Uncaged

by Lucy Gordon

“Then you’ll stay?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “I may as well. I’ll need some clothes. Can you cash this check for me?”

  “No problem.”

  As she had nothing to wear to go shopping, Daniel went upstairs and returned with a few basic things, including a dress and a coat. “These used to belong to my wife,” he said briefly. “They’re all I have of hers. You’ll find them a little out of fashion, but serviceable.”

  “Don’t worry,” she told him, “I haven’t been keeping up with fashion.”

  Half of her mind noted that they were in the style that had been popular when she’d gone to prison, but she was too preoccupied to read any significance into this. Daniel’s wife had been sturdier in build than herself, and not as tall, but with the help of a needle and thread she managed to produce a passable result.

  Daniel drove her into town, well away from the area where he was known.

  Despite everything, Megan’s spirits rose at being out and about after three years of gray walls. She received a nasty shock when she saw the prices, and realized that two hundred pounds would stretch even less than she’d thought. She resolved the problem by diving into a shop that Daniel would have overlooked. “It’s only secondhand stuff in here,” he objected.

  “There can be treasures in secondhand shops if you know how to look,” she told him.

  She chose slacks and sweaters and a couple of dresses that could easily be altered. The only things she bought new were underwear and shoes. When she’d finished, she had thirty pounds left. “Enough for another pair of shoes,” Daniel suggested.

  “No, I have something else in mind. Will you wait for me here?”

  She slipped away and found a shop selling makeup and perfume. She didn’t want Daniel to know the details of what she bought there, but she was providing herself with vital weapons in her campaign to turn him into her instrument.

  At home she offered him his wife’s dress and coat back, but he refused with a brief shake of the head and a curt gesture that told her the subject was closed.

  Gathering her purchases, Megan went up to her own room to work at altering the secondhand clothes. She was a skilled needlewoman, having picked up the hobby in prison, and when she’d finished, she had a reasonable wardrobe, one in which she looked good.

  When she was ready, she dressed and applied makeup, but only very discreetly. Daniel was no fool and would be instantly suspicious of an obvious come-on. So when she went downstairs in the late afternoon she was conservatively dressed in a plain skirt and simple, unrevealing top, with makeup so subtly laid on that it might almost have been natural.

  The door to the video room was closed, but she could hear sounds coming from behind it. The words were muffled, but it was her own voice, followed by Daniel’s, then clicks, as if someone had stopped the tape to wind it back. He played the same section three times over before he was satisfied. Megan went quietly away into the kitchen.

  Half an hour later she knocked on the door and called, “I’ve made something to eat.”

  He grunted his thanks for the food she set in front of him, and ate in abstracted silence. Megan left him to his thoughts until the meal was over, then said, “Did you find those tapes illuminating?”

  “Not very. I’ve been over them so often now they’re not making any impact anymore.” He looked at her abruptly, as if he’d made a sudden resolution. “Megan, listen to me. There may be a way I can help you, but only if we go about it properly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I want you to let me interview you again...like I did before.”

  “Oh, no,” she said at once. “You’ve got all you want on those tapes.”

  “That’s just what I haven’t got. The interviews I did then are bad, clumsy. I missed so much. I want to do it differently...the way I should have done then.” When he saw her torn by indecision, he demanded urgently, “What have you got to lose?”

  She shrugged. “You’re right. What do you want me to do?”

  “Come with me.” He led her into the living room and pointed to the sofa, while he took an armchair. “Sit and face me. Imagine it’s three years ago. We’re talking for the first time. Do you remember that?”

  “Yes. I’d been out on a date for an escort agency. I came home to the apartment block and found the police there. Henry Grainger, the landlord, had been found dead that evening. He’d been killed the night before, but it was some hours before he was discovered. I went up to my apartment, and after a while there was a knock on the door. When I opened it, you were outside.”

  In his mind he saw the door being opened by the supremely beautiful, confident woman. She’d been wearing a red figure-hugging dress, and her glorious brown hair had spilled over her bare shoulders. In his mind he reproduced the face, its smoky sensuality skillfully accentuated by the careful makeup, and he recalled how the mere sight of that casually flaunted beauty had made his hackles rise. But why?

  He took up the thread. “I told you Grainger had been found dead, and asked you about a quarrel you’d had with him the night before. Tell me about that quarrel now...as if it were then.”

  “He came to see me to remind me that I was behind with the rent. I told him I’d be able to pay in a couple of days, and he said, why didn’t I pay him ‘in kind.’ That was how he put it.”

  “Did you ask him exactly what he meant by that?”

  “There was no need. He’d made the suggestion before. He was always smarming around me, trying to touch me, making suggestive remarks. He was a horrid little man. He disgusted me, but I couldn’t get rid of him.”

  “Why didn’t you move to another address?”

  “I wanted to, but I couldn’t find a decent place at a rent I could afford. I found out that he was charging me a lower rent than the others in the block, to induce me to stay. I had no choice. He kept hinting that I ought to be ‘nice’ to him to make up the extra. I didn’t do it, but I felt trapped.”

  “What about your husband—alimony—that sort of thing?”

  “My husband was furious with me for taking our son. He was trying to starve me back to him.”

