Uncaged. Lucy Gordon
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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. 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