Shadow Play Read Online Free

was normal in every way except she could turn into a cat. That, and the fact that she too once committed a murder. It was out of love for me, and there was no other way she could have done it. Her cat identity I had been aware of – it was always ginger with a bushy tail and bigger than you’d have imagined, because she had black hair and was tiny. She waited a whole year before confiding in me, to be certain we were absolutely in love first. But during that year she couldn’t resist playing a few tricks on me. I’d leave the room and when I returned she would be nowhere. I would search every corner of the flat, call out her name, even look out of the sixth-floor window at the ledges below, and she had me sitting down in worry and bafflement before she rang the bell and entered. Of course she’d slipped out as a cat, changed back in an alley and calmly taken the lift up. The night she finally told me, she changed in front of my eyes. The first few weeks after that I kept requesting her to transform, but then it just became one of those things and almost never came up again between us.
    Until the day of the murder. It was her uncle she disposed of, her father’s only brother. For some years now he had been an irritant. He disappeared in his twenties after quarrelling with everyone, and nothing was heard from him for four decades. It was her father who went and sought him out – one of the many ill-planned actions he undertook during the excess of sentimentality that overcame him after his first heart attack, in the six months that he lived until the second. Now her uncle was claiming that one of the last things his brother had promised him was his rightful share of the family fortune, andhe produced a written agreement to prove it. We were certain it was a forgery, but he brought out numerous witnesses who swore their presence on the emotion-soaked evening that the document was drawn up. His position was that his contrite brother had contacted him for no other purpose and would surely have redrafted his will as his very next action. He hired some lawyers of average skill, which was enough to keep the case simmering for two years, two years during which no one else, not even the dead man’s only daughter, could touch any of his assets.
    So she grew impatient. She stole up to his room one night and fixed his nightly medication. She told me how she’d watched his habits for two weeks, and practised entering and leaving his room and garden. She had pinched samples of his medicines to find out what combinations would prove lethal. That night, she slipped into his garden as a cat, climbed up to his room, changed in the dark once she was certain of being alone, placed the altered tablets at his bedside, then changed back and retreated into the veranda until she was sure he’d swallowed them. She watched him convulse and collapse. She knew from her ‘research’ that his heart would stop in another half-hour. All this she told me she’d accomplished just forty-five minutes ago: she was still breathless with excitement and tension.
    â€˜Of course they will have an enquiry, and even a post-mortem, but they’ll be bound to conclude it was an accident. What else can they say even if one of them suspects how convenient it’s proved for me? There’s no poison to be found, no signs of any struggle or weapons. There are no prints of any kind. No one saw anybody enter or leave the compound; no one could even claim to have noticed anyone familiar in the entireneighbourhood. Anyhow, he had made enough enemies during his long and charming life to send them off on numerous false trails. And finally we can be married. We’ll have our home back, and we can flee on the longest of honeymoons.’
    What looms large of her from those moments and keeps returning in my memory are her eyes: at first wild while telling her story, then brimming over with tears, of relief as much as