disappeared. But as he got out of his car, a man, who seemed to be mending the road, suddenly straightened and blocked his path. “Have you got any statement to make, Inspector?”
Daniel took hold of the reporter’s ear. “Yes, I have a statement,” he said with deceptive mildness. “It’s this. You have one second to get out before you feel my foot in your rear.” He let go, and the man scuttled away.
* * *
When Janice had asked where she’d wanted to go, Megan’s answer had been simple. “Somewhere I can hide.”
The result was an obscure boarding house in a shabby part of London. She had one room that doubled as a bedroom and living room, a tiny kitchen, and a bathroom the size of a postage stamp. The apartment wasn’t much bigger than her prison cell, which accorded with Megan’s mood. She was free only in the most limited sense. Everything that had once formed her life had been stripped from her, including her good name, but most of all, her son. For the moment she could see no way of getting them back.
She called her ex-husband repeatedly that afternoon, but he wouldn’t speak to her. His mother answered the phone at home, and at work his secretary had orders not to put her through. Between calls she sat and brooded in terrible bitterness.
Her thoughts were chaotic, but one thing stayed constant. The face of Daniel Keller was there all the time—hard, unyielding, judging her—so convinced that he was right that he’d twisted the case and destroyed her. His face was burned into her consciousness by her hatred of him. She watched the television news reports and caught the moment when the reporter asked how he felt about her release, and his reply. “I have no feelings about it one way or another.”
“Of course you haven’t,” she flung at his face on-screen. “What’s it to you?”
It was some slight comfort to learn that he’d been suspended, although she felt, cynically, that he would be allowed back when the dust had settled. It was her own future that had been blasted.
Her first night alone was tormented by nightmares and she awoke crying out. One of the other residents knocked on her door to ask if she was all right. After that she tried to catnap for short periods, fearful of rousing the house. So far no one seemed to have recognized her, and this was her only hope of peace.
It was early spring, not a green, enchanted spring promising hope and rebirth, but a sodden fag end of winter, where it rained and rained and rained. The endless cascades of water beat against her ill-fitting windows and seeped in through the cracks, making the room damp. And the noise sometimes made it hard to hear anything else.
On the evening of her fourth day, just as she’d finished dressing for bed, she thought she heard a knock outside. Yawning she made her way to the door, then hesitated. A sudden letup in the rain gave her the chance to hear the knock again. “Who is it?” she called cautiously.
“Mrs. Anderson?” A man’s voice reached her from the other side of the door.
“If you’re a journalist, go away.”
“I’m not a journalist....” The man hesitated. “I’m Daniel Keller.”
Sheer outrage made her pull open the door to confront him. “Get out of here!” she said fiercely. “How dare you come pestering me?” Her voice rose to a cry. “Haven’t you done enough?”
He was already halfway in. “I have to talk to you,” he said urgently.
“And I don’t have to talk to you,” she said bitterly. “This isn’t like those times you had me in the police station and I had to talk to you whether I wanted to or not. I’m free now, free of that damned prison where you put me with your lies and your frame-up, and free of you. I can tell you to get out, and that’s what I’m doing.”
He hesitated, driven by desperation but unwilling to use force. Megan’s sharp voice had attracted attention in the shabby little boarding house. Doors were opening, curious heads appearing. “Please let me in,” he said urgently.
“I told you to get out of here.” She tried pushing against the door but he pushed harder and managed to get right into the room. Megan backed away swiftly, as though afraid he might touch her. “What’s the matter with you?” she snapped. “Don’t you understand the word no? Oh, but of course you don’t. How often did I say ‘no’ to you three years ago? No, I didn’t murder Henry Grainger. No, I don’t know who did. No, I’m not lying. No, no, no. And how much notice did you ever take? Not a bit because you were so sure you were right and it was just a question of wearing me down until I confessed. And when I refused to oblige, you framed me.”
“I didn’t—”
“Don’t lie to me,” she cried. “You lied before and your lies cost me three years of my life. They cost me my son.”
Without warning, her fury drained away. She seemed to have little physical strength left, only what her taut nerves could give her. She’d lived on nervous energy through the agonizing days of her appeal; now that she was free, the energy came and went, so that she roller-coasted between being high on adrenaline and being too weak to stand. Only a moment ago she’d been possessed by the strength of anger. Now she felt like a rag doll. “Why on earth did you come here?” she asked, sitting down tiredly.
Daniel hesitated. If she’d looked up at his face she would have seen that it was as tortured as her own. He’d been little more than thirty when they’d first clashed, but the years since then had scored themselves twice over on his features. He’d been to hell, just as she had. But she saw none of this.
“I came because I had to,” he said. “I can’t just leave things like this.”
“Why? Because you’ve been suspended? I’d say that you’d come by your just deserts and things should be left exactly like that.”
With her brown eyes blazing at him, he remembered that as a model she’d been called Tiger Lady. She was rumored to have a short fuse and an explosive temperament, which had counted against her at the trial.
He remembered his first sight of her, three years ago, glamorous in a silk evening dress and velvet cape, her face skillfully made up. She’d been working for an escort agency and had just returned from a date when he’d called to “ask a few questions” about the violent death of her landlord, Henry Grainger. He’d made a professional note of her extravagant beauty, but it hadn’t moved him. His heart had died exactly two months, three weeks and two days earlier—the day his wife had been killed by a drunken driver.
If he’d felt anything about Megan’s looks it was antagonism at the expensive trappings that showed them off. The trappings were gone now. She wore no makeup, and her face was pale. The glamorous clothes were gone, too. Her plain cotton nightgown was mended in a couple of places, and her feet were bare. Yet an irreducible beauty remained. It was there in the high cheekbones and curved mouth, in the large, haunted eyes.
“Mrs. Anderson,” he said at last, “I know you find this hard to believe, but I swear I wasn’t corrupt. I didn’t suppress evidence.”
“Don’t take me for a fool. You had a witness who’d seen me ten miles away at the time Grainger was killed, and you buried his statement because it would have ruined your case. How lucky for you that the constable who took that statement left the force and went to Australia. You must have thought everything was working out wonderfully. Only he came back and started asking
