She glanced over my shoulder at the door. Are you going to report me?
I’d asked myself the same question over and over since I’d found out. In the end, I’d decided against it. It was highly likely that the truth would come out eventually, seeing as the police knew, but I didn’t have to be the one to reveal it, especially as Singh had told me about it in confidence. I was furious with her for lying to me, but I didn’t want to be the one to ruin her life because of it. I knew she’d have to deal with the consequences of her actions eventually.
No, I told her. But I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to hand in my notice.
She nodded. That’s fair.
My problem now is trust, I told her. I’ve been basing everything on my assumption that you knew what you were talking about, that Lukas couldn’t have killed Nadia, but now how am I supposed to know what’s true and what’s a lie? I’ve been helping you all this time, when really Lukas is probably the one who killed Nadia, because she found out he was cheating on her.
No, Paige. Sasha’s eyes were wide and she leant forward in her chair to appeal to me. Please don’t say that. You can’t believe he did it, because he didn’t. I wouldn’t have lied to you about that, even with our affair. If he belonged in jail, I would have sat back and let the police get on with it.
I didn’t trust her, and her insistence that he was innocent made me suspect her even more. Could she have killed Nadia? Or had Lukas done it, and she was protecting him? Whichever it was, I knew I didn’t want to be associated with her any more.
How do you know, Sasha? I asked. He’s refused to defend himself, and he won’t say anything about the people who were hanging around his house the day before Nadia died. The police are looking into that, you know. They think the gang are connected to the fires, and I’ve seen Mariusz hanging around with them. Lukas needs to talk to the police. You need to make him.
She was shaking her head as I signed, but I didn’t know if she was telling me I was wrong or saying she couldn’t do it. Can’t you see, he’s refused to speak to the police because he knows the only person who can confirm his alibi is me?
You?
She nodded. I saw him on that night, before he went to the pub. I was waiting outside his house, and Nadia was inside. I saw her through the window, alive and well.
I was confused. If Sasha was telling the truth, she was the only person who could confirm that Nadia was still alive after Lukas had gone to the pub. She was able to provide Lukas with an alibi. But you were in Birmingham. You were there for the conference. You drove back when I called you about the fire.
No, I came back earlier in the day, and went straight to Lukas’s house. I wanted to see him. So if he’d told the police that I could give him an alibi, it would have come out that we were having an affair, and that would be the end of my career. I could see the weight of the last week bearing down on her as her shoulders sagged. Nadia was dead, so there was nothing he could do for her any more. He thought he could at least protect me. That’s why he refused to say anything to the police.
He could have still defended himself, I told her. He told me he knew who was responsible. Why didn’t he tell the police who that was?
A thought dawned on me, and I saw Sasha’s face go pale. Oh God. Does he think you killed Nadia?
Sasha pressed her lips together tightly, and I could see she was trying to keep her composure. I don’t know. He’s refused to see me alone or talk to me since we saw him at Paul’s the other day. But it’s possible.
For a moment, a feeling of panic rose in my chest. Could Sasha have killed Nadia? If she was jealous, knowing Lukas would never leave her, could she have lashed out? After all, if she saw Lukas before he went to the pub, it would have been easy for her to knock on the door and ask to speak to Nadia about something.
As I processed these thoughts, I must have failed to keep them from showing on my face, because Sasha looked panicked.
Paige, I didn’t kill Nadia! I didn’t think I’d have to tell you that, I thought you’d know I could never hurt anyone. She stood up and backed away so she was up against the wall of the meeting room. Yes, I fell in love with Lukas, and I shouldn’t have acted on it, should have passed his case on to another social worker, but that’s where my mistakes end. I know I’ve lied to you, but you can’t possibly believe I’m a murderer?
She sat back down and clasped her hands together, as if she were begging me. I didn’t know what to think. Surely either of them could have killed Nadia? Sasha claimed to be Lukas’s alibi, but what if that was a lie and they’d committed the crime together? I felt like I’d been taken for a fool, and that the pair of them had been using me the whole time. I’d been attacked twice, and all because I’d agreed to help her prove that Lukas was innocent and I felt I owed her a favour after she’d helped to get me extra work.
Taking a deep breath, I tried to push down the anger that was building. I didn’t know what had happened that night, but I knew I was going to be telling Singh that Sasha had been there. Even though I’d said I wouldn’t report her affair with Lukas to her superiors, I wasn’t going to keep that sort of information from the police. It might finally convince Singh that I was being sensible and leaving the work to him, too.
