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

leave me to answer the question, but I really didn’t want to antagonise Singh – I would be crushed if we fell out and besides, he was my one friendly contact in the police.

‘How can it possibly be connected, when the person who set that fire is currently in custody?’ Singh asked quietly. He was keeping his voice low to avoid us being overheard, but I could still hear the tension underlying his words: he was angry with us for being there.

We don’t believe Lukas did it. You know that. If we can find another explanation, perhaps that will help him. Sasha folded her arms, refusing to back down.

‘Come on, Rav,’ I added, hoping to appease him. ‘You can’t blame Sasha for wanting to help one of her clients.’

Singh tensed his jaw, and I wondered if he was going to shout at me. ‘Can we talk? In private?’

I looked at Sasha and she shrugged. I should go, anyway, she signed to me. Nobody here is going to talk to me.

Singh and I watched her walk to her car, then he looked back at me.

‘Come with me,’ he said, shoving his hands in his pockets and striding off down the pavement before I had a chance to reply. He walked to the end of the road, turned right, then crossed over to a small, scrubby patch of grass with a children’s playground behind it. Here he turned to me and looked me in the eyes.

‘Paige, you know I respect you as a professional, and I like you personally. But you need to drop this now. When we’ve worked together before you’ve been invaluable to our investigation. Now, you seem determined to undermine us. You’re a witness, and meddling like this isn’t going to look good for Lukas.’

I shook my head. ‘That’s not what I’m trying to do, Rav. I told Sasha I didn’t want to get involved, but I can’t stop her doing it, and I’m her interpreter. Anything I’ve done, I’ve done to support Sasha because it’s my job.’ This wasn’t strictly true when I thought about my trip to Worx gym that morning, but I knew he’d be fuming if I told him about that. And I didn’t feel that I could tell him my concerns about Sasha lying to me until I’d given her the chance to explain herself. ‘She doesn’t believe Lukas did it.’

‘He won’t defend himself, Paige! How can she keep insisting he’s innocent when he won’t even do that himself?’

Trying to stay calm, I thought carefully before I spoke. I’d been mulling over Lukas’s reaction for a while, and I’d had some time to come up with a theory based on my experience. ‘My parents were always scared of anyone in authority. Even people like the staff at the bank. The communication barrier always made them feel like they were doing something wrong. Deaf people are routinely ignored or mistreated because of the difficulties in communication, and if they find it hard to stand up for themselves they can end up agreeing to things just because they think it’s what the person in authority expects of them. I once interpreted for a lady who went to Citizens Advice because she was struggling to pay her bills, and when they looked into it they found she had dozens of direct debits going out to charities every month. People would come to her door and ask her to sign up to something for three pounds a month, and she couldn’t understand what they wanted. She realised that signing their bits of paper made them go away, so she did it, not realising exactly what they were asking.’

I made a frustrated noise. ‘I sound like I’m saying she was stupid – she wasn’t, but she’d grown up being afraid of people in authority, in case she was taken away or locked up in an institution, or in case she had something blamed on her because she couldn’t communicate properly with the hearing people around her. I’m worried the same thing is happening with Lukas.’

Singh scowled at me. ‘You think we’ve manipulated him? Scared him somehow, so he won’t tell us anything in case we use it against him? You were there, Paige. That didn’t happen.’

‘You know that’s not what I’m saying!’ I threw my hands up and tried to lower my voice. ‘Lukas is scared of you. He’s scared of the police. He’s scared of something worse happening to him if he tells the truth. So he won’t tell you anything because he’s worried what will happen to him if he protests his innocence.’ I thought back to Tuesday night and the fire and my eyes filled with tears. I tried to blink them away but it was too late – Singh’s face fell, and I knew he thought he’d upset me.

‘I saw the look in Lukas’s eyes when he thought Nadia was trapped in that burning house,’ I told him, my voice cracking slightly. ‘I saw the utter horror and devastation on his face when they pulled her body out. There is no way you can convince me that he’s responsible for her death. He was broken by it.’

We stood in silence for a moment, before Singh turned away from me and kicked a clump of grass.

‘Shit. Shit, shit, shit.’

‘What?’ I asked.

He walked away from me and sat down on a bench, leaning back with his hands linked behind his head. I joined him, wondering what had caused this sudden shift in his attitude.

‘Forest knows Sasha thinks he’s innocent. We talked about it yesterday, after I saw you, and she thinks you’re driving it, that you’ve got it into your head that you’re some sort of amateur detective now.’

‘Wow,’ I replied, stung by his words. ‘I wish you hadn’t told me that.’

‘Sorry. But what I mean is that she actually had me convinced for a few hours. That’s why I came down here to talk to you. But what you just said …’ He looked at me