  “Where was your son that evening?”

  “He was spending the night with the family of one of his school friends. He stayed the next night, too, because I was going to be out.”

  “Doing ‘escort’ work?”

  “Yes, and let me make it plain that my escort work was just that—escort, and nothing else. I didn’t do ‘private’ work on the side.”

  “Was there nothing else you could do?”

  “Like what? I left school as soon as I could. I was a model at sixteen. Jobs are hard to come by even for people with qualifications. I did a little modeling—”

  “Do,” he interrupted.

  “What was that?”

  “You do a little modeling. This is three years ago. We’ve been allowing ourselves to forget that, and we shouldn’t. It’s important.”

  “You can’t turn the clock back like that,” she protested.

  “It’s the only way we can make this work. You and I have just met for the first time. We never saw each other before. There are no...ghosts...between us.”

  “No ghosts, or no guilt?” she challenged him. “Can you wipe your guilt out by pretending it doesn’t exist?”

  He gritted his teeth. “We have to pretend that everything doesn’t exist.”

  She sat regarding him for a moment. “All right,” she said at last. “In that case, I have some changes to make.” She hurried from the room and went upstairs. She was gone half an hour. It was longer than she’d intended, but she wanted to get everything just right. What would have been wrong earlier in the evening was right now. When she was satisfied, she smiled at herself in the mirror. She’d made her decision. Now it was time to carry it through.

  She had her reward when she returned to him and saw the shock in his eyes as he took in the change in her. Gone were the demure skirt and top, replaced by a pair of figure-
hugging slacks. The knitted top buttoned down the front and had a low neck that just revealed the swelling of her breasts. The glamour had been laid onto her face like a mask. “That wasn’t necessary,” he said roughly.

  “Oh, but it was. You’re trying to reproduce that first interview as closely as possible, but it wasn’t pale, dreary Megan Anderson you interviewed. It was Tiger Lady, and you hated her. Come on, Daniel, admit it. You hated everything about her, hated her so much that—”

  “That’s enough,” he broke in harshly.

  “No, it isn’t. You’re the one who wanted to relive the past, so let’s relive that bit—the bit where you hated me at first sight.”

  He hated her now for the wounds she was reopening and the turmoil she was creating inside him. He couldn’t tell her that reliving the past had become suddenly difficult. Back in those days he’d looked on her exotic beauty with indifference, his heart buried, his senses dead. Now his senses had flamed back to life. She was forbidden fruit: forbidden by every law of common sense and sheer self-preservation. But last night the desire to touch her had come blazing out of nowhere to inflame and engulf him. And the more he fought it, the more it possessed him.

  “All right,” he said at last, with an effortful assumption of indifference. “Let’s do it this way. You were saying that you do a little modeling.”

  She moved languidly across the room and dropped into the sofa opposite him, leaning back and looking at him. Everything about her was graceful. “I don’t earn much by modeling,” she said. “I’m over twenty-five, way past my best.”

  He studied his notes, refusing to look at her. “Tell me about what happened between you and Grainger that evening.”

  “Nothing happened. That was the point. Nothing was ever going to happen, but he couldn’t get that into his head. I said no in a dozen different ways, but he wouldn’t accept it. Then he started trying to paw me.”

  “And you reacted violently, according to your neighbors.”

  “I yelled at him, yes. I called him all the names I could think of. Why not?”

  “You did a bit more than call him names, didn’t you?”

  “I told you, he tried to paw me. There was a struggle. I threw him out.”

  “And called something after him as he went downstairs?”

  “I told him he wasn’t fit to live. I should think the whole building must have heard me. But I didn’t kill him.”

  “What did you do when he’d gone?”

  “I dashed out. I wanted to get as far away from the building as possible. I walked and walked for hours. I couldn’t—can’t—afford a car. I ended up on Wimbledon Common, where someone saw me.”

  “Where someone saw a woman who answered your general description,” Daniel reminded her.

  “At exactly the time I said I was there.”

  “It helps, but it’s not conclusive.”

  “I was there. Your forensic experts said Grainger died at three o’clock in the morning. I left the building at midnight and I didn’t get back until seven.”

  “Unless you’d taken a taxi.”

  “So now you’ve got a taxi driver who dropped me at the block in time for me to kill Grainger?”

  “No, but I’ve only your word for it that you ever left the building.”

  “Plus the witness on Wimbledon Common,” she insisted.

  “All right. Plus the witness on Wimbledon Common. What happened when you got back?”

  “The room was still a mess from our struggle. I tidied it up and wiped the corner of the mantelpiece. He’d fallen against it when we struggled, and it split his lip.”

  “You didn’t tell me that the first time,” Daniel said, stopping her quickly.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Not at the first meeting. You didn’t mention it until two days later, after I’d had forensic tests done on the clothes you were wearing that night, and found Grainger’s blood.”

  “Thus proving that I invented the story of the struggle to account for his blood?”

  “Proving nothing. I just wished you’d mentioned it earlier.”

  “I was confused and upset. Haven’t you ever been in such a state that you couldn’t think straight? No, of course not. You wouldn’t begin to know what it’s like.”

