Falling Off Air (27 page)

He raised his hand, pushed a strand of hair behind my ear, and my skin burned at his touch. His eyes were guarded.

“I have people to answer to,” he said quietly.

I turned away from him in disgust.

“Won't anyone stand up for what they believe?” I muttered angrily. “You have a heart, you have a brain, do you need permission
to use them?”

He sighed, took his head in his hands. I stayed kneeling there in front of him, not because I was begging, but because I knew
if I moved away I would break the line of communication. Put me back on a chair and we'd be back at square one with weary
sarcasm dripping out of his mouth and me yelling. At last he raised his head to look at me again.

“The station got a call the night Wills was killed. There's a recording. The voice was distorted. It gave your car plate number,
it told us where to look. We've checked your landline and your mobile. You didn't make that call from either.”

“That's not conclusive.”

“Whoever drove your car wiped it clean of prints. I mean the whole thing's been polished. There's no reason for you to do
that. It's your car.”

“If there had only been my fingerprints, it would have proved that no one else had been in the car.”

“True.” He lowered his head. “Someone also dropped a tissue down on a seat.”

“It could be mine.”

“It's not yours. It has a few spots of blood on it, as though someone used it to blot up a shaving wound or a nosebleed or
a small cut. We have all the DNA we need, we just don't have a match. Can you think of anyone who's been in the car?”

I thought back.

“No one. And the children haven't bled in the car. I mean they're always vomiting, but …”

“Our scientists can tell the difference between blood and vomit.”

I thought again and then there was a bolt of lightning. “I know how he did it,” I said, excitement speeding my voice. “There's
a piece of metal that's come loose by the door frame on the driver's side, low down by the floor. I haven't caught myself
on it for ages because you only do it if you shift the seat setting, you know, if you push it back or forward.”

“It would have had to cut through gloves.” Finney sounded doubtful.

“Thin gloves? You've got the car, check it out,” I instructed. “You have to sit in it like you're about to drive, then reach
down and shift the seat.”

Finney was sitting back in his chair now, looking more at ease. I realized I was clutching his knee. I removed my hand. I
still didn't dare move in case I broke the spell. Because that was what it seemed like. As though I'd unlocked some magic
and with it Finney's mouth.

“This stalker …” I said. “There is a stalker, isn't there?”

“In the two weeks before his death, Adam reported nuisance phone calls and then, just days before he died, he reported an
anonymous letter.”

“What did you do about it?”

Finney looked sheepish.

“We advised him to use an answering machine to screen his calls, and save the letters to show us if he got any more. Frankly,
we wouldn't have done much about it. Every celebrity has their share of cranks. Most of them don't have guns.”

“And some of them don't have cars,” I said grimly.

We sat for a minute.

“Am I the only one with anything approaching a motive?”

Finney scrunched his face up. “There were people he'd pissed off professionally. He was an ambitious man. I don't have to
tell you that.”

“Richard Carmichael thought he was losing his wife, and he thought he was losing her to Adam,” I said. “How about that for
motive?”

“Except for the fact that by the time Wills was killed, Paula was already dead. Motive gone.”

“He blamed Adam for her death?” It was all I could come up with, but Finney shook his head. I stood up and paced around to
get my circulation going again. I could tell from the expression on Finney's face that he would say no more. He too had got
to his feet, and he was looking uncomfortable, annoyed with himself, as though he knew he'd said too much. He wandered over
to the mantelpiece and glanced at the photographs, just as Richard Carmichael had on the morning after his wife's death. Finney
picked up a framed print of myself, Jane, and Suzette. Redhead, black, and blonde, arms around each other's shoulders, strappy
dresses, raising glasses of champagne. We looked like an ad for shampoo.

“Good times,” he said, with that dry tone back in his voice.

“Good friends,” I corrected him. “It was taken at Suzette's wedding, three years ago.”

“I don't see a groom,” Finney said.

“He was there somewhere. They've split up. I think he's in Australia now.”

