Falling Off Air

by Catherine Sampson

  The doorbell rang, like an alarm in the tranquillity of the hostel. Rachel glanced at the CCTV monitor next to the desk and grimaced at me.

  “Here comes our petition,” she said. “It's showtime.”

  Chapter 21

  MY route home was dogged by traffic jams. By the time I got there, and Erica delivered the children into my arms ready fed, bathed, and dressed for bed, I hated myself for things which were actually totally beyond my control.

  “Was everything okay?” I asked

  “Okay,” Erica parroted. “Nobody came here, but there was a phone call. From someone who wishes you well.”

  “What was the name?”

  Erica stared at me.

  “Somebody who wishes you—” she started.

  I interrupted her. I guess I was a little brusque, but all I wanted was to kiss my babies and cuddle them before they fell asleep. “Yes, I got that,” I snapped, “but that's not a name.”

  Erica gave me a look that said I was being unreasonable.

  “No name,” she said, “but someone who knows you, someone who has visited here because they know where you live.”

  What was this? Twenty questions? I rolled my eyes at the ceiling. I know I shouldn't have done that. She'd been taking care of my children, freeing me to do what I needed to do. I couldn't have done it without her, but why couldn't she just take a message?

  “They say you are doing too much.” She said it as if she was scolding me.

  I shrugged. Kind, but I wished people would keep their noses out of my business.

  Just then the doorbell rang. I would have ignored it but Erica was standing right there, pulling her coat on, and she just went ahead and opened it—without looking through the spyhole first, I noticed. Perhaps a day without the press camped outside had made us all relax.

  “Hello there,” said Dan Stein, on my doorstep, wearing a forced smile.

  Erica stared at him.

  My face must have been blank. The poor thing had to fill the silence.

  “We had a date?” he said, “Saturday, at eight? Well this is Saturday at eight, and we have a reservation at Padua…”

  “Oh shit!” I said.

  Erica turned to look at me, her face shocked. I saw Dan's face redden.

  “I'm sorry,” I said. “I didn't mean it like that. Shit. What am I going to do?” I had assumed our date had gone down the drain along with my reputation, but here he was and I didn't have the heart to turn him away.

  “Look, just say if you don't want…” He was fed up now and who could blame him?

  I hesitated, torn. I had been repeatedly rude to Dan, and he had been patient and he had been kind to the children. I had no desire to go out, and not the slightest interest in a date, but he had been sweet and he didn't deserve to be stood up. Reservations at Padua are not to be sneezed at.

  “What time's the reservation for?”

  “Eight-thirty.”

  “Do I have time to put the children to bed first? It'll take me fifteen minutes to get them to sleep, then five minutes to change?

  Can you ring them, tell them we'll be a few minutes late?” I turned to Erica. “Erica, could you possibly stay?”

  “You're going out now?” She was disapproving. “You did not tell me.”

  “I'd forgotten.” I nodded toward Dan, hoping she'd take pity on his face, but her eyes moved toward him and still she did not budge. “Look, Erica, I'm really sorry. I can offer you double time, it's the best I can do. The kids will be asleep.”

  Erica looked from him to me, and back again.

  “I don't have any choice,” she grumbled, “or the children will be left alone.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, then shut it again when I caught Dan's eye. It wasn't the time to argue. If she had to grumble that was fine.

  Padua was a fifteen-minute walk away. I apologized about ten times for my absentmindedness and then couldn't think of anything else to say. Making small talk seemed ridiculous when what I wanted to say was what eventually burst out of me.

  “Didn't your mother tell you it was a bad idea to date a murderess?”

  Dan came to a halt and faced me. Of course, if I'd given it half a thought I wouldn't have put it that way.

  “My mother?” he said, clearly irritated. “How old do you think I am?”

  I gazed at his face. He had gray eyes and the sort of male beauty that has cheekbones and a jaw. His crew-cut hair emphasized the lines of his face. He looked a little like Adam, or rather like Adam when I first met him. I felt awfully old.

