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

a moment, listening to see if I could hear any sounds from the other side of the door. There were some doors banging in other houses, and I heard a few shouts from further up the street, but nobody came to the door. I was just deciding whether to knock again, when a woman stuck her head out from the next house, two doors down from the burnt-out one.

‘He’ll be at work,’ the woman said, looking me up and down and wrinkling her nose. ‘You want to talk to him, you’ll have to come back later.’

‘Okay. Thank you,’ I replied, not sure what to do next. I was thinking of trying the house on the other side of Lukas’s, but now this woman was standing in front of me it seemed silly to pass up the opportunity to speak to her. She seemed familiar enough with her neighbour’s movements to possibly be able to tell me something about Lukas and Nadia, so I turned on my brightest smile and approached her.

‘I wonder if you could help me instead,’ I began. ‘I’m an insurance investigator. Were you at home on Tuesday night, when the fire took place at number fourteen?’

The woman sniffed. ‘I mighta been. Why you asking?’

Keeping my smile fixed, I looked around, as if I was checking to see if anyone was listening. ‘Well, it’s my job to make sure my company understands exactly what happened on that night. We need to be certain we’re paying out to the people who deserve it, and any compensation claims are genuine.’

‘Compensation?’ the woman replied, her tongue flicking over her lips. She’d stood up a little straighter as I said my piece, and I knew I had her interest.

‘Well, yes. In this sort of situation, we need to be sure the policy holder isn’t the only person affected by this. Neighbouring houses could well have sustained some damage.’

The woman glanced back at her house, and I wondered what sort of story she was going to concoct. I could tell her house was far enough away from Lukas’s that it hadn’t been damaged by the fire, but I could practically see the cogs whirring in her mind as she tried to think of a way in which she could benefit.

‘I got COPD,’ she said eventually. ‘That’s me lungs. The smoke, you know. Made me right poorly, it has.’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that, Mrs …?’ I replied, tailing off.

‘Adams,’ she replied. ‘Jill Adams.’

‘Well, Mrs Adams, would you mind telling me what you know about what happened on Tuesday?’

Jill Adams leant back against the wall that separated the front of her property from the house outside of which I was standing, and rubbed her nose.

‘I don’t really know,’ she told me. ‘I spoke to the police about it. I always knew there was summat wrong with them in that house.’

Bingo, I thought. It looked like we’d struck it lucky with the neighbour who had reported a fight between Lukas and Nadia.

‘Wrong? In what way?’

‘Well, you know.’ She leant forward, as if she was imparting a great secret. ‘They’re foreign. And they’re both deaf and dumb, you know.’

I cringed at the outdated and offensive phrase, but I bit my tongue. It was a good job Sasha had stayed in the car so she hadn’t been faced with this sort of attitude. In my professional role, I would have corrected Jill Adams immediately, explaining the negative connotations of the word ‘dumb’ and suggesting she use ‘mute’ instead, but right now I needed to keep her onside.

‘So neither of the occupants of number fourteen speak?’ I asked, trying to clarify what she meant. If she was claiming that neither Lukas nor Nadia ever used their voices, she couldn’t have heard them shouting at each other.

‘Well, not exactly. He doesn’t talk, but she does. I meant more that, you know, they’re a bit simple.’

Once again, I swallowed what I wanted to say in response. I knew that Lukas had left school with several good qualifications, and he was eloquent when it came to expressing himself in BSL. He had no learning difficulties that Sasha had ever mentioned, and so I assumed this was prejudice on the part of Jill Adams. Unfortunately, some people jumped to conclusions when it came to deaf people, especially sign language users.

‘They yelled at each other – I heard that sometimes,’ Jill was saying, nodding to herself as if she’d proven a point. ‘It was both of them, like. They each gave as good as they got.’

I knew that this could have been accurate – just because Lukas didn’t use a spoken language didn’t mean he couldn’t make any sound, and in argument I imagined he wouldn’t be silent. Still, I didn’t want to lead her into talking about Tuesday night; I needed her to tell me of her own volition.

‘Did they fight a lot?’ I asked, trying my best to sound sympathetic, as if the rows must have disturbed her.

She shrugged. ‘On and off. More when there was people in the house. Well, afterwards.’

I frowned. ‘People in the house?’

‘Yeah, for a few days last week there’s been loads of people going in and out, at all hours of the day. I reported them to the council for antisocial behaviour,’ she told me, leaning back and folding her arms. ‘There’s plenty of folks that could be doing with a council house like that one, and I don’t think them that’s causing trouble should be allowed to keep theirs.’

Sasha would definitely want to look into that, I thought, though chances were it was just a group of Mariusz’s friends and Jill Adams was being oversensitive.

‘And it was definitely this house, number fourteen?’ I asked, pointing over my shoulder at the house behind me and making a note in the little yellow book.

‘Oh yes. I’m not the only one who’s noticed it. But I’m the only one who had the guts to call the council about it. Everyone else just wants to keep their head