Finney replaced the photograph.

“I have to be going,” he said. “I've been here too long.”

T
HE rain is falling like shards of iron, hard and fast and vicious. Above me the sky is dark. It is only ten in the morning
but it might as well be dusk. My rented car is parked outside a crumbling mansion on Hill Rise, squeezed in between a minicab
and a van with painted-over windows. I have grappled the double stroller out of the trunk and set it where the pavement should
be but isn't. My bare head is soaked, my hair dripping onto my sodden shoulders, but the stroller has a raincover. I remove
the children one by one from the shelter of the car, trying in vain to shield them from the downpour, and I strap them into
the stroller with slippery fingers. By the time they are in, both they and the stroller are damp. Hannah and William are cheerful,
nonetheless. I have not taken them on many outings recently, and they are prepared to be doused in water if I think it's a
good idea. We maneuver our way between the cars and down the hill, then turn right and up Wood Vale, a steep incline. I am
bent double, and I can see Hannah through the window in the back of the stroller, her face lifted toward the plastic of the
raincover, her finger pointing, mouth burbling pleasure as raindrops splat against it. We are on our way to see David, Adam's
brother. We used to be friends and I want him to help me.

For twenty-four hours I have been all but incapacitated. With Hannah and William clambering all over me, vying for my attention,
I sat at home and watched the television coverage of the funeral of their father. No channel carried it live, but because
of the nature of Adams death, it had become a huge story and there were extended clips on news bulletins and lengthy reports
on the state of the investigation into his death. I sat flicking from channel to channel, horribly fascinated. I was not going
to make a fortune from libel suits. The lawyers must have pored over proposed scripts, cold-blooded and calculating. How much
could be safely said? How much implied? The reporters, each one of them, stopped short of declaring me guilty, but there were
no other suspects, no alternative paths of inquiry. Adam was killed by my car. Increasingly, it seemed to me, the only dramatic
tension left in the affair was the question of when I would get my comeuppance. There was hurt outrage in the commentaries
that accompanied the funeral, and I knew I was lucky that so far, aside from a single oped piece, no one had publicly bayed
for my blood. Finney's beautiful smile was no good to me if he was too spineless to stand against the tide that was rising
and threatening to engulf me.

Transfixed, I watched my friends and colleagues caricatured by the television cameras, their mourning pallor accorded a sickly
hue, contours flattened, their expressions and gestures theatrical, self-conscious. Jane, her hair twisted and stabbed by
two silver pins, her black cheongsam high at the neck but split to the thigh, defying death to catch her. Suzette, her dancer's
body wilting under the weight of sadness, twiglike limbs in black slacks, a black sweater, her small breasts rising and falling
fast, like a frightened bird, her hair loose over her shoulders and halfway down her back. I had never seen her broken like
this and I thought, grudgingly, that she must really have loved him. Maeve, uncomfortable, turning her head to speak to Jane
in the pew behind, then turning back, her face unhappy. A chasm lay between us. I knew that I was, in the mind of each one
of them, paired with Adam in death.

I had considered going to the funeral. I would have liked to bid Adam farewell in person, but my very presence would have
been news, it would have turned a funeral into a circus. So instead I was a phantom at the feast, my place set, food untouched.
I bade farewell from the comfort of the sofa, my face wet with tears, the children frustrated by my distraction. I had closed
the curtains against the cameras of the press, waiting for me outside.

In the front row sat Harold, Norma, and David, the wife and mother in the middle, her hands reaching out to hold the hand
of her husband on one side, her son on the other. Both were seated well away from her so that she had to stretch. I willed
David to move closer to his mother, to smile at her, squeeze her hand, anything to comfort her. If only he would give her
the affection she craved, surely she would not need my children. My children, the other phantoms at the feast.

The inadequate priest seemed haunted by the children, his homily falling repeatedly into traps of his own making. Clearly
the man had given no thought to what he would say or to how it would sound.