  “Well?”

  “I don't know,” I fished for something a tad more diplomatic than I'd managed so far. “Thirty?” I suggested, adding a good half-decade to my mental estimate.

  “I'm twenty-seven,” he said. “What about you?”

  “Thirty-five. And a half.”

  For a moment he said nothing.

  “Wow, that's older than I thought,” he said seriously. There was a moment's silence and then we both burst out laughing. But he must have known, I thought a moment later, because every detail of my life had been in the papers in the past week. Then I pushed the thought from me. I was becoming paranoid.

  We laughed a lot after that. Perhaps I was just near breaking point, hovering on the rim of hysteria, but even in the best of times I think I would have found him an amusing companion. When I caught sight of myself in the mirror, a broad grin on my face, head back, I realized I hadn't laughed since before Adam died. The thought sobered me, but it was Paula's death to which we returned.

  “I still think about those voices,” I said as the coffee arrived. “It was a hell of a row, really vicious.”

  “They've split up now,” he said. “The husband's moved out, and the wife and daughter are there.”

  “Did they know Paula Carmichael?”

  Dan looked at me as though I was mad.

  “Should they?” he asked. I shook my head. No reason, except that my head seemed intent on linking things together, creating a world where people talked to each other in the street, chatted over the fence, knocked on each other's doors for cups of sugar. Our world was patently not this world, it was central London, and yet I could not shake the sense that we were all connected in ways we could not fathom.

  “You know,” I confided, “I thought I heard voices later too, just before Paula Carmichael's fall. Did they bother to even ask you about that, or do they think I'm making it up?”

  Dan shrugged. “I told D.C. Mann I was on the phone for the half hour before you got there. She didn't mention voices.”

  Half an hour. Much more than a manly grunt, then. I didn't dare to bring his mother into it again. A sister, perhaps, or a girlfriend. Most likely a girlfriend. I thought that probably I did not care.

  “D.C. Mann came back a few days ago.” Dan was running his fingers up and down the stem of his wineglass. “She asked me about the night of Adam Wills's death. I told her that you were at home when I called around.”

  He paused to take a sip of wine.

  “And?”

  “And nothing. I said that you didn't look to me like a woman who'd just committed a murder.”

  “Quite right.”

  He held my eyes.

  “It's the only reason I'm here,” he said, reaching out his hand briefly to touch mine, then pulling back because of something he saw in my face. “You looked kind of unhappy, and very tired, knackered actually, but you were totally calm. I don't think,” he was shaking his head now, as if he was trying to convince me of my own innocence, “that someone who's just spattered someone all over their windscreen would look so at ease.”

  I tried to smile in grateful thanks for the support, but the bloody imagery defeated me and made me feel slightly nauseated. Let him believe what he wanted. Like Rachel Colby he had persuaded himself that I was not a murderer. For which, mentally, I thanked him. Of course I was pleased that I was not universally condemned, but frankly I was far from convinced by their logic. To Rachel I w
as not a murderer because I did not fit her pattern of the woman who killed her man: I had not endured years of abuse, the drip by drip erosion of my sanity. But Rachel could not know that I had felt fury. There had been days when, if Adam had walked through my door, I would have struck out at him with little thought as to what was in my hand. As for Dan, he had declared me murder-free because he couldn't conceive that someone would look calm after a crime of passion. But if you have been provoked to rage or indeed to frustrated passion, surely wiping out the source of that agitation would calm you right down.

  “Besides, I could scarcely have made it back home by seven-fifteen from the Oval if I killed Adam at six forty-five,” I pointed out.

  “You'd have had to put your skates on,” Dan said, “but I think it's doable. Anyway, I thought when he was killed it was nearer six-thirty.”

  “You've got inside knowledge have you?” I was feeling suddenly tired, and I know I sounded irritable.

  Dan looked at me a little oddly.

  “I'm just making conversation,” he said.

