There was nothing more he could add. Anna could see he was distressed, as he kept pressing his hands flat on the table.
“I didn’t have no place to call her, no number. She contact me.”
“She rang you from a mobile?”
“I dunno, I never checked.”
“We got your number from a Mrs. Henderson whom Estelle worked for. Did you only ever receive the one phone call?”
“Yes, she call just once.”
Andre left the station shortly afterward to return to Manchester. It was yet another dead end. Anna made a note on the incident board regarding their interview, then returned to her desk to continue the search for Smiley. He might have gone abroad, but his van was obviously still in London, so they needed to discover if he had sold it. Anna made more calculations, comparing the dates from the CCTV footage of the parked van against the murders. Of the three different occasions, two matched the dates the last two victims were discovered, but there had been no signs of the van at the time of Margaret Potts’s murder.
Anna called across to Joan to ask if she would scroll through previous cold cases with a date similar to when the sightings of the van had been recorded.
“Christ, we don’t need any more bodies,” Joan grumbled.
“Just start on it, Joan, and if you don’t get anything from the service stations, search on.”
Anna’s desk phone rang; it was the headmistress from Smiley’s children’s school. Anna was surprised.
“The reason I am calling is because I was talking in the staff room after you had left, and one of our junior teachers, who’d been in the nursery section as a trainee, recalled Mrs. Smiley. She said she was Polish, and she also recalled her talking about some blinds—”
Anna interrupted. “I’m sorry, I am not quite following... Blinds?”
“Yes, you know — wooden slatted blinds. Mrs. Smiley apparently told her that her husband worked for a company that made them. They’re rather expensive and trendy, and they come in different shades of wood and various sizes.”
Anna clarified that they were window blinds, and she was told that the company made them to measure and fitted them.
It was too much to hope that the teacher recalled the name of the company, and she didn’t, but it meant they were another step forward.
Barbara wrinkled her nose at the news. “Blinds? Wooden blinds like in Switzerland at the skiing chalets?”
“No, for homes here, slatted blinds made to measure in wood. It’s got to be quite a specialist company, as they deliver and fit them. So start checking all the companies.”
Barbara and Joan worked together, literally going through every listed company in the Yellow Pages, on the Internet, and in the directory. While they were checking, Anna joined Mike and Barolli, who had returned from Earl’s Court. Their remaining victim had been identified by two waiters and the manager of the small restaurant. Her name was Anika Waleska; she was a Polish student who had worked for cash in hand four nights a week and the odd weekend as a relief waitress. They had no details of where she had lived, just a phone number. One night she had simply not turned up for work and had not been seen in months. The phone number was a mobile no longer in use and had been bought from a telephone warehouse.
The police began to check back with the Polish embassy in the hope that they could give more details. The incident room was hopping, with every telephone in use as thorough checks were made via Interpol and the UK border agency. They now had a link between their two young victims, as both were Polish — but that excluded Margaret Potts.
Joan got the breakthrough, and everyone went quiet as she had finally traced their only suspect. John Smiley worked for a company called Swell Blinds. They had moved from their warehouse in Hounslow to Manchester five years ago, and John Smiley was still employed by them. She had a contact number for him, as well as the address and details. The company still delivered to London and in fact did business all over the country. The blinds were handmade in a factory in Salford, near Manchester.
“Did you explain why we want to contact him?” Mike asked, worried that Smiley might be tipped off and disappear.
“No, I didn’t, because I know how important this could be, so I played it quite casual and just said it was a routine inquiry.” Joan gave a raised eye to Barbara, who hid a smile. Sometimes in his new position as DCI, Mike got under their skin. They were both old hands and knew enough of police procedure to act accordingly.
They had made big steps forward. Mike contacted Langton to tell him that their third victim had been identified and the owner of the Transit van traced. Langton suggested they move on Smiley fast but keep it low-profile. No sooner had Mike replaced the phone than Joan was startled to receive a call from Smiley himself.
“Is he on the line now?” Mike asked.
“Yes.”
“I’ll take it in my office.”
Everyone waited, and Mike eventually returned to the incident room.
“Well, Smiley by name and nature. Very helpful; said he’s delivering in London tomorrow and he’ll come in first thing.”
“You believe him?” Barolli asked.
“Yes. He has no idea what we want to see him about, as I said it was connected to him not changing addresses on his van.”
“I don’t like it,” Barolli muttered.
“You want to go all the way to Manchester? I don’t, and if we need to confirm that he is in actual fact delivering tomorrow, we can contact his boss — all right?”
“I’d just like to know he’s not about to do a runner.”
“Listen, contact Manchester Murder Squad and ask them to keep an eye on him. He’s got a mortgage, a wife, and two kids, so I don’t think he’s going to do a disappearing act.”
“Yeah, they said that about Ronnie Biggs.”
Anna could see the tension mounting between the two men, and to defuse it, she asked if the team could move on with tracking down anyone who had known Anika Waleska.
“It’s coincidental that Smiley’s wife is also Polish, and there may be some kind of connection there,” Anna said.
Barolli was at it again, suggesting she read up on just how many Polish immigrants had been shipped back out of England. “We’re bloody inundated with Poles,” he said rudely.
Anna gestured to the board, snapping, “Not murdered, though, all right?”
The following day, Langton appeared, sat himself down at one of the desks, and impatiently demanded a briefing. He was playing with a small piece of string, tying and untying a knot as Mike gave him a runthrough of the new details. His foot twitched while he tied and untied the knot. As Mike finished, he stood up.
“You’re out by three days — correct? — from the time Estelle was last seen to her murder? And you got the ID via a phone-in from Crimewatch on Anika, right?” He sighed and chewed at his lips. “They got this anonymity deal, but did you get any hint about who the caller could have been? Did she work in the same restaurant?”
Mike said there was no way the program would give them any assistance on tracing the caller; that was what it was all about, anonymity assured.
“Fuck that. Go back and ask if they’ll run a request for the informant to come forward on their next show. Maybe she’ll cough up.”
Langton paced in front of the board and then stopped, noticing Anna’s detail about her phone call from Welsh.
He glanced at Anna. “You got your number changed?”
“Not yet.”
He returned to perch on the side of her desk. “Okay, I want to visit the prick. Now, I know you don’t want to set eyes on him again, Travis, but let’s put the bastard to bed or see if he’s fucking us around once and for all, eh? So first thing in the morning, all right?”