Falling Off Air (33 page)

Adam Wills's parents, contacted by this newspaper, were shocked by the news of Ballantyne's new love. “Our son is just buried,”
said Norma Wills, “but Robin is as hard as nails. It doesn't surprise me that the children were nowhere to be seen. She gets
them out of her way whenever she can so she can have the sort of lifestyle she wants, which is very free and easy.”

Robin Ballantyne and Detective Inspector Tom Finney were last night both unavailable for comment.

O
NLY Jane could have got through the pack of hyenas at my door. She rang me on her mobile.

“I'm coming in, be ready to open the door for me.”

So I stood inside my front door and waited until I heard her voice outside.

“Out of my way, you daft buggers,” I heard her shout, and they must have made way for her because the next thing she was rapping
on the door and I was opening it to let her in, and pushing it closed before the rest of them fell in behind her.

I sat down on the staircase while she took her coat off and flung it over the banisters.

“You're not even dressed,” she accused. “Look at you in your jammies with your head in your hands.”

“It's six-thirty in the morning and I'm in shock,” I informed her.

“No you're not, you wee idiot, and what were you thinking of anyway, snogging a policeman? Do you have a death wish?”

I shook my head. I didn't want to talk about it. I looked up at her and she made a face at me.

“You'll have to pull yourself together,” she said, “or there's nothing I can do to help you.”

I put my head back in my hands for a moment, and then I stood up, turned, and went up the stairs to get dressed.

Jane watched the
Carmichaelite Mission
tape in the sitting room while I washed the children and fed them. I didn't set her to watching the whole thing, just the
last scene, with the boy. She came into the kitchen, ashen with shock, and sat down heavily without saying anything. I sat
down opposite her and poured us both coffee.

“I think the man who's there when the boy shoots up is living opposite me here,” I told her calmly. “I met him on the night
of Paula's death. He's been trying to seduce me.”

Jane screwed her face up and shook her head.

“What the fuck is going on?”

“You'll have to pull yourself together,” I told her pointedly.

She puffed out her cheeks and blew, looking up at me, still shaking her head. “Have you asked Suzette about this?”

“I can't get hold of her.”

“Let's try again,” she said grimly.

We tried again, and then again. While I dealt with the children Jane called every number we had for Suzette, and then she
tried every number anybody else had, and also rang Suzette's mother, but once it was clear Suzette wasn't there, she didn't
prolong the conversation. Her mother, we knew, was frail and prone to terrible fits of anxiety. Suzette wasn't anywhere to
be found. We even tried her ex-husband in Australia. God knows what time of the day it was there. Jane had to sweet-talk him,
just so he didn't hang up. Anyway, he didn't know where Suzette was and he didn't much care.

“Okay,” Jane said. “Suzette's gone AWOL. Time for Plan B.”

Plan B, she suggested, was to confront Dan Stein. I couldn't be seen in the street or I'd be mobbed, so it had to be her.
She snuck out the back way and around the block, so that in the event the hacks outside simply didn't pay any attention to
a woman walking down the other side of the road and stopping outside a house that wasn't mine. I watched from the window as
she rang his bell. No one came. She rang another bell, and a woman came to the door who I recognized from the top window the
morning after Paula's death. Jane and the woman exchanged a few words, and a few moments later Jane was back.

“She's on the top floor,” she told me, “and she hasn't seen him for the last couple of days, but that doesn't mean a thing.
Do you have a home number for him?”

We tried it, but there was no answer.

“Or a work telephone?”

“He's in personnel …” I started to say, but realized he'd given me no company name. “No. I have nothing.”

We sat in silence for a few moments, realizing we'd hit a dead end. Then we started to discuss my options, and we kept on
and on for a good hour. Talk to Finney, she suggested, but I could not bear to—and besides, what if the tape was a red herring?
I would look like an idiot. Like a desperate idiot.

“No,” I told her, “I've got to find out what it's all about before I run to the police.”

“Okay,” she said.

I looked at her expectantly.

“Then don't talk to Finney,” she said.

We smiled weakly at each other. My situation was dire. Hysteria was close at hand.

Talking to Maeve was similarly out of the question. Her only instinct would be to protect her backside, and anyway, I felt
an obligation to Suzette. I needed to hear her side of the story. I needed to know what happened in Cornwall, who knew what
and when.

“So you go to Cornwall,” Jane said eventually, “and you find out what happened there.”

“Okay.” I nodded.

“I mean you go now.”

“The children …” I started to say. “I'll be gone for a while, I don't know …”

“The children will be fine,” she assured me. “Carol will get here in a minute. I'll call her and tell her to come round the
back way, and then I'll call your mother and sound pathetic, and she'll help us out. We'll be fine 'til you get back.”

I looked at her.

“Carol will show me what to do,” she said.

I continued to stare at her.

“None of us will let any harm come to them.”

I bit my lip. “That day, you know, with Erica. That call she had from the well-wisher. What if it was Dan warning me off?”

“We don't even know he's involved. We don't know anything. That video's just spooked us.”

“I don't trust him. He knows the kids are here, he knows …” My voice trailed off. I wasn't yet prepared to voice the fears
that were flooding in.

We stared at each other.