  I nodded. My head felt heavy, as though I could barely lift it. Dan had ordered a bottle of Prosecco, and my mouth tasted sour.

  “I have to go home,” I said. Dan raised his hand for the bill.

  “You don't have to do that,” I said wearily, as he got out his credit card: American Express.

  “It's okay, it all goes on my mother's account,” he said.

  I frowned.

  “Joke,” he said, signed the chit with a flourish and followed me out of the restaurant. On the street outside, the cold leeched its way to my flesh. Dan took my hand, threading my arm through his. It made me feel slightly uncomfortable, but I told myself that I was just out of practice.

  We reached his house before mine.

  “Come in?” he asked. “See how the other half lives?”

  I shook my head, disentangling my arm from his.

  “Your children are asleep and your babysitter's on double time,” he said. “You think she wants you back any time soon? Have a drink, that's all.”

  I looked at my watch. It was just before ten, and although I was exhausted, I was enjoying the freedom of an evening out.

  “Just for a minute,” I said.

  As I stepped into the lobby I remembered that door swinging open before, Dan standing there in his coat, ready to go out. I remembered him listening to my phone call, heading out into the storm. It seemed a lifetime ago. Inside that lobby, now denuded of its antique table, we went through the door marked “A,” and up the stairs to the second-floor flat. I wished that he'd been on the ground floor. It was altogether too suggestive to be following him upstairs. His home, when we entered it, was clean, ordered, uncluttered. Men, I find, fall either into the clinical or the crappy school of housekeeping and he was definitely the former. The sitting room was unremarkably furnished from IKEA, but on the walls hung framed architectural photographs, each one a work of art. Capturing stone and brick on film should of course be easy. It doesn't, after all, move. Yet the buildings in these black-and-white prints seemed to be alive.

  “You're a photographer,” I said, delighted, walking up close and moving from one print to another.

  Dan shook his head. “I'm in personnel, I told you.”

  “And a traveler.” I'd passed London and Chicago and reached a photo of the Potala Palace hanging next to a street scene in Jaipur.

  Dan nodded. “Footloose and fancy free,” he said. I realized then that we'd scarcely spoken about him in our whole evening out, but I remembered talking a lot about myself.

  “No people,” I commented, nodding my head at a print of Angkor Wat. “It's all bricks and mortar.”

  “Plenty of people,” he countered, “I just don't hang them on the walls.”

  I followed Dan to the kitchen, just to be nosy, but my legs could barely support me I was so tired, and the kitchen was standard kitchen, so I retreated to the sofa. It was the best sort of sofa, chosen for sinkability rather than fashion. Its cushions engulfed me, and when I laid my head back, my eyes automatically closed. I heard the clatter of coffeepot and cups. I heard Dan come into the room and chuckle as he saw me, almost comatose.

  “You need a head massage,” he said lightly. Still half asleep, I shook my head. When I felt his fingers in my hair I sat forward abruptly, hunching over, rubbing my eyes. Dan was standing behind me, and he reached out and took me by the shoulders, pulling me back. Again I pulled forward.

  “I've got to go.” I stood, impelled by a premonition, sure that somehow things were going wrong.

  “What?” He was indignant.

  “I have to go home.”

  He watched me as I pulled my coat back on. “What's wrong?”

  “I have to go home,” I said more insistently now, embarrassed that I had let him get so close, angry for some unfathomable reason at both him and at myself.

  “They can do without you for an hour.” He was smiling and pleading all at once. “They're fast asleep. But I'm wide awake, and I'm not sure I can do without you.”

  “I'm not in the market for … a date,” I tried to explain, reaching for my bag.

  “Well, why the hell not?” He was irritated and laughing. “You're not fifteen, you're allowed out on your own.”

  “You're right, I'm not fifteen,” I clutched at that, “I'm thirty-five, all grown up, too old for this.”

  He shook his head, still grinning, but he put his hands up in a gesture of defeat.

