The Silent Suspect Nell Pattison (best classic books of all time TXT) 📖

help you report them to the council?’ I asked. ‘They can install something in your house that records the noise, to prove how bad it is.’

Eric perked up a bit. ‘My granddaughter comes over once a week, cleans for me and does some shopping. I could ask her.’

‘You really should. It’s not fair on you, having to live with that.’

He nodded thoughtfully, then pointed over at Lukas’s house. ‘They were never no trouble, them two, not until recently. I don’t know what happened on the night of the fire, though. Must have fallen asleep in my chair, because I woke up and there was all these flashing lights and a huge fire engine outside my window.’ Looking at me, a thought seemed to occur to him. ‘Are they okay?’

Clearly, he didn’t get all the local news. I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry, but Nadia died, and Lukas is in prison.’

‘In prison?’ he asked, looking genuinely puzzled. ‘What for? He didn’t start that fire. I saw him go out.’

My ears pricked up at this: here was another eye witness to confirm that Lukas went out that night before the fire started. I made a mental note to suggest that Singh interviewed Eric, although as he’d already admitted to falling asleep in his chair I didn’t think he’d be considered very reliable. I didn’t know how much the police had made public yet, and Singh would kill me if I got the local rumour mill working, so I didn’t answer his question.

Luckily, Eric didn’t seem to notice and was still muttering to himself. ‘Bollocks. It will have been all those kids who were hanging around.’

‘Which kids?’

Eric jabbed a finger in the direction of the house. ‘The last week before that fire, there was all sorts of people coming in and out of the house at odd hours. No idea who they were, or why they were there, but I’d never seen any of them before. And there were loads of kids hanging around outside on bikes. Not a lot of kids on this street, just a couple down the other end, and it weren’t any of them.’ He looked at me triumphantly, as if he’d solved the crime himself.

I remembered Singh’s comment about kids hanging around outside the other house that had been damaged in a fire, and I wondered if it was the same group. Were they responsible for the fires? But what did that have to do with Nadia being murdered?

I spent another hour with Eric, listening to the gossip about the people whose houses he could see from his window. He was especially vicious about Jill Adams, but, honestly, I didn’t blame him.

As I left, he stood in the window to wave me off, and I returned the gesture. Turning back towards Lukas’s house, I looked up at the blackened walls, and the boards that had been nailed over the windows to keep the house secure. It looked like one of the boards had been prised off. Moving closer, I pulled it back, peering into the gloom of the living room, but the lack of natural light coming in meant I couldn’t see much. Just as I was about to go back to my car, I thought I heard a noise coming from inside the house. I froze, my breath catching in my throat. I was about to call out and see if anyone was there, but instinct stopped me. I’d been in too many dangerous situations in the last year or so, and I couldn’t risk walking into another, certainly not alone.

After stepping away quietly, I got back in my car and went home, knowing I wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about what I’d heard: it had sounded like someone crying.

Chapter 21

Anna was still out when I got back and Eric’s words had got me thinking, so I spent the time sorting through my notebook again, which prompted me to go over my thoughts about Roy. The way the muscled guy had spoken to me the previous day had made me instantly suspect that Roy had killed Nadia and burned down Lukas’s house as a threat, and whilst Roy himself had seemed genuinely sympathetic to Lukas’s situation he could have just been covering his tracks. If Sasha was right that Lukas was innocent, I wasn’t sure if Roy was as obvious a suspect as she first thought.

Adding some more bits to my notebook, I thought about what Roy could gain from Nadia’s death. If Lukas had the money and was withholding it from Roy, it would make sense to threaten him, but to go so far as to murder his wife? That seemed pretty extreme. Unless Nadia had money that we didn’t know about, or if she had life insurance, in which case her death could benefit Roy financially. If Lukas was convicted of Nadia’s murder, however, the life insurance policy would be void, so that wouldn’t do either of them any good. Then, of course, there was the matter of the thefts – was Nadia responsible, or was she framed? And I still needed to find out more about how she and Caroline got on at work. I couldn’t imagine they were playing happy families.

It was too confusing, and I knew I needed to stop thinking about it for a little while if I was going to make any sense of it. I often found that if I did something different to take my mind off a case, my brain would carry on working away at it in the background.

I arrived at the Deaf club before Gem – she had a seven-year-old daughter called Petra, and I knew she would be making sure she was in bed and settled before leaving her with whoever was babysitting. The club was housed in a tiny old building near the steelworks, and provided the local Deaf community with opportunities to socialise. Some nights had organised activities, from yoga to bingo, but mostly people just met up for