  “I might,” he said after a moment.

  “Not you.”

  “You criticized me for making glib judgments, Megan. Be careful you don’t make them yourself.”

  “I’ve had a lot of time to make my judgments about you. Three years.”

  “But you didn’t know all the facts,” he said quickly.

  “So tell me the facts. Let’s talk about you, Daniel.”

  There it was again, the chance to make her understand how ill and distraught he’d been three years ago, and perhaps remove that cold, judgmental look from her eyes, perhaps even soften her so that she would let him reach out and—

  “This isn’t doing any good,” he said harshly. “We should try to keep to the point. Grainger’s blood was found in your apartment.”

  “But his body was found downstairs,” she reminded him. When he hesitated, she gave a little smile and said, “Then you have to say, ‘You could have killed him easily. He wasn’t a big man, and I’ll bet you’re not as fragile as you look.’”

  “Did I say that?” Daniel asked awkwardly.

  “Oh, come on, we’re being honest. I’ve looked at those tapes, which means you certainly have. How come they let you remove them from the station?”

  “They didn’t. I got copies.”

  “Why?” she asked quickly.

  Realizing what he’d given away, he shrugged and prevaricated. “Does it matter?”

  She shook her head, smiling, and he knew he’d revealed too much about the inner turmoil she was causing him. Although they were reenacting the interrogation, he had the uneasy feeling that she’d somehow taken command. “Let’s get back to the point,” he said uneasily.

  “All right. You said I wasn’t as fragile as I looked, and I did the stupidest thing, didn’t I? I proved you right by losing my temper and flying at you like this—”

  She launched herself at him suddenly. He rose and put up his arms, trying to fend her off without actually taking hold of her, but she renewed the attack until in the end he was forced to seize her. For a few moments they struggled until he managed to imprison her in his arms, holding her tightly. She looked up at him, her face flushed from the struggle, her eyes alight with an emotion he didn’t understand, but which was actually triumph. She’d drawn him further into her spell. She knew it from the thunder of his heart that she could feel against her own, from the rasping sound of his breathing, and from the look on his face as he stared down at her: part unease, part desire, part alarm.

  The pounding of his heart had communicated itself to her own, so that it, too, was beating madly. A hot sweetness streamed through her body, and she knew it was the sweetness of revenge. To turn the tables on the man whose prey she’d been and make him her prey, to know that he was becoming as helpless in her clutches as she had been in his—that was pleasure. “I forget how the next bit went,” she breathed. “What did we do?”

  He loosened his grip on her and placed his hands on either side of her head, twining his fingers in her hair. His chest was rising and falling rapidly, and she could feel the force of his struggle in her own flesh. “We—”

  “Yes...tell me—”

  A shudder convulsed him. With an effort he freed himself from her. “I pushed you away from me,” he said hoarsely.

  She was disappointed, but only a little. She’d always known she was contending with a strong man, a hard man, who wouldn’t fall easily. It would make his eventual subjugation doubly satisfying. “And you asked me if this was how I’d gone for Henry Grainger,” she reminded him.

  Daniel took a deep breath and forcibly pulled himself together. He felt buffeted by a whirlwind. “Ashtray,” he said. “He was killed with an ashtray. It had your fingerprints on it
, and nobody else’s.”

  “It was mine. I’ve never denied it. But I didn’t take it down to his flat, he did. That was one of his charming little habits. He’d call on me on some feeble pretext or other, and when he left he’d steal something of mine so that I had to go to his place to get it back. When I got there he’d apologize, pretend to have lost it, offer me a drink, anything to drag it out. It was that kind of sneaky behavior that made me loathe him. Are you seriously suggesting that I took my own ashtray down to kill him, and then forgot to take it away?”

  “That was always the weakest part of the case against you,” he conceded. “But it was the murder weapon, and it had your prints on it.”

  “Since it belonged to me, that’s hardly surprising.”

  “There was no doubt that it was used to kill him.”

  “But not by me. Look, I know you don’t have to prove motive—you told me that often enough—but did it never worry you that I didn’t have a motive?”

  “You loathed him. You’ve admitted it.”

  “That’s a motive for kicking his shins, not for killing him. Good grief, if I killed every man who’s tried to paw me in my life I’d be knee-deep in corpses by now.”

  He wished she hadn’t put on the glamorous mask. It took him back in time in a way he didn’t want. He tried to fight down his antagonism, but he couldn’t prevent it infusing his voice. “I believe you. There must have been quite a few men who wanted you.”

  She shook her head so that her glorious hair swirled about her shoulders, and stood with her arms folded, regarding him satirically. “Yes, there have. After all, look at my career—first modeling, then escort work. That practically makes me a scarlet woman, doesn’t it?”

  “No, but it makes you Tiger Lady.”

  “Don’t tell me you were blinded by that stuff, too?” she demanded with an ironic humor that mocked his naiveté. “It was all a load of publicists’ nonsense. Inside I’m just like any other woman.”

  He looked down at her flushed face and glowing brown eyes. “No,” he said slowly, “you’re not just like any other woman. You never could be.”

  “That’s it, isn’t it? Tiger Lady was different—guilty from the start.”