  “They have names for girls like you,” he murmured as I turned for the door.

  Startled, I turned to look back at him, and he must have seen from my face that I was offended.

  “Sorry, I'm sorry.” He wasn't grinning anymore now. “I'm just, you know … sorry, that was a stupid thing … it was a bad joke …”

  “Let's be clear,” I said, looking him in the eye and speaking softly, “that was not coitus interruptus.”

  “No, of course not.” The smile was back, sly now. “I have that to look forward to.”

  “In your dreams,” I muttered and I heard him laugh behind me.

  I ran down the stairs two at a time, flung open the door to the street. And there was my premonition: a siren, unremarked by my conscious mind, a siren that belonged to the police patrol car parked outside my house. As I moved toward my home, another car pulled up behind it and Finney emerged.

  Chapter 22

  HOW I FOUGHT OFF A KIDNAPPER

  Martial arts expert Erica Schlim talks to Bill Tanning exclusively about her life as nanny to the children of murdered newsman Adam Wills, and reveals how she saved them from a shocking kidnapping attempt while their mother was out on a hot date.

  Blond and bubbly Erica, 23, has revealed the dramatic goings-on in the house where the children of murdered newsman Adam Wills live with their mother, Wills's former lover, Robin Ballantyne, 35.

  Just last night, Erica reveals, there was a shocking attempt to kidnap the year-old twins, Hannah and William, while Ballantyne was out on a hot date. It was only foiled when Erica, like a lioness guarding her cubs, used her judo skills to bring the kidnapper literally to his knees.

  The first suspicious incident happened in the afternoon, when Erica answered the phone. “I couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman, it sounded as though whoever it was had a heavy cold,” she said. “They didn't ask for Robin, just asked me to take a message. I didn't have a pen and paper to hand, so I just memorized it. They said tell Robin she's going too far. If she doesn't stop, we know where she lives. We know where the children are. Tell her this is a well-wisher.”

  Later, when Robin Ballantyne came in, it was only for a few minutes, and when Erica tried to tell her about the phone call, Ballantyne dismissed it and said she was going out on a date.

  “I wasn't planning on babysitting,” Erica told us, “but who else would have looked after the children while Robin went out with Dan, her boyfriend? She told me she was going to a restaurant with him, but later I found out she had
gone back to his place. When she eventually turned up, after it was all over, she looked as though she had just got out of bed. Her hair was all over the place.”

  The man Erica describes as Ballantyne's boyfriend has been questioned by police, and it is believed that he has provided an alibi for Ballantyne for part of the evening of Adam Wills's death.

  Erica described how, just after ten o'clock last night, a man arrived at the front door. Erica asked who he was. He pretended that he was the twins' grandfather, and that Robin had told him to wait inside for her. Once inside the house, he pushed Erica aside and walked toward the staircase that led to the children's bedroom. Erica told him to leave, but he ignored her, and she chased after him and tackled him on the landing at the top of the stairs, using her skills as a black belt judo fighter to bring him to his knees.

  “I knew I had to protect the children at all costs. I used all the moves I've worked on,” Erica said. “It was very satisfying to put them to use. Usually I just fight the instructor, and he yields, so he never gets hurt, but this man was soon very scared of me, and he fell down the stairs when I used the ko uchi gari on him. That's a sort of tripping throw where I use my foot to hook his out from under him. I think he hurt his arm when he fell, because he was holding his wrist when he left. He shouted that he would come back, and I was scared because I thought he might bring more people, and I could not fight them all. So I tried calling Robin's mobile, but it must have been switched off. Then I called the police, and they came very quickly. They looked for the man in the street, but he was already gone.”

  Ballantyne turned up just a few minutes later, still unaware how close her children had come to being abducted by a madman. “She looked stunned,” said Erica, “but she didn't really thank me for what I'd done, which I find a bit hurtful, because if it wasn't for me, what would have become of her children? And I have a bruise on my leg where the man kicked me.”