“We won't let any harm come to them,” she repeated.

I drive fiercely at first, as though my life depends on it, south and west. I begin to find the motorway soothing, which means
I am in a truly sorry state.

There was no point in splitting hairs with the
Chronicle
over the newspaper's story. I had not slept with Finney, but that wasn't really the point. I had not spoken to him before
I left. I didn't know what to say. Between us I supposed that we had ruined his career, but I wasn't sure that I was required
to apologize. I wanted to ask about his marriage, and I wanted to ask about the woman in the case he'd been suspended from
the year before, but I was sure as hell I didn't want to know the answers. In my experience the tabloids never say it prettily,
and sometimes they get it totally wrong, but, more often than not, there's a grain of truth around which they spin their pearl.
We were finished before we'd begun.

I had another question. Why had Finney come to see me? Was his intention to seduce me, and if so why, or at least why then?
As the tarmac sped by, my mind, now mired in paranoia, began to spin a scenario in which Finney was for some reason in league
with the tabloids, plotting to ruin me. There was, as far as I could see, nothing in it for him, but whichever way you looked
at it, we'd both walked headlong into trouble. I was past fury, past even being hurt.

It took me six hours to reach Penzance. I crossed the Tamar from Devon into Cornwall, thinking I must be nearly there, but
the peninsula stretched for miles. On the A30 I passed fields of new age wind turbines, their propellers turning purposefully,
as though they might just take off and float skyward. Around me the land swelled and dipped and the vegetation became thicker
as if growing on more fertile land. As I drove southward the air that washed into the car became warmer and damper, and it
seemed to carry salt on it. By the time I actually saw the sea and St. Michael's Mount, the castle rising out of the waters
of the bay like the home to some imprisoned princess, the sky was already dark. The streets of granite terraces were quiet,
clinging to the steep hill that sloped up from the harbor. There were pubs open, but little else, and few people around. A
light drizzle added to my overwhelming impression of water and wetness: shops for surfers, bikinis and swimsuits in the windows;
rainwater trickling along the gutters, down my windscreen; sea stretching away, boats bobbing in the harbor, waves beating
against the promenade. Inside the car I was dry from head to toe, but I felt as though I were submerged. Eventually I found
my way from the sea and up farther into the town, to Alexandra Road, a street of severe town houses, each in competition with
its neighbors for the bed-and-breakfast trade.

I cruised up the street, then down, and chose an establishment with stone steps up to the door and a palm tree in the small
front garden. I hoped business was bad enough that it would not turn away a potential customer on the basis that she was a
suspected murderess, alleged inadequate mother, and general lowlife. Still, I approached the reception desk with some trepidation.
There was a woman behind the desk, her large shoulders bent over a newspaper. She wore a flowered cardigan over a woolen dress
that stretched over a substantial bosom and ballooned over a similarly substantial stomach. She wore a rectangular plastic
badge on her cardigan that read “Betty.”

“Do you have a room for the night?” I asked. I suddenly felt a very long way from Hannah and William. How could I spend a
night so far from them? Surely it was time for me to turn around and go back home, now.

Betty was startled by my voice, and looked up, then did a double take. She looked down at the newspaper, then back up at me.

“You look just like this lass,” she said.

I was caught off guard.

“Really?” I peered at the newspaper. I hadn't thought to wear a disguise, and anyway it's not as easy as it sounds. To wear
sunglasses in the winter is to invite stares. I gazed at myself, upside down.

“Well, he's a fine figure of a man,” she said. “Who could blame her?”

Our eyes met, and I knew instantly that she knew, but that, it seemed, was as far as Betty wanted to take it. I was, she informed
me, their only guest that night, so she'd given me their best room, and I'd find it very quiet. I signed myself in as Joanna
Smith.

“Very imaginative, my sweetheart,” said Betty, and it was said with such generosity and such a lack of condescension that
I was almost flattered.

She didn't serve food, and I ended up eating cod and chips in a café on the promenade. The proprietor, who provided newspapers,
gave me a curious look too, and I lowered my head over my food and left a fat tip behind me.

Afterward, cold but no longer hungry, I returned to the B and B and made my way through the silent corridors to my room. It
was decorated in pink chintz and was more quiet than I could stand. I did not want to be alone with my thoughts, and I longed
for Hannah and William. I looked at my watch. They would be out of the bath, warm and soft and sweet-smelling. Here in this
clear silence and the clean air and this neat and tidy room, I even felt nostalgic for the mess and muddle. I rang them on
my mobile and spoke to my mother. Everything was fine, but I hung up feeling no better: I was redundant; I had left my children
behind in the care of others. I had spent an entire day burning up petrol on a wild-goose chase, the deaths that haunted me
as far from any solution or explanation as they had ever been. My love life was lurching from tragedy to humiliation. My career
was in tatters, my dignity a farce, my very future as the mother of my children in doubt. Oh yes, and my father was a crook.
It was not an evening for peaceful reflection.

I turned on Adam's computer and read halfheartedly through an e-mail or two, but Adam's cyber voice, the dead echo of his
vitality, depressed me further. In the end I took a sleeping tablet and felt relief steal over me as I sank into oblivion.
My last thought was of Hannah and William, of their sleeping faces.