Uncaged (3 page)

Daniel had stepped out quietly to stand in front of them, which had made the grin fade from Denroy’s face. He’d halted, saying nothing, looking nervous. But the woman hadn’t been nervous. She’d looked Daniel up and down before saying imperiously, “Kindly get out of our way.”

Daniel had neither moved nor spoken. He’d just stood looking at the man who’d killed his wife, his face possessed by a cold, silent hate that had made Denroy flinch. He’d been scared. Was that what had made him say such a stupid, fatuous thing?
No hard feelings, eh? Just an accident.
Then he’d fallen back at the menace in Daniel’s face.

Now Daniel remembered how Denroy had cast a nervous glance at the woman, and how her contempt had seemed to force some courage into him—enough courage to shoulder his way past. That look had told Daniel all he’d needed to know about their relationship. Denroy had been intimidated by her, had wanted to impress her. That was why he’d driven her home when he’d had no right to be behind the wheel of a car. He’d probably bragged, “Don’t worry. What’s a little booze? I can handle it.”

Daniel had thought of Denroy often, but the woman had faded from his mind—until now.

Another memory—Canvey, there with him in court, hovering beside him as he’d confronted his wife’s killers, hands at the ready to stop him from physically attacking Denroy. He was a good friend. He’d hauled Daniel away to the nearest pub and poured drink down him. “Take some time off,” he’d said. “Take as much as you need.”

“I can cope,” he’d insisted.

“You think you can, but you shouldn’t work in this state.”

“I tell you, I can cope.”

He’d prided himself on being a hard man, a strong man who could stand up to anything. He’d thrown himself into his job, working all hours, ignoring weariness, driving himself to the limit. It was the only way he could endure. Canvey had been concerned. “I see you staring into space sometimes,” he’d said, “and when I say your name, you don’t seem to hear.”

Daniel had responded by driving himself even harder. Whether he’d done his work well or not was something he didn’t know, because he could hardly recall a single detail of that time.

But he
had
to remember. He forced his mind back. Henry Grainger. Hang on to that name. Henry Grainger, the owner of a small block of apartments, had been found dead. Someone had hit him over the head with a blunt instrument. Daniel had been sent to investigate.

All the signs pointed to Mrs. Megan Anderson, one of Grainger’s tenants, who’d been heard quarreling with him the night he’d died. He hadn’t been found until the following evening, at which time Mrs. Anderson was out on an assignment for an escort agency. Daniel had waited until she’d returned late that night. She’d walked in, glossy, expensive, consciously alluring, dressed and made up for effect. He recalled that she’d made that impression on him, but strangely, he couldn’t conjure up her face. Instead he kept seeing the face of Denroy’s companion, who’d also been glossy and heavily made up. He tried hard to concentrate, but he couldn’t clear the confusion, and at last he gave up and put a cassette into the video machine.

For a moment he didn’t even recognize the woman who appeared on the screen. Surely she couldn’t be the same person as the tense, feverish invalid upstairs? The contrast shocked him. He stared at the screen, noting her defiance, almost arrogance, tinged with bafflement at finding herself in a police station under suspicion of murder.

He heard his own off-camera voice. “Let’s go back to your quarrel with Mr. Grainger, Mrs. Anderson.”

“It wasn’t a quarrel,” the woman on the screen said wearily. “I didn’t know him well enough to quarrel with. He tried to paw me about, I told him to push off.”

“That’s not what your neighbors say. According to them, the whole thing was very violent.”

“They weren’t there. I was.”

“They heard screaming and shouting.”

“I was angry. He disgusted me. He was a worm.”

“That’s how you saw him, was it? A worm?”

Such an obvious trap, he thought now, but she hadn’t seen it. “Yes, a worm,” she said with a shrug. “Or a sewer rat. Take your pick.”

Wouldn’t a woman have to be innocent to walk so blindly into danger? he wondered. He almost winced as he heard his own voice springing the trap. “In other words, vermin—to be destroyed? A worm to be trodden on. A rat to be hit on the head—like Henry Grainger?”

“I didn’t kill him. He was alive when I left the building. I walked miles away. I told you that before.”

“Yes, you told me you went to Wimbledon Common. I’ve got a team out there trying to find someone who saw you. But so far there are no witnesses to confirm that you were there.”

The words brought Daniel out in a cold sweat. There
had
been a witness. He’d been lying, unless...

He leafed frantically through the papers until he came to the photocopied statement from the man who’d seen “a woman who might have been Megan Anderson,” on Wimbledon Common at the time Grainger had been killed. There was a note scribbled on it in Daniel’s own writing, saying he’d received it on February twenty-third. He yanked the cassette from the machine to study the label, but in his haste to duplicate everything, he hadn’t made notes. But it would be on the cassette, at the very start. His heart thumping madly, he shoved the cassette in, rewound it and pressed the play button. In the few seconds it took the machine to start, he felt as if he was dying.

