The Silent Suspect by Nell Pattison (epub e ink reader .TXT) 📕

It’s a confusing situation, I told her, wanting to share without giving her too much information. They’ve arrested someone, but I don’t think he did it. I don’t even know this guy very well, but Sasha’s convinced me he’s innocent and we need to help him.

Why don’t you think he did it? Anna asked.

He told me he didn’t do it, before he was arrested, and he was telling the truth. I’m sure of it.

She seemed to be choosing her words carefully before she replied. Do you think it’s because you’ve worked for the police before?

What do you mean?

Well … She paused. Being involved with the police as an interpreter, maybe you’ve started thinking a bit like one of them, if you see what I mean.

I frowned. I’m not trying to be a detective, Anna. Just because I’ve been involved in a couple of cases doesn’t mean I think I know better than them. Her words smarted, especially because they echoed what Forest had been saying about me.

What does Singh think? she asked, and I wondered if this was connected or if she was changing the subject.

I thought for a moment. I really don’t know. I think he’s not sure about Lukas’s guilt, but he’s not convinced there’s any evidence to point towards another suspect either.

Well, you can help him find it, she replied, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

I didn’t reply straight away. What could I say? I knew I shouldn’t be getting involved, but I’d been talking to people and sticking my nose in, exactly what Singh had warned me against.

Maybe I should just leave it, I told her. You’re right, I’m getting carried away because I like having a mystery to solve. Maybe there isn’t a mystery this time, and I’m just looking for something that isn’t there.

She nodded, obviously satisfied with my answer.

Have you told Gem about Max? she asked. Gem was my oldest friend – she was the only deaf person in her family and I was the only hearing one in mine, and when we were children our respective families took us to the Deaf club in Scunthorpe. Opposites attracted, and we’d been close ever since.

Not yet. I wanted to tell you first. I didn’t tell her that telling my friends my relationship was over almost felt like admitting failure, as if my inability to maintain a stable relationship was a character flaw. In reality, this was rubbish, because a couple of my friends were happily single, including Gem herself, but I judged myself in the way I expected other people to judge me. But telling people also meant accepting it myself and I didn’t know if I was ready for that.

Go on, you should tell her, Anna told me. She’ll want to take you out.

That’s the last thing I want right now, I replied, but she was right, so I spent the next ten minutes texting my friends to tell them what had happened, then another fifteen fielding their replies and assuring them all I was okay.

When Anna went to bed, I spent some time toying with the idea of calling Max, but I knew she was right and it wasn’t the right time. My mind drifted to my conversations with Singh and Paul earlier that day. The more people I talked to, the more complicated the case seemed to be. I remembered I’d never actually asked Paul about the relationship between Caroline and Nadia, so made a note to find out more about them and how well they’d got on. I thought it was important to find out more about these thefts too, and see if it really had been Nadia.

I sat in the living room for ages, rereading my notebook, looking for a pattern to jump out at me, but nothing came. Giving up, I went to bed but tossed and turned for ages, struggling to sleep as everything whirred round in my head, until finally the exhaustion won.

Three hours before the fire

Lukas closed the front door carefully and took off his shoes and jacket. He knew Nadia didn’t like him tracking dirt from outside into the house. She had tried to train him out of a lot of his bad habits in the time they’d been together, not that he thought there was anything wrong with half of the stuff she was bothered by. He knew if she weren’t there he’d be straight back to his old ways and it wouldn’t do him any harm. Right now, though, he wasn’t in the mood for being nagged yet again, so it was easiest just to do what she wanted. He thought he knew Nadia inside and out, but ever since she’d been accused of taking things from her clients he wondered if there was a different side to her he hadn’t realised was there. Paul insisted he thought she was innocent, but Lukas didn’t know what to think.

He was relieved to see the house was empty, apart from Nadia. The people who had been hanging around for the last couple of days had frightened him, and he knew Nadia hated having them there. But he also knew they had him backed into a corner – he couldn’t get rid of them without exposing himself and his family to more danger, and he wouldn’t do that.

There was a delicious smell wafting from the kitchen, so he poked his head around the door to see what Nadia was cooking. She was standing over the hob, stirring a large pot of some sort of stew or soup, and the steam coming off it had made the hair around her face go a little frizzy. So engrossed in what she was doing, she didn’t notice Lukas, so he took the time to look at his wife for a moment and appreciate her. She was dressed very nicely, in something more low cut than she usually wore, he noticed, and he