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

didn’t really matter if she got annoyed with me for sticking my nose in, as long as she actually listened to me.

I related the conversation I’d had with the carer that morning, and told her about the obituary I’d found, and why I believed it was the person Nadia had been referring to. To my surprise, Forest didn’t interrupt me while I was speaking, but waited for me to finish.

‘That’s potentially new information. We’ll look into it,’ she said, and I smiled to myself that she couldn’t even bring herself to thank me.

Emboldened by the lack of hostility from her, I told her how I thought it fitted with the cuckooing and how they’d managed to choose their victims and keep it under the radar for so long. At this, there was a frosty silence on the end of the line.

‘How do you know about the cuckooing?’ Forest’s voice was cold enough to make me shiver.

I swallowed and made a couple of incoherent noises before she interrupted me.

‘As if I need to ask. And what other details of police investigations has DS Singh been sharing with you?’

‘It wasn’t Rav, I mean, DS Singh,’ I spluttered, but she knew I was lying. The damage had already been done, and she hung up.

‘Shit,’ I said to myself, hurriedly calling Singh. He still didn’t answer, and I didn’t know how to tell him I’d just dropped him in it with his boss, so I didn’t leave a message.

I paced around my flat for a while after I spoke to Forest, wondering what I should do. I knew that in the past she’d completely ignored anything I’d said, but would she do that this time when she’d told me herself that I’d given her some new information? She wasn’t the type to cut off her own nose to spite her face, so I was sure she would at least follow it up. I couldn’t sit around at home doing nothing, however, so I decided to pay one last visit.

Chapter 36

Turning off Frodingham Road, I followed the directions on my phone until I reached the house where Lukas was staying. Sasha had given me the address the previous day when she’d come to see me in hospital – it felt like that had happened weeks ago. Before Lukas called me on the night of the fire at his house, I had barely spent any time in this area of Scunthorpe, yet now I was finding myself there on an almost daily basis.

The house itself looked like it could do with some attention. Paint was peeling from the front wall of the red-brick terrace, and the wooden window frames were starting to rot. Most of the other houses in the row had been extended slightly, with a bay window added at the front, but this one didn’t look like it had had anything done to it for a long time. I could see a yellowing net curtain hanging in the front window, and the front doorstep had cracked right down the middle.

I knocked, then realised Lukas wouldn’t be able to hear me. I doubted he’d had time or opportunity to install any sort of adaptations for himself, so I’d need to find another way of alerting him to my presence. Moving to the side, I pressed my face against the front window, wondering if I would be able to see anything through the ancient polyester on the other side of the glass.

‘Hello?’

I jumped. Someone had opened the door, but it wasn’t Lukas.

‘Paul, hi. I came to see Lukas. Is he here?’ I shouldn’t have been surprised that Paul was there – after all, the house belonged to him, and had been his mother’s before he let Lukas use it. I’d hoped to have a conversation with Lukas alone, and Paul’s presence immediately put me on my guard.

‘Paige, isn’t it?’

I nodded and Paul held the door open wide.

‘Why don’t you come in?’

I hesitated for a moment, but I didn’t want to make a scene on the doorstep, so I followed him inside.

The smell of damp hit me as we walked in. I knew the house had probably been lying empty for a few weeks, but the intensity of the smell suggested it had been neglected for a long time prior to Mrs Ilford’s death. I picked my way across the filthy carpet and into the room to the right.

‘Take a seat,’ Paul said cheerfully, pointing at an armchair in the corner. The leather was worn, but it was definitely a better choice than the sofa, whose upholstery had worn right through to the stuffing in a couple of patches.

‘Where’s Lukas?’ I asked.

‘He’s just popped out to get a couple of things,’ he told me. ‘He should be back soon, though. Do you want a cup of tea while you wait?’

I had two choices – I could make my excuses and leave, and try to talk to Lukas another time, or I could suck it up and wait. I don’t know what pushed me towards the latter, but I was already there so I thought I could sit it out.

While Paul busied himself in the kitchen, I stuck my head into the hallway and had a quick look around. There were only two rooms downstairs – the kitchen and the sitting room Paul had shown me into – so I assumed upstairs had two bedrooms and probably a very small bathroom. The carpet on the stairs was the same murky shade of dirt as the one in the hall, and I shuddered to think just what had been ground into it over the years.

‘Tea.’ Paul appeared from the kitchen, with a tray in his hands. I hoped the mugs hadn’t been here as long as the carpet, but the one he handed me looked relatively clean, so I risked it and took a drink.

‘How long did your mother live here?’ I asked him, stuck for conversation topics.

‘Most of her life,’ he replied. ‘I grew up in