Falling Off Air (39 page)

The moving men, all of them Australian, are just about done. My life is in boxes. The children are at Norma and Harold's for
the day. My only worry about them being with Adam's parents is that they always come home on such a sugar high that it's impossible
to get them to bed, but in the scale of things, a sugar high does not rank as a problem. I'm standing in the hallway trying
not to get in the way of the movers. The front door is wide open and D.C. Mann appears there, except that now she's a sergeant.

There is nothing strange about her visit. She has come here often over the past few months. There was a time when they didn't
think I would be able to testify at Suzette's trial, and Mann was charged with monitoring my mental health—she and a battery
of psychiatrists. She also filled me in on the life and times of D.C.I. Finney. She told me one day how his wife walked out
on him, to go and live with her boss in Manchester. Another day she told me about the case that got Finney in trouble a year
ago. It had indeed involved another woman, and one Finney had been fond of, but this one had been seventy years old, a woman
who had been beaten up in her own home by her nephew. “It wasn't,” Mann said carefully, determined that I should understand,
“at all a romantic thing. He just liked her and bent the rules to make sure she was okay.” Now, whenever she gets the chance,
she tells me little stories, and the point is always the same: Finney is a good man and he is a lonely man. All this I knew.
I like to hear the stories, but in all this time Finney has never been to see me.

Mann comes in without knocking, and squeezes against the wall while two of my Australians stride by, boxes of books on their
shoulders, biceps bursting. She flashes a grin at one of them, then looks over the scene of devastation. With my furniture
gone the house looks grubby.

“Do you have time for a walk?” she asks me.

I know this means there is news. I tell my men I'm taking a break, and go out into the early summer sun. I fall into step
beside her.

“Sennet's been detained in Wales,” she tells me, “and he's talking.”

“You mean he's made a deal. Let me guess—he won't be charged with supplying the drugs that killed Sean Morris?”

“It would have been almost impossible to make it stick. He claims Morris brought his own drugs, and he says he didn't pay
Morris for shooting up on film—and since Morris dropped dead before any money could change hands, that's technically true.
We've got Paula's account of what happened, but she's dead.”

“And the cash gone from her account for the blackmail,” I said. “Surely that's proof of something?”

“Could have been charitable donations. Anyway, the point is Stein, Sennet, whatever you want to call him, is giving us what
we need to nail Suzette's motive for killing Adam. He's going to describe how Morris died. He heard Suzette swear Paula and
Adam to secrecy in the hotel bar that night. He heard the row over what should happen to the film. Adam promised to stay silent
about Morris's death, but only if he got the tape. He promised to destroy it.” Mann trailed off and sighed. She loved her
story, how it grew and made more sense with every fact she uncovered, but she hated this bit. “Why did Adam want the tape
at all? That's the bit I don't get,” she said. “Why say you'll stay silent but preserve the evidence? It doesn't make sense.”

It did to me. No real journalist can bear to destroy the historical record. You can bury it, you can hide it for a thousand
years, but destroy it and you'll be hit by a thunderbolt. Besides, maybe Adam knew that even if he was prepared to stay silent
about Morris's death in the short term, in the long term he might change his mind. Adam was a pragmatist. Never burn your
bridges. I guessed the only reason he'd agreed to stay silent at all was out of loyalty to Paula, and perhaps to Suzette too.
By all accounts Suzette and Adam had indeed been having a relationship, as Suzette had told me, but their friends and colleagues
agreed they had not been seen together after the documentary had been abandoned.

Mann went on talking, as if reciting by heart the facts of the case. “Then on the day of Paula's funeral Suzette overheard
you telling Finney that Adam was coming to see you. Suzette knew Adam was going through hell after Paula killed herself. She
had watched him walk out of Paula's funeral. She must have known what was going through his head. Maybe they even talked about
it. She must have thought he was about to bare his soul to you. She drove over to your house in her own car. She was wearing
her hair up, covered in a knitted hat, with a scarf over half her face, a basic disguise, nothing fancy. She probably told
herself she was going to confront him, or just scare him. In fact she would probably have killed him in her own car. Then
she got lucky. She saw yours and recognized it. She parked her own in the next street, tried the door of yours, it opened.
You'd even left the keys in the ignition. Well, we won't go over just how stupid that was.”

“Thank you.”

“We've got a witness now, who saw Suzette stop by your car. She got in. She was wearing gloves, but when she adjusted the
seat to reach the steering wheel she cut her hand on that bit of metal on the floor. She mopped up the blood with a paper
hanky, then for some reason she got careless. Perhaps she saw Adam walking along the street, getting ready to cross the road
in front of her. She dropped the tissue. We've got her. She must have thought she could throw us off the scent by trying to
frame you.”

“She was right,” I pointed out, but Mann wouldn't be led down that road. She returned to her story.

“She thought she was getting away with it, and then Michael Amey rings her, trying to track down Ned Sennet after Bovin called
him. Amey is all heated up, and he tells her of Bovin's allegations that Sennet had dealt drugs. Suzette panics. She's totally
paranoid by now. She returns to Cornwall to try to find out what is going on. Well, the rest you know only too well.”

I sighed. I wanted to go home, to build my new home around me. I'd been through this a million times. Suzette's trial had
been hanging over me ever since my mother told me she had been picked up trying to board a plane to New York the day after
she attacked me and left me for dead. It was clear to me that Suzette was effectively out of control by the time she killed
Adam. It was a risky, opportunistic murder, panicked and last-minute and ill thought-out. Then, when she attacked me, she
hadn't even stopped to make sure I was dead.

