Falling Off Air

by Catherine Sampson

  “Fucking wuss,” one boy was saying to another. “Fucking mummy's boy.”

  The face of the mummy's boy contorted, and with good reason I realized, as I recognized him. It was Kyle, Richard Carmichael's younger son, a mummy's boy whose mummy had just been buried.

  The older boy—he must have been about thirteen—reached out and grabbed the collar of the Carmichael boy, who was still hugging his stomach. He began to wrestle him toward the Hammer, and the other children went along with them, so that the two were surrounded. The woman in the ticket booth watched impassively. She'd seen it all before.

  “Hey,” I hailed them. I felt like a fool, vulnerable and unimpressive with my strollerful of babies. “Let him go. He doesn't have to go if he doesn't want to.”

  The older boy turned around and the other children stood kicking their feet in the mud.

  “Fuck you,” he said. “It'll be good for him.”

  “Let him go,” I said again. The Carmichael boy was trying to wriggle his way out of the older boy's grasp. Another boy in the group seemed to intercede on his behalf. Maybe he recognized me—if so, it was the only time being a suspected murderer worked to my advantage. Whatever the reason, the older boy sent Kyle packing with a last kick. He ran, stumbling toward me, and I caught him. Once in my arms he seemed reluctant to emerge, and I wasn't sure how to proceed. I knew how to deal with infants, but what did I do with this young man-boy?

  “I'll take you home,” I said to him, holding him by the shoulders and looking him in the face. What I saw there shocked me. He was white and trembling and the fear in his eyes hadn't departed with his tormentors, but there was recognition there too. He knew me, as I knew him.

  “Are you all right?” I thought maybe something else had happened, something I hadn't witnessed, but he nodded gruffly and turned away, hands in pockets.

  “Where are you going?” This bleak Common was no place for a child in the dark. He shrugged, but he lingered there, clearly reluctant to head off on his own.

  “Come on, I'll take you home,” I said again to him.

  “I'm not going home,” he muttered.

  Was it pure altruism or sheer curiosity that prompted me to say what I said next?

  “Come back with me for a while then, have something to eat. I've got hot chocolate.”

  He shot me a look of frank distrust.

  “I'm not going to kill you,” I said mildly. “I've never killed anyone in my life.”

  He never did say yes, just started to shamble along after me when I gave up waiting and headed off. When we reached my front door he tried to pretend he wasn't there, huddling his head down inside his collar and standing in tight to the wall, as though he didn't want his father to see him.

  Once inside he paid the children no attention at all, and in fact the fresh air and the movement of the stroller had served to send both Hannah and William to sleep. Usually I would have woken them at this point—if they slept now they would be up until midnight—but I wanted to talk to this boy and I wanted to do it in peace, so I left them tucked up. I tried not to hurry him. He followed me into the kitchen and watched while I warmed milk on the stove and stirred in chocolate powder. I scrabbled around in the cupboards, looking for something to feed him. I knew I'd got it right when I produced a packet of crisps and he made an appreciative grunt and practically snatched it from me. He sat there chomping crisps and I sat opposite him sipping hot chocolate, and I was afraid that his visit would pass in this noisy silence.

  “Why don't you want to go home?” I asked eventually.

  He sniffed and shook his head and I thought I was going to get nothing.

  “Why d'you think?”

  Point taken. It was obvious.

  “Because your mum died,” I supplied the answer.

  He shrugged and pulled his mouth, which threatened to betray him, into a twisted sneer.

  “Your dad's still there,” I pressed on relentlessly, “you're not on your own.”

  This was greeted with silence. He'd finished the crisps and he rolled the packet into a greasy ball and pushed it across the table toward me, spreading crisp crumbs liberally. Something about the gesture told me that this was not how he had been brought up to behave. This was a boy who knew not to hang out at fairgrounds and knew to put rubbish in the bin. Perhaps this was what I'd heard people describe as attention-seeking behavior. Perhaps he was trying to engage me, even if only engage my irritation, by shoving trash at me.

  “Doesn't your dad worry about you, doesn't he want to know where you are?”

  “I'm okay.”

  “I can see that. I'm asking about your dad.”

  “He can go fuck himself.”

  It sounds ugly now, but when he said it, it was so full of hurt that my heart nearly broke for him. I sighed. Kyle retrieved the crisp packet and started to pick it apart, licking the salt from his fingertips.

  “He'll take care of you, now your mum's gone. He's a good man.”

  “Take care of me?” He gave a snort. “She was too fucking busy saving the world.”

