Falling Off Air (30 page)

I went to the “Deleted Items” folder in Outlook and scanned the list that came up: a lot of junk mail, offers to enlarge Adam's
penis, give him free web access to pornographic sites, improve his credit rating, a proposal that he work from home, and then
a message from Paula:

My dear, he hasn't been around here. Not that I've seen anyway. I don't know what to suggest. I am incapable, now, of giving
advice, because I distrust—indeed detest—my own instinct. As you see, I'm now so self-centered that I'm of no use to anyone.
What can I say? Do you really think she'll thank you? The best you can probably do is take my cynicism and reject it. You
have a good heart and you must follow it. The children will thank you. They will always thank you if you are not cruel to
them and do not mistreat them. I cannot bear this vein of thought. I will sign off. Can we meet? Our meetings are the only
thing keeping me going. Always faithfully yours, Paula.

I frowned at the screen. What was that all about then? Why delete her messages? I clicked back to the “Sent Messages” folder,
and searched for the date on which Paula had sent her last message. There it was, the same day, a message from Adam to Paula.
Sent on the day that Paula died.

Paula, I know we said no e-mails, but this is different. I think I've found my stalker. He eventually plucked up courage to
knock on the door and introduce himself. Robin's father. The old scoundrel. Looking for his daughter. He had this address,
didn't know she'd moved out. He's been staking out the house, ringing too, expecting her to pick up the phone. He wants to
know where Robin is. He wants my help to contact her. My instinct, these days, is if anyone asks help from you, give it. That's
what our good friend the Father says anyway, and if I have any chance of getting into heaven—and it's slight now—I need to
take his advice. Still, my brain takes over and says “What if she wants nothing to do with him.” I seem to remember there
were rumors of scurrilous behavior. Perhaps I finally need to talk to her face to face. I'm running scared from her too. With
better reason. In need of your sterling wisdom, as always, Adam.”

I reread Paula's sign-off from her e-mail: “Can we meet? Our meetings are the only thing keeping me going.” My eyes flicker
to Adam's phrase, “I know we said no e-mails, but this is different.” It sounds like a secret affair, but I have been told
by Rachel Colby that one never took place.

I rub the palm of my hand over my face. I feel numb, as though I have been transported into a parallel universe and haven't
quite made it back. These voices from beyond the grave are more than I can stand. Certainly they enlighten me. I know now
things I did not know. I know, for instance, who Adam's stalker was. Either my father found some reason to kill Adam, or I
must now eliminate the stalker as a suspect. I have further evidence too, of Paula's depression, and I have reason to believe
that something had happened that made Adam rethink his life. On this level, my examination of the computer was a useful and
informative exercise. But I am sitting here at two in the morning, the children's breath like a whisper from the next room,
the hum of a city almost but not quite asleep from outside. A cold draft finds its way through the curtains. To hear Paula
and Adam conversing is like sinking into death itself.

T
HE next morning I went to visit Lorna and found her at the computer in her sitting room, which was bathed in sunlight. With
her wrist still bandaged, she was picking out words on the keyboard at a painfully slow speed. I drew up a chair, but said
nothing, aware that I would get none of her attention until she was done. Eventually she hit the “Send” button, gave a final,
exasperated sigh, and turned to smile a greeting. Her red hair, always more glamorous than mine, gave her a golden halo where
the sun touched her curls. The dressing on her forehead was white on white.

“Lorna,” I dived right in, aware that if I hesitated I was in danger of wimping out, “I want to talk to you about our father.
I think you've seen him.”

Lorna's eyebrows flickered upward in surprise, and the smile fell from her lips, but she made no other response. My heart
was pounding. To suggest that Lorna had defied, or even betrayed, our mother was to step into a minefield. The silence stretched
between us like a wire, and I blathered on.

“I wouldn't blame you, you probably remember more than I or Tanya do about him. So if he got in contact and wanted to see
you …”

“I never stopped seeing him,” Lorna said smoothly, “at least when he was around. We've tended to lose contact when he's been
in prison.”

I stared at her, and she raised her eyebrows in a challenge. Since her illness began she has learnt to conserve energy even
in conversation. She doesn't waste words.

“He's a con man and a thief,” she told me bluntly, “just like Ma's always said. He was a doctor. He did defraud his practice.
He did go on the run. He's been doing similar things ever since. He can't help himself.”

My chest tightened, but I forced myself to keep on talking. I would digest this later. For the moment I must not let her stop,
I must find out all I needed to know.

“You told him where to find us. Except that you gave him my old address. What's going on?”

Lorna pulled a face. She sighed, looking away from me, and for the first time there was a hint almost of apology.

“A couple of years back he decided to get in touch with you and Tanya, and I gave him your addresses almost without thinking
about it. He's a very charming man. He's actually very much like you …” She broke off, then started again, “Then there was
your pregnancy, Adam left, Tanya and Patrick were having a bad time financially, and it dawned on me that this was not the
right time. Everyone had enough on their plates without Gilbert. Anyway, when I told him he wasn't to see you, we argued badly.
He was hurt and angry that I thought you wouldn't want to see him. Then, a few weeks later, he was back on remand awaiting
trial …” She looked up at me, and I shook my head slowly in disbelief, and perhaps in rebuke. “Well anyway, I got ill and
he's been in prison all this time. I haven't spoken to him since our argument. I suppose he must have finished his sentence.”

