Uncaged Read Online Free PDF

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