Maybe nostalgia kept him from changing anything, but that still didn’t excuse him allowing his mum to live in squalor.
We drank our tea in an awkward silence; I was itching to say something about the state of the house, but I knew there was a chance I could get myself into trouble, so I kept my mouth shut. After finishing my tea, I put my mug on a low table by the side of my chair and stood up to have a look at the pictures on the wall. They all appeared to be of Scunthorpe in the 1950s, and I took a few minutes trying to identify the different locations.
‘Do you mind if I just use the toilet?’ I asked, pointing to the door and moving towards it. There was no way I actually wanted to use the facilities in a house that was in this state, but it would give me an excuse to poke around a little bit before Lukas got back. I wondered where he’d gone, because he was taking a while.
Paul jumped up out of his seat and followed me into the hallway, where I already had my foot on the bottom stair.
‘No!’ he said sharply, making me jump. His eyes were narrowed and there was a tightness in his jaw that made me uncomfortable. ‘No, the bathroom isn’t upstairs,’ he continued, his voice now returned to a more even tone. ‘It’s an old house, used to just have an outside privy when it was built. The bathroom’s off the back of the kitchen.’
I nodded and stepped back, skirting round him carefully and going into the kitchen. I could feel his eyes on me as I walked across the tatty lino to the door at the back. Pushing it closed behind me, I leant on it and pulled my phone out of my pocket. Something was telling me that wherever Lukas was, he wasn’t at the shops. I sent a text to Singh, telling him where I was and that I might need some help, fervently hoping he read it quickly.
I waited in the bathroom for as long as I felt was decent, then flushed the creaking toilet and splashed some water in the sink, drying my hands on my clothes rather than touch anything else in there. When I stepped out, Paul was standing in the kitchen, rubbing his arms, obviously waiting for me.
‘Is Lukas back yet?’ I asked brightly, and Paul’s eyes narrowed slightly. I glanced past him, wondering if I could make a break for the door, but I wasn’t certain, and I didn’t want it to seem like I was in a hurry to get out of there.
When Paul didn’t reply, I shrugged. ‘Maybe I should come back another time. I’m quite busy. I need to get to work.’
‘Why are you here?’ he asked, moving himself so he was positioned between me and the door.
‘I came to see Lukas,’ I said evenly.
‘Why? What did you need to talk to him about?’
I opened my mouth to reply, then my eyes went to his hand. I hadn’t noticed what he was holding until then. It was my notebook, the one that had been stolen from my car on the night I was mugged.
He saw where I was looking and brandished it at me.
‘Looking for this? It wasn’t hard to get hold of.’
When I’d come here, I’d been certain that Paul Ilford had killed Nadia, either because she suspected him of killing his mother, or because she was threatening to expose him as the man behind the cuckooing gang operating in that area of Scunthorpe. But I had had no intention of confronting him – I had wanted to talk to Lukas, to find out how much of it he knew, how much Nadia had told him. Now I found myself in a situation I really didn’t want to be in, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to get out of it. Even if Singh had read my message, how quickly would he get here?
‘How did you get that?’ I asked him quietly, wondering if I could manage to pretend to be clueless about the whole thing. The look on his face told me he wasn’t buying it, however.
A sneer pulled at the corner of his mouth. ‘I’ve got a few people who are willing to do little jobs for me. Breaking into a car isn’t much to any of them, but I had him take your keys from your pocket in case we needed to search your flat too. Of course, in the end he didn’t need them.’
I gave a shudder at the idea of one of Paul’s unsavoury associates in my flat, particularly if Anna had been home, and was thankful that I’d taken my notebook with me that night and left it in my car.
‘I thought you’d be easier to scare off,’ he said with a glance at where the graze on my cheek was still healing.
‘That was you too?’ I asked in surprise. I had assumed from the size and shape of my attacker that it had been a patron of Roy’s gym.
‘You and that social worker were asking a few too many questions,’ he replied. ‘I couldn’t have you fucking everything up for me, not now that I’m getting properly established.’
‘You used your care business to find vulnerable victims, people who you knew wouldn’t say anything about strange people coming in and out of their house.’
‘And it worked,’ he said with a smug grin. ‘Nobody suspected a thing, until Mariusz Nowak got involved. I should never have pulled him in.’
‘Why Mariusz?’ I asked. If I could keep him talking, hopefully Singh would arrive, with back-up.
Paul glared at me. ‘What does it matter?’
‘I’m trying to work out why you killed Nadia,’ I replied. ‘I think it started with your mother. The obituary said she passed away peacefully in her sleep, but Nadia didn’t think that was true, did she?’
‘Stupid woman,’ Paul spat, and there was rage in