“Okay,” I said softly. “Just one more thing and then I'll go. Could he be violent? I mean if Adam refused to tell him where
to find me, or something?”

Lorna didn't seem shocked by my question. She wiped away a tear. She gave the question a moment's consideration.

“I don't think so,” she said. “When we argued, he just got hurt and petulant. He is excitable, but really … he's a mild man,
not very physical, I can't …” She held the palms of her hands out toward me in supplication.

I nodded for all the world as though I understood.

My mother was waiting for me, her face flushed, playing hide-and-seek with Hannah and William, who were under the table.

“You were in there a good while,” she commented as I entered the kitchen. She put a cup of coffee on the table next to a flapjack
on a plate. I sat down, marveling that my new knowledge did not somehow show on my face. Thirty-odd years of secrecy, and
still the charade could go on, if I was willing to play the game. I reached for the coffee. My mother stood watching, then
pushed a pile of newspapers nearer me.

“You should read what they have to say today,” she said, and I was intrigued to see that she was smiling, really smiling,
for the first time in weeks. I pulled the newspapers toward me and turned to the inside pages—Adam's death no longer made
the front. Still, tabloids and broadsheets alike all carried a similar story, some smaller, some larger.

In what appears to be a significant breakthrough, the police are for the first time investigating the possibility that a person
other than Wills's former lover Robin Ballantyne drove her car when it ran Wills down.

Police sources say that the blood sample voluntarily supplied by Ballantyne has been tested against a bloodstain found inside
her car and that there is no DNA match. It is possible, the sources say, that the bloodstain came from a cut caused by a loose
strip of metal by the lever that regulates the position of the driving seat. Traces of the same unidentified blood have been
found on that metal.

A police source cautioned that the discovery did not mean that another person had been driving the car on the night of the
murder, only that another person had at some point been in the driving seat, but he acknowledged that this new evidence did
introduce significant doubt into the case against Ballantyne.

I looked up, grinning, at my mother, only to find that she had filled a glass with something that looked suspiciously like
champagne and was thrusting it toward me.

I shook my head.

“I'm not going to tempt fate,” I said.

My mother shrugged, smiling.

“Well, I'm quietly confident,” she said, and raised her glass to me.

I stretched my arms above my head. For the first time in weeks the air around me felt light and bright. I toasted my mother
with my coffee. What pleased me most about the newspaper article was not simply the DNA evidence, but that the tone of the
journalism seemed to have changed. Of course this was not the
Chronicle.

“Look,” she said happily, pushing a tabloid toward me, “there's even a little article here saying Harold Wills was once convicted
of drunk driving.”

I pulled a face and read through it. It was brief and of course completely irrelevant, but anything that made Adam's grieving
parents look bad made me look better. It was an ugly contest. This must all, I thought, be Finney's work. If so, then he was
not as spineless as I'd feared. I had hated writing him off.

I had a carefree lunch with my mother and then I tried to track down Father Joe Riberra. I called the church where Paula's
funeral had taken place, where I was informed that Father Joe Riberra was not based there. They gave me the number of the
office of the theological department of London University. Father Joe Riberra was, they told me, a visiting professor and
he had been in the States for the past few days. They could not provide me with his number there, since he was on personal
business. He was due back in a couple of days and he would return my call then if I left my number. Which I did. I e-mailed
him too, because my faith in people returning calls is shaky.

I tried calling Suzette, but I couldn't reach her at home, or on her mobile, or at her office. Her assistant said that Suzette
had gone on a trip, but that she couldn't say where, or when she would return. It was not clear to me whether this was incompetence
or secrecy. Then I rang Rachel Colby and asked her the same thing I was going to ask Suzette: What was the last thing they
filmed for the documentary before it all fell apart?

“I know where they were,” she said slowly, “I mean geographically I know where they were, but I couldn't tell you who they
interviewed last or anything like that.”

“Geographically will do.”

“They were in Penzance. Filming at a drug rehabilitation center that's funded by us, at least in part. I needed to talk to
them about something just the other day, but the guy there never called me back. Still, I'll give you his name. Maybe you'll
have more luck.”

Shortly after that, and just as Hannah and William emerged from their nap, I had a phone call that seemed like a gift from
the gods. Tanya had a friend, a trained nursery nurse, who had just lost her job through no fault of her own. Tanya had explained
the situation to her and she would be willing to babysit for the children whenever I needed her on an ad hoc basis and at
an hourly rate that seemed fair. The downside was that if something better came up, she'd take it and leave me high and dry.
Still, I couldn't get any higher or drier, and I liked her already for being up-front about it.

“Are you sure she's trustworthy?” I asked Tanya for the umpteenth time. And she assured me for the umpteenth time that she
was.

“She's not going to photograph my children and put our pictures in the newspaper?”