Uncaged

by Lucy Gordon

  Then the door opened, and her enemy came in. She stared, aghast, and tried to pull herself upright in the bed, but lead weights pulled her back. “What are you doing here?” she demanded in a hoarse whisper.

  “This is my home,” Daniel told her. “I brought you here after I found you in the park.”

  “How dare you!” It was hard to sound angry when she could hardly speak.

  “I had no choice, Megan. I couldn’t take you back to that apartment. The press had it staked out.”

  “Not here. Anywhere but here,” she croaked.

  “If you think about it, you’ll see that this is the best place. Who would ever think of looking for you with me?”

  She started to cough and could do nothing until the fit had subsided. When it was over, she lay back, drained, and looked at him helplessly.

  Daniel laid a gentle hand on her forehead. “You’ve got a feverish cold,” he said. “You stay here until you’re well.”

  “You’ve taken a lot for granted,” she said hoarsely.

  “What would you prefer, the hospital, where you’ll be stared at?” She shook her head weakly, beyond speech. “Don’t waste what little voice you’ve got left in abusing me,” he advised. “The doctor left you something to take. I’ll get breakfast and make you comfortable, then you must get some more sleep. The bathroom’s next door. Put this on.” He indicated a thick terry-cloth robe lying across a chair, and left the room.

  As soon as she got out of bed, her head swam. It took ten minutes to get into the robe and out of the room. The bathroom mirror showed her looking haggard, with large, feverish eyes, but it had been a long time since she’d cared what she looked like. Almost subliminally she noticed that the room was exclusively male. There was shaving tackle and toothpaste, but no talcum powder, or anything else to suggest a woman.

  She slowly made her way back to the bedroom, holding on to the wall, and was leaning against it to regain her breath when Daniel appeared with breakfast. “Let me help you,” he said, setting down the tray and reaching for her.

  Her eyes glittered at him. “Don’t...touch...me....” she said in an emphatic whisper.

  Reluctantly he let his hands fall to his sides and watched edgily as she tottered back to bed. After that, she seemed to have no more fight in her, accepting the tablets he offered without protest, eating some of the breakfast, falling asleep and staying that way for the rest of the day.

  That afternoon Daniel called Canvey. His old colleague greeted him with cautious warmth, until he heard what Daniel wanted. Then he exploded with outrage and apprehension. “Are you out of your mind, man? Do you want me to be thrown off the force, as well?”

  “I know it’s a lot to ask,” Daniel said urgently, “but nobody need suspect. Just for one night, and you can have them back in the morning.”

  “Masters will have my head on a plate if he finds out.”

  “He won’t find out. Please, Canvey, I’m desperate.”

  In the end, Canvey gave in as he was bound to do, since he owed his life to Daniel. He arrived after work that evening with a parcel that he thrust into Daniel’s hands with the words, “Have these ready when I call tomorrow morning, or we’re both in big trouble.”

  Daniel went into the back room where he kept his audio-video equipment, the one luxury he allowed himself. He opened the parcel and found that Canvey hadn’t let him down. Inside were cassettes, both audio and video, of his interviews with Megan, three years ago, plus all his own notebooks.

  He spent the night duplicating everything, and had just managed to get the parcel packed up by the time Canvey called on his way to work the next day. After thanking Canvey, he made his way upstairs with Megan’s breakfast. He found her coughing and sneezing, and unable to do much more than nibble on some toast. He put fresh sheets on the bed and helped her back in. She made no protest. In fact, she hardly seemed aware of him, falling asleep almost at once.

  Then Daniel was free to settle down with the videocassettes and papers. He wished he could remember more about what had happened. It wasn’t uncommon for policemen to forget details in time, as other cases took over, but he’d always been known in the force for his phenomenal memory. Not with this case, though. His mind seemed to have wiped it out.

  He tried an old trick. Stop worrying about the thing you needed to remember. Go back to something that had happened earlier and work forward. But that meant reviving a memory he flinched from; of how a gentle, loving woman and a bright-faced little boy had been mowed down in a car driven by Carter Denroy, a lout with booze running in his veins, a man so drunk that he couldn’t afterward remember what had happened. And that led to another terrible memory—Denroy walking from court, a free man, smirking because his only punishment had been a fine. That smirk had burned itself into Daniel’s consciousness so deeply that it still tortured his dreams.

  He wanted to shy away now, but he forced himself to relive the scene, and gradually another detail emerged. There had been a woman there, too. A glossy, expensive woman who’d looked bored and impatient with the whole business of coming to court, as though it was simply too ridiculous to make a man pay for the lives he destroyed. As Denroy and the woman had walked out together, Daniel had heard her say, “You see, I told you it would be all right.”

  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 lat
e 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.

  Three

  After 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. Mega
n 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.”