I stood up. Sasha, I don’t know what the hell has gone on, but I don’t want to be a part of it any more. You’ll have my resignation letter in the morning. I’ll work out my notice, but you need to find yourself a new interpreter.
Paige, please. She grabbed my arm. I still need your help.
I shook my head. No. I’m not helping you any more. I’m sick of getting involved in other people’s problems and ending up being the one in danger. You can sort out your own mess.
With that, I turned on my heel and marched out of the door.
Chapter 35
I was so angry I didn’t know what to do. It felt like I was back at square one. My theory about Mariusz setting the house on fire to cover up for Caroline didn’t seem very likely any more. I was no longer convinced of Lukas’s innocence, or even Sasha’s. I tried calling Singh, but there was no answer on his mobile and I didn’t leave a message because I didn’t know where to begin. My head still throbbed from where I’d hit the pavement and I just wanted to go home and sleep and forget about the whole sorry mess.
On my way home I took a shortcut through some side streets, and recognised one of the roads I had followed Mariusz down a couple of nights ago. I was curious about my theory concerning Mariusz and the fires, so I slowed down and kept an eye out for the first house I’d seen him checking out, where he’d gone round the back. The road looked different in daylight, however, and I had to check the address on my phone so I knew exactly which house it had been.
As I approached the house I was looking for, I couldn’t see any signs of a fire, so it looked like my theory was wrong. I was about to drive away when I saw the front door of the house open and someone familiar emerge. At first I couldn’t place her, but then I recognised her uniform. She was the carer I’d spoken to a few days ago, when Sasha and I had been to visit Miriam. On impulse, I pulled up and jumped out of the car, managing to reach her before she got into her own.
‘Hi!’ I called, and she turned to look at me. I could see the same look of recognition pass across her face. ‘We met a few days ago, at the assisted living facility. We talked about Nadia.’
‘Oh, yes! Hi.’
We looked at each other awkwardly for a moment, before I pointed at the house she’d just come out of. ‘I take it one of your clients lives here?’
She raised her eyebrow, but didn’t reply.
‘I mean, it’s not your house,’ I said.
‘No, it’s not my house,’ she replied warily, clearly not willing to give me any more information than that.
I rubbed my face. I must look a mess – huge graze on the side of my face, exhausted and a bit dishevelled. No wonder she was looking at me like I might be dangerous.
‘Sorry, I really should explain
myself. My name’s Paige, and I know Lukas, Nadia’s husband. I saw his son hanging around this house, and I wondered what he might have been doing here, if one of his friends lived here.’
‘There are no kids here,’ she said, still wary. ‘Just an old lady. Maybe you got the wrong house.’
I nodded. ‘Maybe you’re right, yes. She hasn’t had any break-ins lately? Nothing like that?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. I’m sure she would have said.’
Relieved, I glanced at the house. What had Mariusz been doing, then? Was it connected to the cuckooing? An elderly lady would definitely be a prime victim for that sort of crime. If Mariusz had got himself mixed up with this gang, maybe he was being expected to scout out houses of potential victims.
The carer was still watching me, obviously curious about why I was asking these questions.
‘They let him out then,’ she said after a pause. ‘Her husband.’
‘Lukas?’ I said, getting my brain back on track in the conversation. ‘Yes, he’s been released. Insufficient evidence, I think.’
She fiddled with her car keys, obviously wanting to ask something else. ‘Do you think he did it?’
‘I honestly don’t know,’ I told her, shaking my head. ‘I did think he was innocent, but since then …’ I let my voice tail off, knowing I couldn’t tell this stranger everything that was going round in my mind.
‘I thought of something else, after we spoke the other day,’ she began. I could see that she was torn between talking to me and getting in her car. I didn’t blame her for not trusting me when I’d just been asking questions about one of her clients, when many of the people she worked with would be vulnerable.
‘Something else about Nadia?’ I asked.
She nodded, a quick, sharp single nod, but remained silent.
‘Do you think it might have something to do with her death?’ I probed.
‘I don’t know about that,’ she said hastily. ‘It might be nothing. It’s just something she said to me the other week. It would have been the last time I saw her.’
I waited, wondering if patience was the key to getting this woman to 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 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.<
br />
‘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 Silent Suspect Page 26