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

open up to me. After a long pause, I was rewarded for waiting. She glanced over her shoulder, as if to check nobody was watching her.

‘She’d just finished a shift and she’d come into the office to hand in some paperwork, I think. Anyway, we were in the loos, and I could tell she was really distracted. She was just standing there, looking at herself in the mirror, as if she was in her own little world. I asked her what was wrong, and she didn’t hear me at first. She spoke well, did Nadia, but she had to be looking at you to understand you. So I tapped her on the shoulder and she jumped, like she hadn’t even noticed I was there.’

‘Did she tell you what was wrong?’ I asked, wanting to hurry the woman up but also not wanting to risk asking any leading questions.

‘Sort of,’ she said with a frown. ‘She was obviously really worked up about it. She started trying to tell me about something, but she couldn’t quite find the right words. It all ended up a bit muddled. I offered to make her a cup of tea so she could talk to me about it properly, and she agreed, but a couple of minutes later she got up and said she had to get home.’ She shrugged. ‘That was the last time I saw her.’

‘Do you remember what day that was?’ I wondered if this had happened on the day Nadia died, and if whatever she’d been anxious about had been the motive for someone to kill her.

‘I’ve been thinking about that and trying to remember. I think it was the Monday.’

‘The day before she died?’

She nodded. ‘I think so. But it might have been the Tuesday.’

I bit my lip and thought for a moment, not realising that I was leaning on the woman’s car. ‘What was it that got her that worked up, do you think?’

The woman glanced over her shoulder again, then lowered her voice. ‘It was something to do with one of her clients. She said that one of them had died, and she wasn’t happy about it. I mean, she thought there was something dodgy going on, that whoever it was hadn’t died of natural causes. She kept saying, “He’s been lying.”’

‘Who was she talking about?’ I asked, unable to keep the eagerness from my voice.

‘That’s what I don’t know,’ she replied, clearly as frustrated as I was. ‘She didn’t say. Whoever it was, she just kept saying “he”, “him”.’

I folded my arms as I thought about who it could have been. I knew Lukas had been lying to her. Had she found out about his relationship with Sasha? Was that why she was flustered and making no sense? Because she’d found out that her seemingly devoted husband was having an affair with his social worker? But that had nothing to do with her work.

Mariusz was another possibility. I imagined none of his parents or step-parents had known about the gang he’d been hanging around with, and the crimes that he was now linked to. If Nadia had found out about that, though, surely she would have told Lukas and Caroline, rather than keeping it to herself. Roy Chapman was another man she could have been referring to. But what did any of these people have to do with one of her clients dying in suspicious circumstances?

‘Do you know which client she was talking about?’ I asked, hoping that that would make the identity of Nadia’s killer more obvious. There couldn’t have been many who died recently, but the woman shook her head.

‘I don’t know who Nadia had been working with. We support a lot of elderly people, so deaths aren’t that unusual. I asked around, but I couldn’t work out which client it might have been. Nobody that Nadia had been assigned to has passed away in the last couple of months, so it must have been something that happened a while ago, and she’d just found out something about it. That’s what I thought, anyway,’ she added defensively.

‘Thank you,’ I told her, because she looked as if she was getting ready to leave, already regretting having told me so much. ‘I appreciate you speaking to me.’

She nodded. ‘I hope he rots in jail, whoever killed her. She didn’t deserve it.’

‘You’re right,’ I agreed. ‘She didn’t.’

After giving me another strange look, she got in her car and left, leaving me standing on the pavement, wondering what on earth it all meant.

I drove home, all the time trying out different theories in my mind. I’d forgotten my promise to Singh to leave it alone; there was something about the puzzle that kept drawing me back in. I was missing something, something that was probably obvious.

When I got home, I grabbed my tablet and started looking at the local obituaries, and any newspaper stories about recent deaths. From what the carer had said, the death itself might not have been treated as suspicious, even though it was clearly bothering Nadia. I scrolled through dozens and dozens of names until something caught my eye: a familiar name. The obituary was about six weeks old, but that could fit with the time frame.

Within about fifteen minutes, I had a plausible theory. It all fitted, even the cuckooing. Grabbing my phone, I called Singh, but there was no answer from his mobile, so I called the police station and was put on hold. When someone finally came to the phone I was almost bursting.

‘Yes?’ My heart sank at the sound of the voice. It wasn’t Singh, it was DI Forest.

‘Er, hi. It’s Paige. I was trying to reach DS Singh.’

‘He’s not available right now. Is there something I can help you with?’

I hesitated for a moment, wondering if I shouldn’t tell her and should wait to speak to Singh, but I knew I needed to pass on my thoughts as soon as possible. Forest already had a low opinion of me, so it