Then his own voice, “Mrs. Megan Anderson being questioned by Detective Inspector Keller in Interview Room 10. Interview timed at fifteen hundred hours, February twenty-first. Let’s go back to...”

The twenty-first. Two days before the statement. He hadn’t been lying to trap her. The relief was so overwhelming that he almost blacked out. When he’d steadied himself, he poured a stiff drink and wondered at the pass he’d come to. It was appalling to have to rely on outside evidence to confirm his honesty to himself, but he had no recollection of either the statement or the interview.

He ran the tape forward to where he’d left off. “...no witnesses to confirm that you were there. It’s a pity you can’t remember seeing anyone else there.”

“I wasn’t looking at other people,” Megan said. “I just walked there to be alone and brood on how much Henry Grainger disgusted me.”

Her tone struck him. She sounded bored, exasperated and edgy, but not frightened, as though she knew this was only a misunderstanding that was bound to be cleared up in the end. It was a tone he associated with innocence, and he wondered if he’d noticed it at the time.

This interview had taken place two days after Grainger’s death. She’d changed from the gorgeous evening wear of their first meeting, but she was still smartly dressed and groomed. A lot of care had been applied to her face, as though beauty was a tool of her trade.

He saw himself appear on the screen. Evidently he’d risen and walked around the table to confront her more closely: he sat on the table in front of her and leaned down. Watching himself, he made a face of distaste at what looked like an intimidatory tactic. But the woman he confronted wasn’t intimidated. She raised her head and looked up at him coolly, defiantly. He felt a flicker of admiration now for the way she wouldn’t back down in front of a bully.

A bully? Himself? Yes. The sound of his own voice grated on him. “Tell me about it from the beginning, Mrs. Anderson.”

“Oh, God, not again! I’ve told you so often.”

Suddenly his face came into view, and he was shocked. He looked like a dead man, a zombie, and it was a dead man’s voice that said, “Tell me again. Let’s see if you can remember any details you’ve forgotten.”

Daniel shivered.

A
fter three days of feeling too ill to care about anything, Megan awoke to the discovery that the fever had left her and her body no longer ached. Getting gingerly out of bed, she found that she was still weak, but after being unable to eat anything she was now ravenously hungry. She put on the thick socks Daniel always left for her feet, pulled on his robe, and left the room, holding on to things as she moved. The house was a big, rambling building that looked as if it might have been built a century ago. Although clean, it was shabby and in need of redecorating. Glancing out the window, she saw a large garden with trees and a rockery, the sort of garden that cried out for dogs and children romping together. But it was empty.

Everywhere was silence and there was no sign of Daniel. What Megan could see of the house was austere, as though its occupant lived in it only in passing.

One room was different. It was at the back of the house, and it was filled with electronic gadgets, audio-video equipment, tapes, records, magazines. How like Daniel Keller, she thought, to have a hobby that offered him the world at a distance. It fitted her picture of him as a man without human feeling.

She glanced idly through the videocassettes strewn on the floor. Their labels bore hastily scrawled notes in pencil. One of them read Interview 3. Feb. 23rd, 19—

Her heart began to beat hard. February 23rd was the day of her third interview with Keller. But surely...?

She hurried, switched on the set, and shoved the cassette into the machine. Shocked, she saw her own angry face on the screen. And from off camera came Daniel’s voice, taunting her. “You could have killed him easily. He wasn’t a big man, and I’ll bet you’re not as fragile as you look.”

Then the woman on the screen did the worst possible thing. Losing her temper, she launched herself forward at her tormentor. For a moment Daniel came into the shot, fending her off. He was right. She
was
stronger than she looked, and he had some trouble keeping her nails from his face. “Was this how you went for Henry Grainger with that heavy ashtray?” he asked, gasping slightly.

“I didn’t kill him.”

“The ashtray had your fingerprints and nobody else’s except Grainger’s own. How do you account for that?”

Megan shut off the set, shaking. She tried to calm her own thoughts. If she brooded about how much she hated Keller, it would overset her mind, and she needed her wits about her. Quickly she pulled out the cassette and began to rummage through the others, which all turned out to be copies of her interviews in the police station. The last thing she came to was a thick, buff-colored envelope, which she accidentally knocked off the sofa, sending its contents spilling over the floor. Gathering them up, she found herself looking at her own face.

Amazed, she studied the other papers. Every one of them was a piece about herself from her modeling days. Most were straightforward fashion shots, in which she was wearing a succession of glamorous clothes. One was a magazine cover, showing a close-up of her face, looking sensual and gorgeous. Megan considered the beauty in that picture as if she were a stranger, which in a sense was true. She had nothing to do with the shattered woman regarding her now.

