Uncaged. Lucy Gordon

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Uncaged - Lucy  Gordon

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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

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