  “She did a lot of good,” I said.

  “Not for me,” he came back quickly.

  “She loved you.”

  “Yeah,” he could barely speak for emotion.

  I decided to change the subject.

  “Your dad seems to think someone might have been with your mum that night.”

  “That's what he wants me to say,” Kyle mumbled.

  “So there wasn't anyone?”

  “I don't know if there was or there wasn't. I heard the doorbell go early in the evening. I was eating in my room, it must have been about six-thirty but I don't know who it was.” It was the longest thing he'd said so far, and I could hear his mid-Atlantic accent, the American drawl of his stepfather overlaid by South London prep school and the failed bravado of the fairground. “I had my headphones on. I never know what's going on in the house when I've got my music on. I thought I heard the front door slam, and later I thought I heard the doorbell again, but I thought my mum would get it, so I wasn't interested. Then nothing. I was on the computer, listening to music. Nothing until the sirens.”

  Kyle's face fell, and I didn't want him to dwell on that memory.

  “So your mum may have had a visitor that night?” I clarified.

  Kyle shrugged.

  “The doorbell rang. I guess she opened it.”

  “And the door slammed later—when would you say?”

  “You're as bad as the police.” Kyle stood up angrily, pushing his chair away from him. “I was just trying to tell them what I remembered, but now my dad's all over me pushing me to say I saw someone, when I didn't, and the police keep asking me questions, and if I say I'm not sure whether I heard the door slam, or I'm not sure what time it was, they make out I'm lying. Can't they understand that I don't look at my watch every time I hear the door slam? I just don't care who comes to see Mum and Dad. It's none of my business.”

  He paced around angrily. He reminded me of his stepfather, the morning after Paula had died.

  “I've had the same problem,” I told him. “I made the mistake of saying I thought I'd heard voices just before your mum died, and they've been trying to pin me down on it ever since, but there's nothing to pin down really, it was just an impression.”

  Kyle came to sit down again.

  “Dad's not completely out of line,” he said, calmer again. “There was a man who used to call Mum up on the phone and upset her, and I know once there was a man came to visit her when Dad and I were out, because I saw him leaving the house when I was walking home. I asked her who he was, and she got angry with me for no reason. So I'm not surprised Dad's suspicious.”

  “Why would he keep insisting someone came that night if they didn't?”

  Kyle's baleful eyes locked on mine.

  “Because of the insurance,” I answered my own question again. “Because it won't pay out for suicide.”

  “The insurance? You think my dad cares about
money?” Kyle said with the level of disdain that could only be produced by the young and rich.

  I stared at him. If not money, then what? I remembered what Rachel had told me, that Paula was searching, lost at sea, and that Richard knew he was losing her and was panicked by it. My mind was racing. Perhaps Kyle suspected his stepfather of killing his mother.

  “Are you afraid of him?” I asked.

  He looked away.

  “He threw a cup of coffee at her once,” he whispered, “when the man rang. Dad answered the phone and he got angry.”

  “That's not the same as killing someone,” I told him, trying to reassure him, trying to bring him back into the present. “Besides, your stepfather has an alibi.”

  But Kyle was in no mood to be comforted.

  “He's not stupid,” he growled.

  I stood and got another packet of crisps from the cupboard. I couldn't bear to see what he was doing to the empty packet. He took the pack from me and tore it open, as he had the first, as though it was the only thing he'd had to eat in days.

  “Look,” I said. Kyle was staring at the floor, stuffing his mouth, and the smell of sour cream and spring onion was hanging over us both like a cloud. “I mean look at me, listen to what I'm saying. Your dad is hurt because your mother killed herself. He's looking for another explanation, that's all. Right now he's all caught up in what happened, and maybe his judgment isn't as clear as it should be. He just doesn't want to think his wife killed herself.”

  But it was I who had misjudged the situation. Kyle's face writhed in anguish and half-masticated crisps flew from his mouth.

  “She didn't kill herself,” he howled in pain. “She didn't.”

  It was all he said before his head sank to the table and his shoulders shook, and the kitchen reverberated to the sound of his sobs. His mother couldn't have killed herself because he was her reason to live. Kyle would rather believe his stepfather had killed his mother than that she had chosen to abandon him.

  Chapter 26

  WILLIAM wakes up and Kyle leaves. For the rest of the evening my hands do the work of a mother while my head churns through what Kyle has told me. I am interrupted only by one phone call: Jane, reporting back, sounding weary and fed up.