“Adam made such contributions to all of us,” he said, his eyes blinking earnestly behind his spectacles, his voice strangely
high-pitched. “He helped us understand the way the world works. He was in all ways a man of the world, a man who'd been round
the block a few times and could tell us what was on the other side and make us want to go there. Adam's mother mourns him,
his father mourns him.” He launched into a dolorous list of those left behind. “His brother mourns him and his friends and
colleagues mourn him. We who are left behind, his family and friends, mourn the man who might have been, the father to his
children … that is, the pillar of strength to a woman, a woman that is, who might have been his wife. A filial son, like the
son he never knew … never had, in fact … in his parents' declining years.”

It was such a poorly worded send-off for a wordsmith that I couldn't help smiling. I saw signs of impatience on Maeve's face.
If she'd been God she would have fired the man. Perhaps it was his ineptitude that stirred Norma and Harold to what came afterward.
They emerged from the church but, instead of keeping on the designated path to the waiting limousines, Norma made a beeline
for the press, galvanized suddenly to action. Harold chased after her, taken by surprise.

“I'd like to make a statement,” she said into the nearest microphone, her voice rushed and nervous. “Nobody's brave enough
to say it, but I don't care about the consequences. We all know who killed my son. My grandchildren are in danger. I beg—”
But at this point Harold reached her and grabbed her arm, yanking her back.

“Don't be a bloody fool, woman,” he snarled at her. He pushed her away from the press as her face crumpled, but the tapes
still rolled, and they captured the curses he hissed at her.

They looked bad but I looked worse. The newspapers the next morning were united.
IT'S THE WILL, STUPID,
screamed one tabloid headline. The broadsheets just put it another way.

No one should be subjected to what Norma and Harold Wills have had to go through during the past week. They have lost a son
and been refused access to his children. The cameras took us yesterday where we should not have gone, to the place where loss
and anger meet, and it shocked us because it is an ugly place, where dignity is crushed. But push aside that shock, look with
sympathy even on Harold Wills as he vents his distress on his wife, and who of us cannot say that anger is justified? Someone
must pay for the loss of talent and humanity, and there must be no squeamishness about the sanctity of motherhood.

And so it was that I had to find David. I had not spoken to him since my split with Adam. The home phone number I had for
him no longer worked, but a sympathetic mutual friend directed me to the Horniman Museum, where he had apparently been working
for three months on a temporary project. I knew instinctively that the day after his brother's funeral he would be back at
work, taking refuge. I had not telephoned to warn him of our arrival. I did not want to scare him off. As it was, I almost
lost my nerve. Getting out of the house had been a nightmare, both children crying by the time I'd wrestled them through the
horde outside. My escape route at the back of the house was still remarkably clear, I assumed because they were waiting for
me to be arrested, and had calculated the police would have to park in front. With the virtue of hindsight I should have snuck
out of the backdoor, but I hated to creep around like a criminal.

In the rain, the facade of the museum had a doleful look. The mosaic that decorates the frontage depicts a central figure,
“Humanity in the House of Circumstance,” bordered on either side by the gates of life and death, the latter guarded by a somber-looking
figure representing resignation. We struggled, stroller and all, up the steps.

Inside, a pretty teenage girl at the reception desk regarded me with awe.

“Why didn't you bring an umbrella?” she asked me.

“Can't hold an umbrella and push a stroller at the same time,” I answered, still breathless from the hill and the steps. “It's
one of life's great truths.”

I pulled back the raincover, drenching the children as the rain ran off the plastic in rivulets onto their heads. They blinked
and looked around expectantly.

“Can you tell me where to find David Wills?” I asked, approaching the desk and flashing a smile. “We wanted to surprise him.”

She stared at me, and my heart sank. There was nowhere, now, that I could go unrecognized. Even those who failed to read the
newspaper every day had seen my picture on television. Surely, I thought, we looked sufficiently unthreatening. What was I
going to do? Shake rain all over her? But the girl crumpled up her face in doubt.