Falling Off Air

by Catherine Sampson

  Contacted by this newspaper, Commander Perry of the Metropolitan Police said that if the allegations were substantiated Detective Inspector Finney would be suspended “for as long as it took.” This paper has passed to Commander Perry the photographs it obtained as a result of its investigation. This newspaper has also learned that Finney was suspended for two months last year after allegations that he had acted unprofessionally in a case concerning a female suspect. Finney was cleared, but one police source told the paper Finney, “remains under a cloud to this day, and he should be watching his back, not following other parts of his anatomy.”

  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.

  Chapter 31

  ONLY 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 tr
ouble. 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.

  The next morning I opened the window and took a deep breath, the air like spring water. I showered, I carbo-loaded on scrambled eggs and bacon and toast, fending off the landlord's attempts at conversation. Betty had clearly shared her suspicions with her husband, and he was questioning me about where I was from and why I was in Penzance. I didn't want to talk, and he must have concluded that I was guilty. I got back in my car, and drove to the address that Jane had given me. Market Jew Street could have been a high street anywhere, complete with Boots and Woolworth's and WH Smith. Elderly women pulled shopping carts, and young mothers pushed strollers. There were few men around, and those there were had nothing to push or pull. There was no beach crowd at this time of year, just a few brave walkers, dressed professionally against the weather.

  Away from the street a maze of alleys sloped up and away from the sea, and it was here, vertiginously perched just off Causeway-head, that I found a modest terraced cottage, a small hand-painted plaque next to its door confirming that it was the office of the Penzance Clear Water Rehabilitation Project. I rang the bell, but there was no response, and I realized that the windows were still dark. I turned around to leave—so much for early-morning optimism—but as I did so, a man hailed me. He was striding toward me, and I met him halfway.

  “Who are you looking for?” he asked.

  “You're Michael Amey,” I said, recognizing him from the documentary film.

  “At your service.”

  “Robin Ballantyne,” I said, and held out my hand. He gave me an intent look, but shook my hand anyway, then led the way to the office, where he unlocked the door and pushed it open, waving me in ahead of him.

  “We don't really get started until about ten,” he said, brisk and businesslike, “but the day stretches into the morning at the other end. Now, tell me what I can do for you.”

  Amey was, I guessed, in his early fifties. He wore a tweed jacket and had a receding but distinguished hairline. He was bluff and sociable, but I imagined that he did not suffer fools gladly. He had a vaguely military air to him. I glanced at his shoes. Brown leather, well worn, but they shone. Inside the building, the original layout remained: a narrow corridor, small rooms, the thick granite walls taking up more space than any modern architect would have allowed. We sat in an office that was small but perfectly ordered, except for a mound of mail in a basket marked “In-tray.”

  “I've been away,” Amey explained as he followed my eyes. “I'm afraid things mount up. I don't know if you know, but what we're trying to do here is keep people out of prison, even persistent offenders. We're trying to get them into detox, turn their lives around. It's a constant battle. How anyone can imagine that with a challenge like that we have time for the fine print of bureaucracy …” He stopped himself and took a deep breath. “But I'm sure that's not why you've come to see me.”

  I launched into my story, keeping my eyes glued to his. He must not think me shifty, or indeed mad. I told him about finding Paula Carmichael's body, about the death of Adam, and my conviction that the two deaths were linked. I told him that the police did not share my view, told him that I myself was a suspect in the killing of Adam. I said I believed he could help me by talking to me about Carmichael's visit during the making of the documentary. As I spoke I could see the tension rising. By the time I was finished, his jaw was set, his lips thin.

  “Well, I knew a lot of that already,” Amey said when I drew to a halt, “but thank you for being so candid. Tell me what you'
d like to know.”

  “I think something happened here that put an end to the filming of the documentary,” I said. “I know that there was some sort of falling out between Suzette and Paula, and that perhaps something happened that involved Adam too.”

  “I'm afraid I can't help you with any internal differences,” he said. “If there were personality clashes between the three of them, that's nothing to do with us or our work here.”

  I nodded slowly, asking myself whether there was any other way to approach this.

  “I understand that,” I said carefully, “but I wonder how you would characterize your relations with each of those three people.”

  “Characterize my relations?” Amey laughed nervously, but then he caught sight of my face and the laugh disappeared. “What does it matter?”

  “Well, people may have died because of it,” I said quietly.

  Amey raised his eyebrows, but he gave a little bow from his neck, and started to speak.

  “Everything we do here is sensitive. We walk a tightrope, perhaps they didn't understand that.” He paused, to give me time to digest what he'd said. “We'd talked to the production company, and we were aware in advance that the filming here would be a small part of the documentary about Paula, and about her organization, and that really we would be filmed just as an illustration of the work that organization does. Everything was fine at first. I liked Paula Carmichael, and we were all fully supportive of the documentary. In our view, and in the view of our governors, the more publicity Paula Carmichael got, the more people would be motivated to help. It's meant a lot to organizations like us, the extra funding. I can't say it's flowed, but there's been a steady trickle since Paula Carmichael came on the scene. So we were only too happy to do our bit. At first.” Amey shifted in his chair, leaning forward, supporting his elbows on his knees, and pressing the tips of his fingers together. “There was a lot of filming, lots of talking, lots of interviewing. Paula was absolutely delightful, so there was absolutely no ill will, none at all. Then she wanted interviews with clients. We found a couple who were willing to talk on film, and that went well I think. Then …” He screwed up his face and looked away. “Much as I want to help, I'm going to ask you to keep what I tell you next confidential. You'll understand why. I'm cooperating with you, and on this I need you to cooperate with me.”