There were some pages attached to the cover, containing a feature about her from inside the magazine. It was headlined, Tiger Lady and the writer had started by quoting Blake’s “Tyger, tyger, burning bright/In the forests of the night.” From there he’d gone wild, lavishing purple prose over “a woman with the power and sultry eroticism of a tiger, who moves with the sleek, silent grace of a jungle creature, stalking the forests of the night.”

The first time Megan had read it she’d laughed, thinking it wildly overdone. Now she wondered who that proud, confident woman had been, and how she’d ever come to this pass.

What astonished her most was finding the piece here, along with the copies of her interviews with Keller. It looked as though he’d been studying her in some depth. But why? Was he seeking the truth after all this time, or merely trying to confirm his original verdict? She decided it was probably safest to think badly of him. He was concerned with saving his own face and rebuilding his life. The rebuilding of
her
life wouldn’t concern him.

Megan rose suddenly and began to search for the telephone, which she found in an alcove in the hall. It was nearly four o’clock. Tommy would have just arrived home from school. If she called now there was a chance that he might pick up the phone. With trembling hands she dialed the number and sat, white-knuckled, listening to the ringing on the other end. So intent was she that she didn’t hear the front door open and Daniel come quietly into the house.

At last there was an answer. Megan’s heart sank as she heard the voice of Brian’s mother. “I want to speak to Tommy,” she said as firmly as she could.

“I’ve told you before, that isn’t possible,” said Mrs. Anderson in the cool, inflexible voice that Megan hated. “Please don’t call again.”

“I’ll call as often as I have to,” she raged. “He’s my son, and you can’t keep him from me.”

“Whatever his father and I do is in the child’s best interests. Kindly try to understand that, and don’t keep pestering us.” The phone went dead.

Megan had always disliked her self-righteous mother-in-law, but in the past she’d had the emotional stamina to cope with her. Now, with her nerves in shreds, she had no stamina left. She slammed down the receiver and thumped her fists helplessly against the wall again and again.

“Hey, come on.” Daniel reached out and touched her shoulder. Megan swung away, staring at him. “That doesn’t help,” he said gently.

“Nothing helps,” she said frantically. “But it relieves my feelings, until the next time.”

“Was that your husband you were talking to?”

“His mother. She won’t let me talk to Tommy.”

“Let’s have a cup of tea,” he suggested, leading the way to the kitchen. She followed him and watched while he put the kettle on. “It’s good to see you up and looking better,” he said.

“I don’t remember much about what happened. I ran away into the park...didn’t I?”

“That’s right. I followed you there and brought you here. You were soaked. I haven’t tried to get your things back from the boarding house in case the press is still sniffing around and it leads them here.”

“There was nothing I cared about,” she said with a shrug. “Just the things they give prisoners when they’re discharged.” She looked down at his robe and nightwear. “What happened to my nightgown?”

“I sent it to the laundry. It isn’t back yet.”

“There was no need to take that trouble,” she said, glancing at the washing machine. “Just throw it in.”

He was embarrassed. Having stripped the soaking nightgown off her without a second thought, he’d discovered that an unsuspected sense of propriety had made him avoid washing it himself, even in a machine. But he flinched from explaining this, anticipating her derision. “I was afraid you’d be really ill,” he said, concentrating on the kettle, “so I called in my doctor—a woman doctor. She looked after you. Here, the tea’s ready.”

She accepted the mug and sipped it. “I don’t like depending on you,” she said. “I’ll call my lawyer, and she’ll help me.”

They looked at each other warily. “I’d rather help you myself,” Daniel said.

“Look, I’m grateful to you for nursing me, but basically nothing’s changed. I just want to move out.”

“But not today. I need to talk to you first. We have...a lot to talk about.”

She regarded him ironically. “Didn’t we talk enough three years ago?”

“We talked a lot, but maybe not to any good purpose. I’ve been through those interviews, and there are things I’m uneasy about.”

“You’re...?”
She regarded him in cynical hilarity. “You’re uneasy. Now I’ve heard everything. There were one or two things I was uneasy about, too, in particular, the way you deliberately distorted the truth and wrecked my life. Don’t ever imagine that pouring a few aspirin down my throat makes up for it.”

“I wouldn’t expect it to, if I really had deliberately hidden the truth,” he said edgily. His anger was rising as he discovered how difficult it was to make any impression on her. He was used to being arrogant, dominant, as a policeman had to be. Eating humble pie came very hard to him. “But I didn’t.”

“Oh, come on,” she said wearily. “We’ve passed that point, surely?”

“Megan, I didn’t suppress that statement,” he said emphatically. “I simply didn’t remember it.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “You can do better than that.”

