The Silent Suspect by Nell Pattison (if you give a mouse a cookie read aloud .TXT) 📗

Lukas was visibly trembling, but he maintained his refusal to communicate. Whatever his reasoning, Forest was right – he wasn’t doing himself any favours if he didn’t even give a statement telling his side of the story.

It continued in the same way for some time, until Forest seemed to give up and turned to Singh.

‘I don’t have time for this,’ she growled at the DS.

Singh looked down at the file in front of him, then back at Lukas. ‘What about if we start at the beginning, Mr Nowak? Let’s talk about yesterday afternoon. Your employer has confirmed you left work at the steelworks at six, and we have CCTV of you getting on the bus that goes past your house. Was your wife, Nadia, in the house when you got back?’

Lukas watched me as I interpreted, but then sat back and folded his arms. In the silence that followed, I thought I could hear Forest grinding her teeth.

When Singh realised he wasn’t going get a response, he tried a different tack.

‘Would you like to tell us how you got the bruises on your face and body?’

Lukas’s face coloured, but he stayed in the same position, still refusing to be drawn.

I wondered how long he could keep this up, and if he was ever going to say anything about what had happened. When he’d told me last night that he knew who was responsible, I had assumed he was going to tell the police who they should be looking at, so this approach surprised me. He was making himself look even more guilty by refusing to defend himself.

Snatching the file from Singh, Forest pulled out a piece of paper that looked like a witness statement, and I felt as if the temperature in the room had dropped a couple of degrees.

‘The police officers who were at the scene of the fire last night took some statements from other residents on your street. One of them informed us that you and Nadia had a very loud fight yesterday, shortly after you returned home. Is that how you got the bruises? Did she fight back? Is that why you killed her?’

Lukas’s jaw tightened and his eyes narrowed, and I could see white patches appear on his knuckles from gripping his own arms so tightly. I couldn’t imagine him ever being violent; when he was in a bad mood he became depressed, not angry, in my experience. Surely this would draw him into communicating with the detectives? For a moment, I thought he was going to sign something, but then he took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and continued staring between the two detectives.

They carried on for another ten minutes telling Lukas what they knew, and trying to provoke him into responding to them. It sounded like they’d been busy yesterday evening and this morning – they had already ascertained that Lukas left work at his usual time and took the bus home, that he and Nadia had argued at some point in the evening, and then he’d gone out to the pub, leaving her alone in the house.

‘We’ve spoken to two people who saw you at the Frodingham Arms last night,’ Forest told him. ‘Hopefully they’ll be a little bit more cooperative than you when we ask them about your state of mind, or if you already had these bruises when you came in.’

I noticed that Lukas had developed a slight twitch in one eye in response to a couple of questions, and I wondered if Singh and Forest had picked up on it too. Sign language users are good at communicating with their body language and facial expressions, and it wasn’t easy to suppress that when it was your main mode of communication. I often found myself signing as well as speaking to hearing friends when I was particularly excited or worked up about something, and I could see Lukas was struggling to show no reaction to what the detectives were saying to him.

The crunch came when Forest pulled out the piece of information they’d been keeping back.

‘Mr Nowak, your wife didn’t die in the fire. The pathologist examined her body at the scene, and she said it was clear that Nadia had been strangled. We expect the post-mortem to confirm that she was dead before the fire started.’

Lukas jerked in his seat and his mouth hung open as he tried to take in this information. I felt bad that I’d known the night before, but he’d not been well enough for the police to question him, so I assumed nobody had explained the situation to him. Still, it had obviously come as a huge shock to him, as he covered his face and howled with grief, the first true display of emotion I’d seen from him that day.

The detectives gave Lukas a minute to compose himself before continuing with their questions.

‘Are you sure you don’t want to change your mind and cooperate with us, Mr Nowak?’ Singh asked, his tone soothing, leaning towards Lukas as if to invite his confidence. ‘Did you and Nadia have a fight? Did things go a bit too far?’

Lukas half jumped out of his seat and slammed his fist on the table, lifting his hands as if to sign something. The detectives and I all held our breath, expecting him to finally tell them something, but then he froze. He sat down again, his whole body trembling, then slipped his hands beneath the table and bent his head, tears running down his nose and dripping off the end.

Just at that moment there was a knock on the door. Singh got up to see who it was, and was passed a piece of paper that he put down in front of DI Forest.

‘Well, this is interesting,’ Forest told Lukas, scanning the paper quickly, her voice scathing. ‘It seems that the preliminary examination of your house has determined that the fire was started deliberately. Did you set your house on fire because you