“I'm glad you got Dan,” I said, “but I hate to think of him walking away from this.”

Mann and I had walked by this time all the way up and all the way down the street. She nodded at the estate agent's sign outside
the front door.

“Did you get a good price?” she asked.

“Not bad,” I said. But I'd taken the first offer I'd got. I hadn't the heart for a hard sell, and when the surveyor came around
I came clean and told him the roof leaked. Still, once I'd paid off the mortgage, the rest was profit. With the legacy of
Adam's flat I could see light at the end of the financial tunnel.

I was back at my house, and Mann said she'd come in for a cup of coffee to get a better look at the Australians, but as we
were about to walk inside another car pulled up, and her face broke into a broad grin.

“Hello, sir,” she hailed him.

Finney wound down the window and gave her a lopsided smile. I could have sworn he blushed.

Mann pulled a face at me.

“I'll be off then,” she said.

Finney and I watched her go. He looked over at me, but he didn't get out and my heart twisted. I walked over to the car.

“You're going,” he said.

“Not far.”

He nodded. Then he reached behind him and picked a bunch of red roses off the backseat. He handed them through the window
to me.

“For the new house,” he said.

“You haven't been to see me. All this time.”

He shook his head, apparently incapable of speaking. He stared straight ahead. I looked back at the house, but it was no time
to invite anyone in. I walked around the car, opened the passenger door, and sat down beside him, roses on my lap. I could
feel the thorns on my thighs.

He turned toward me. He reached out and touched my short hair.

“You're blond.”

“In parts,” I said. “I heard they have more fun.”

We smiled at each other then, shy at first, then just sheer happy. He stretched his hand, palm upward, toward me, and I put
my hand in his. His fingers tightened around mine. I leaned back against the headrest. I was sitting in a police car, double-parked
in the middle of a south London street, and I was home.

“I can't mess things up again,” he said. “I'm off the case, but the defense could still make something of it. So could the
press.”

“You're here today.”

“I wanted to wish you well. With work and …” His voice trailed off. “Well, just with everything.”

We sat in silence. The sun was setting over the rooftops, but the dusk was warm and slow. The Australians lugged the last
box into their truck and slammed the doors. They waved at me and shouted that they'd see me tomorrow morning, then they beeped
their horn in farewell and my belongings bumped off down the street. We sat in silence for a while longer.

Suzette's trial would not go away. Even after it was over, it would stay with me forever, like Adam's death and Paula's before
that. Hard, dark moments in my life—but I would not let my life, or Hannah's, or William's, be lived in gloom.

“When the trial's over,” I said, “you could give me a couple of weeks. Then you could call me, and we could have dinner. If
you wanted to. Or we could take the kids somewhere.”

He breathed in deeply.

“Dinner sounds good,” he said.

I nodded.

“To me too.”

“I would need your new number,” he said.

So I wrote it for him in his notebook, the number I had called and called on the night of Adam's death, and Finney took it
and put it in his jacket pocket.

“I won't lose it,” he said.

“Don't,” I told him. I leaned over and kissed him lightly on his cheek, then opened the door and got out. He sat immobile
for several seconds, looking out at me and smiling. Then he raised his hand in farewell, and he drove away.

W
HEN I awoke the twins were laying quietly in the patch of sunlight at the foot of my bed. I pretended to be asleep and through
half-closed eyes watched them squatting, bottoms stuck out, in their pajamas. Hannah and William are three years old. Hannah
has the willpower of a Sherman tank and William the devastating cunning of a stealth bomber. They were sorting through my
jewelry box, draping strings of beads around their necks. William had a bangle dangling from one ear, and Hannah had devised
for herself a crown. Once in a while, Hannah would thwack William, and he would obediently hand over whatever treasure she
coveted, then steal it back when she wasn't looking. They were so busy that they had forgotten even to demand food and drink.

Their father, Adam, was murdered nearly two years ago and anyway was never really a father to them. Perhaps, I thought wistfully
as I watched them play, this was what parenting would be like as they grew older. They would require only the occasional meal
or dose of moral guidance, and I could recline on the sofa and admire them as they quietly bathed and dressed themselves and
bent their heads dutifully over their homework.

Half an hour later, when Finney arrived, Hannah was sitting stark naked on the stairs and screaming, and William was clinging
to my leg, trying to pull me toward his train set. Finney took in the scene in one sweep of the eyes, settling on. Hannah
to give her a look he would usually reserve for the drunk and disorderly.

“We're going to be late,” he growled.

Long weekend drives in the country with my children in the backseat are not Finney's idea of fun, but I had asked him to come
along because I needed the eyes of a detective chief inspector. And he agreed because he has fallen in love with me, even
if he has not fallen in love with my children. We were heading south on the A23 toward Reigate, to a manor house on the edge
of London, a place known among my fellow journalists as the War School. Here in rural England, journalists learn from former
elite forces soldiers how to duck and dive in deadly games of hide-and-seek. Or how to stanch the bleeding of a fallen colleague
whose stomach has been blown open or eye dislodged. His screams are amateur dramatics and the torn flesh is bread soaked in
animal blood, none of which makes it any less a matter of life and death.

Because of the number of journalists who have died in the past decade in war zones, news organizations now realize they must
try to protect their employees, at least with knowledge and sometimes with arms, too.

“You know this is a wild goose chase,” Finney shouted over the children's yelling. I was driving, and he was in the passenger
seat, stoically ignoring Hannah, who was stretching out her legs to kick the back of his seat. “If there was anything to find,
Coburn would have found it six months ago when she disappeared.”