished her late breakfast.
Barbara was removing her cardigan as Anna got back to her desk. “I’m going to need my eyes tested again.” The DC sighed. “If I’m not glued to the computer all day, it’s sifting through this lot.”
“Did Swell Blinds have any contracts for vertical blinds with police stations?”
“I’ve not come across one yet, but there’s got to be hundreds of firms that make them. They’re very popular because they’re cheap.”
Anna frowned. Something was niggling at the back of her brain; she just couldn’t bring it out. Opening her briefcase, she took out the three notebooks she’d filled during the investigation and began to skim through each one. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for but hoped that something would jog her memory.
“You look different,” Joan said.
“Pardon?”
“I just said you look different. Dunno what it is, but you look...”
“Different. Yes, so you said.”
“I’m going to the canteen — you want anything?”
“No, thank you, Joan.” When DC Falkland had gone, Anna opened her handbag to take out a mirror and looked at herself. Yes, she was different; she felt different because she was in love.
“Nothing better to do?” Barolli said as he passed her desk, also on his way to the canteen.
Anna put her mirror away, then hurried across to Barbara. “The contract for the Swell Blinds company...”
“Which one? Take your pick.”
“No, you said something about a housing association...”
“Yeah, they had a whopper of a contract but lost it, part of the reason Swell Blinds uprooted to Manchester.” The DC began to search through a stack covered in yellow stickers. “Arnold Rodgers said something about losing the contract because there were so many companies after it who had contacts within the housing association. In other words, it was possible that money changed hands.” Barbara continued sifting, asking, “You thinking of ordering some for your flat?”
Anna made no reply, waiting impatiently until Barbara handed over a thick set of documents stapled together. Anna took them back to her desk, her heart jumping as she thumbed through the orders. Next she flicked through her notebook to her first interview with Emerald Turk. To trace her, she had gone through Social Services, and they had put her in touch with the Strathmore Housing Association, which had rehoused Emerald in a newly refurbished apartment in a high-rise block. Anna picked up the phone, trying to keep herself calm, but felt certain she was on the right track. She recalled looking toward the window in Emerald’s kitchen and was positive that the woman had vertical blinds.