  “Robin, all the paperwork that had anything to do with the documentary went to Maeve when Richard Carmichael made those allegations after Paula died. I can't get near it.”

  “You mean it's physically in her office?”

  “In a filing cabinet. Under lock and key.”

  “Can't you butter up her secretary?”

  “I tried that. Gayle believes Maeve is the one true God, and thou shalt have no other. I even tried bribing her with tickets to a Celine Dion concert. She wouldn't budge, but I gave them to her anyway. I can't bear the woman.”

  “Well, thanks for trying.” I tried to sound upbeat, but my head was beginning to ache from all the banging up against brick walls.

  “Robin, I even waited and went in there at lunchtime when they were both out and went through her drawers, but God knows where she keeps the keys. Probably in her knickers. Short of blowing the safe sky high with dynamite, we're buggered.”

  “Okay. Forget the memos. Have you heard anything from Ray?”

  “I took him for a drink last night. He's pissed off with you. Says can't you understand it's more than his job's worth to leak information to you. And anyway, he thinks you did it. Says Finney's under huge pressure to arrest you and he can't understand why he hasn't.”

  “He said all this to you? Doesn't he know you're my friend?”

  “You wouldn't have thought I was your friend to hear me talk.” Jane was sheepish. “I was a wee bit rude about you to get him talking. I'm surprised your ears didn't burn.”

  “Oh.” I forced myself to sound cheerful, but it was hard work. “Well, thanks anyway.”

  It is after midnight by the time I'm off the phone with Jane. I return to Adam's computer. Late at night and on my own I feel strange sitting here, my fingers on his keyboard, as though if I rub a little a genie will appear. A computer is the imperfect imprint of its owner's mind. The things that were said or done are not here, of course, but the things thought and not pursued, directions conceived and not followed, all those are here, as well as a lot of trash. It's a bit like sorting through someone's rubbish bin, reconstructing their last meal from the food wrappers. In this case, it's a bit like finding a pizza box, but being pretty damned sure that the last meal consisted of a burger. Nothing quite adds up. What I want is a journal, a day-by-day account of his life. And death, if possible. All I can do is piece together e-mails and Word files.

  I try to eliminate the dross, but I don't want to compromise evidence. I click on “History,” the machine's memory of Adam's web trawls. There is a whole series of drug-related sites. I proceed in his footsteps, glancing with ghoulish fascination through the material he had sought out. I learn all about death by heroin, that a true heroin overdose is rare and slow and treatable, but that a cocktail of impure heroin and alcohol can be much more rapidly lethal. It is clearly research for some project or other, and it tells me nothing about Adam's life or death.

  It dawns on me that I shouldn't have the computer at all. In the few hours I have had possession of it I could have planted anything there. Then I realize that it's too late to start worrying about evidence, and I feel free to mess around with the order of things. I create new folders and shuffle files and gradually lines begin to emerge, patterns, a sense of symmetry. Most of the information comes from e-mails, but there are Word files that tell their own story, like a curriculum vitae updated just weeks before. It started out like all the rest: date of birth, education. Then, with “Positions Held,” Adam seemed to lose interest in his own career. His job description trailed off into a row of question marks and then into blank space. I assumed he had never printed this version out, but why then even create it? He must have been applying for jobs. I clicked my way back to Outlook and his e-mails suggested that he had, but not, it appeared, journalism jobs. Instead, Adam had been requesting application forms for teacher-training courses. There was more, equally baffling: e-mail conversations with a Catholic priest, a Father Joe Riberra, the same priest, if I remembered rightly, who had given Paula's funeral oration. The contents of the e-mails were not personal. Rather, Adam seemed to be requesting a theological and philosophical reading list and Riberra providing one. This was intriguing, inasmuch as the Adam I had known was dismissive of all things spiritual. But all it told me was that Adam had changed.

  I did a search for e-mails to his parents and to David. There was a handful, all brief and uninformative—confirmation of a date for Sunday lunch, apologies for a birthday missed—and I suspected that most family communication was done by telephone. I searched for Paula's name, and for Suzette's. There was a spate of e-mails to Suzette about the arrangements for the Carmichaelite Mission documentary. They were all brief and professional, none hinting at a torrid affair. There were several to and from Jane too, all work related. Jane had never trusted Adam and he was never comfortable in her company. Nevertheless their communications were chummy, bordering on the flirtatious, Jane's all signed with hugs and kisses. I rolled my eyes. Very Corporation.

  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 bea
r 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.