“No, I can’t, because it’s true. I didn’t remember anything about the witness. My mind just...blanked him out.” In despair he could hear how unconvincing it sounded, and her look of derision confirmed it. Perhaps if he told her everything about his mental and emotional agony at that time, and what had caused it, she might understand. But something deep within him shied away from exposing his wounds. He’d never begged for mercy. It wasn’t his way. “I had...a lot of cases on my plate” was the best he could manage.

“Funny, that. You always seemed to have time to interrogate me,” she observed. “I’ve never heard such a feeble excuse. What are you? Some kind of incompetent who needs your hand held? At least suppressing evidence is decisive. Losing it because you’re muddled is the action of a wimp.”

His temper rose. “You make very glib judgments,” he snapped.

“So did you.”

“The evidence against you was very strong. Without that witness it was a rock-solid case.”

“And of course you made absolutely sure it was ‘without that witness.’”

“Will you listen to me?” he demanded hoarsely.

“Will listening to you make any difference?” she flung back at him. “Will it give me back my reputation, three years of my life—
my son?
How would you know what it’s like to lose your child and think about him every moment of every day, becoming obsessed with him because they had no right to take him but he’s gone anyway?” She took a deep, shuddering breath and forced herself to calm down. “There’s no point in going through it again. You know what you did, even if you won’t admit it. There must be a way to undo the damage you did. I just...just don’t know what it is.”

He could have given her the answer. There was only one way to clear her completely, and that was to find the real murderer. But he didn’t say so because he still wasn’t totally convinced. After the days spent studying the interviews, he had serious doubts, but that wasn’t enough. He caught her looking at him, and had an uncomfortable feeling that she’d read his thoughts.

“I’m going to call my lawyer,” she said. “The sooner I’m away from here, the better.” She went back to the alcove and dialed.

“Newton and Baines,” the receptionist at the other end said.

“I’d like to speak to Janice,” Megan said urgently.

“I’m afraid Mrs. Baines isn’t here. Her son has measles and she’s quarantined at home with him.”

Megan ground her nails into her palm. “Mr. Newton, then.”

“One moment.”

She was reluctant to talk to Newton, a curt man who seemed devoid of all human sympathy, but she was desperate. When he came on the line a moment later her worst fears were realized. He listened in frozen silence as she described her predicament, then said, “I must say I think you were extremely unwise to leave your lodging.”

“I was driven out. I can’t go back there.”

“But you appear to have found somewhere else, so I don’t see the problem.”

Megan tried to keep her temper. “I am
temporarily
in the home of Detective Inspector Keller, the man who put me away, and
that
is the problem.”

“I don’t understand. What are you doing there?”

“He rescued me from the press and brought me here. But I’ve been here nearly a week, and I don’t want to stay.”

“Hmm.” Newton sounded bored. “Well, frankly, Mrs. Anderson, I find your point of view hard to comprehend. Having managed to get this man on your side, your sensible course would surely be to make use of him. He has, er, resources denied the rest of us. Give me the address and I’ll arrange for some money to be sent to you, but I’m afraid it won’t be much.”

As she hung up, Daniel came out into the hall and looked at her inquiringly. “She’s away,” Megan said. “Her partner is going to send me some money.”

“If you need money, why did you run away from the press?” he asked wryly. “They were offering to buy your story. You could have told the world just what you thought of me. I can’t think why you passed up the chance.”

“Because my son might have seen it. I don’t want him picking up a newspaper and seeing Megan Anderson Tells All. Brian would claim it made me an unfit mother, and I have enough of a fight on my hands without giving him ammunition.”

“Won’t he give you some financial help?”

“Him?”
Megan asked with withering scorn. “All he wants is for me to vanish from sight. It suited him to have me in prison where I couldn’t challenge him for Tommy. Now that I’m out, he’d like to pretend it hasn’t happened.”

She sipped her tea in brooding silence, not noticing what he was doing until he placed a plate of bacon and eggs in front of her. “Eat up,” he said. “You haven’t had a proper meal for days, and it takes strength to hate someone as much as you hate me.”

She thought she couldn’t touch anything he’d cooked, but after the first mouthful she couldn’t stop herself. It was delicious. When she could spare the time to speak, she said, “I’ve lived on hate. I’d almost forgotten what anything else tastes like. You’re a good cook. I’ll admit that. I suppose I really should thank you for taking care of me.”

Daniel managed a faint grin that briefly lightened the habitual sternness of his face. “Don’t force yourself if it’s hard. Having led the press to you, I had to rescue you.”

“I suppose your appearance on the scene gave them an even better story.”

He shook his head. “I’ve been watching the papers. One or two of them said you’d been found and escaped. One of them mentioned a ‘mystery man,’ but nobody realized it was me. We were lucky. The light was poor, and they didn’t recognize me.”