Falling Off Air

by Catherine Sampson

  I perched on a wooden stool, but Suzette was too hyper to sit down. She couldn't keep still.

  “Why are you here?” I asked her.

  “I felt so awful about the boy,” she said, sitting down for a moment, then getting up again to pace some more. “I came back to try and put things right. I wanted to find his family, I wanted to help them out.”

  “He didn't have any, or none that wanted to know him.”

  “I know that now,” she wailed. “And then I saw Ned in town yesterday, he was following me and I got scared, so I came back here, and I haven't been out since. Then, when I got your message from my mother, I thought I'd drive into Penzance and see you. So I go outside and the car's vanished. I've looked everywhere, it's just gone. Bloody Sennet and his stupid bloody pranks … Robbie, I'm so scared. I have to get out of here tonight, can you take me? You know what happened to Paula, I'm not going to hang around and wait for him to push me off a cliff.”

  There was a bag packed on the floor by the door. I could feel her fear and for a moment I shared the impulse to flee.

  “You have to tell me what happened first.”

  “I don't want to hang around here. Aren't you scared of him?” She was incredulous. “If you know about the boy, you're on his list too.”

  I gave it a moment's consideration, but no more. I did not know why I was not scared, but I wasn't. If Ned had wanted to kill me, he could have done it on the beach.

  “Tell me what happened,” I repeated.

  She shook her head in exasperation, but she was desperate to get out of there and I was the one with the car.

  “I didn't know.” She took a shuddering breath. “You have to believe me. I didn't know what Sennet was doing. He was always messing around, but he was funny, you know, always on the right side of jokey. He stopped before you got fed up with him. And you got the idea that he knew what he was doing. He wanted to make films professionally, and I was supportive. I gave him advice and he showed me some of his work. It was great. Anyway, one day he just said he wanted to borrow my camera and I'd like the results, so I let him. I know it was stupid but I let him. I didn't realize, but he took Paula with him too. Apparently he told her that it was something I'd asked him to film. Then they came back to the hotel that night looking like ghosts, and I asked them what happened, and he tried to shut her up, but Paula told me this boy had died. I just couldn't believe it. I mean, I just couldn't believe either of them would be so stupid—or that someone could die that fast. Paula got sick. I mean really sick. She was throwing up in the bathroom. So it was just me and Ned, and I said to him, ‘Come on, we've got to tell the police,’ and that was when he said it.” Suzette seemed momentarily unable to get her breath, and I went to the sink and ran her a glass of water. She gulped, then continued talking. “He said he'd kill me if I went to the police,” she said. “And I laughed, because I thought it was a sick joke, but there was something in his eyes that … I just knew it wasn't a joke.”

  She stopped speaking and drank again. She stared into my face, as though she was looking there for validation.

  “I knew it was wrong not to tell anyone. I felt sick at myself, but I knew he would kill me.”

  “So what did you do?”

  She shrugged, as if I should have guessed.

  “Nothing. We left. We agreed that the documentary had to be ditched.”

  “And Ned?”

  “He killed Paula. She was getting so depressed over what happened that he thought she would just blurt it out. Then he killed Adam, because Paula had told Adam what happened to the boy, and after Paula died, Adam told Ned he was going to the police.”

  I gazed at her. It all made sense for the first time, the knot of horror at the center of things, and then the unraveling. Telling the story seemed to have comforted her, and she had stopped shaking. I gazed at her. Her face had shrunk in on itself so that she was all cheekbone and eye socket, her skin so translucent I could see the capillaries underneath. Her hair shone white and brittle as straw in this strange light. She looked tiny and vulnerable, her birdlike limbs twisted around themselves, all elbows and knees, her shoulders contorted to hug herself tight.

  “How did you know about the boy?” she asked.

  “Adam,” I said. “He left me a message.”

  She frowned, and seemed about to speak, but I cut her off. “Why don't we get going?”

  She nodded slowly and got to her feet.

  “Are you all set?” I asked.

  She rubbed her hand over her face.

  “I'll just lock up.”

  I picked up her bag and took it out to the car. With the house lights switched off it was pitch dark, and I was scrabbling around trying to get the trunk open when a moment later she followed me outside. I glanced up. All I could see was a dim outline against the whitewashed walls of the cottage. She'd got dressed up warm, and I wished I had too.

  I opened the trunk, then turned to her. What she'd told me was playing over and over again in my head, but something kept catching like a scratch on a record.

  “What happened to the film?” I asked her.

  “Ned destroyed it,” she said. “I saw him do it. Paula was screaming at him to get rid of it, and neither of them wanted any evidence. He threw it into the fire. I saw it burn.”

  For a heartbeat all I heard was the wind in the trees.

  Over her voice came the sound of a car approaching on the coast road. I turned to look and saw lights drawing near below us.

  “Come on,” Suzette said urgently, “that must be Ned.”

  She stepped toward the car and I bent over to pick up her bag, my mind rewinding, replaying. Suzette's story, Suzette's face, her voice. What is fear and what is a breakdown of reason? Her story is beautiful in its simplicity. Its logic and symmetry attract me. It is aesthetically pleasing, well produced. What she said is true: She never doubted that I had not killed Adam, never questioned me. She was my one true friend.

  I hear the sound of spray curling and leaping as the wave rises to the shore. I hear the car engine purr, coming closer. Suzette shifts from one foot to the other, uneasily. My eyes are getting accustomed to the darkness. As I straighten and turn to throw the bag into the trunk, the shape of the house emerges from the black sky and the clear outline of a garage built on the coastal side defines itself. Somewhere a gull calls. If I don't believe her, the time to confront her is now, before she steps into my car, before I drive through the night with her at my side. Perhaps Suzette had good reason to believe me innocent of Adam's murder: not faith in my good character but some more sinister knowledge. I realize that the sound of the car is receding. It has not turned off Cliff Road toward the house. Its taillights are vanishing into the distance. I hear a footfall. I glance around to tell Suzette that the car is nothing to do with us, to tell her that if we are going anywhere, we are going to the police. I see the birdlike arm is raised, and in its claw a hatchet of polished metal reflects the moon. The moon falls, dealing a blow on my skull that fells me to the unflinching granite, and my fading mind struggles to comprehend how the moon can fall again and again and again.

  Chapter 35

  I lie on the operating table, my skull bared, hair hacked and shaved, and there is blood and skin, some neatly cut, some torn, and a team of surgeons breathing into masks, leaning anxiously over me, tying knots, sewing stitches in holes where blood still leaks hours after surgery began and should not. When they started operating they played a jazz CD. It relaxes them, makes their muscles less tense. Now they operate in silence. I can feel nothing and I will sleep after this for days. They are afraid that I will never wake up—they are afraid that if I wake, I will not be me. Outside the operating theater, in the corridor that doubles as a waiting room, D.C. Mann watches Finney pace, cursing his own stupidity.

  Finney, not long before, is sitting at home, suspended. He's in a space too big and too unfamiliar since his wife left him eighteen months ago to go and live with her boss. He is drinking beer and working
his way through Paula Carmichael's voluminous diaries, the diaries that have been abandoned along with the investigation into Paula's death. He reads about me there, about my life, or at least what Paula has observed, and what she has heard from Adam. He knows more about me, now, than I do about him.

  Then Finney realizes what should have been realized weeks ago. There is a missing diary. The dates do not add up. He leaves his house and goes to find Carmichael. They talk, they argue, and eventually Carmichael produces what he has been hiding since his wife's death: the missing diary, and in it an account of the death of Sean Morris. The one volume Paula has kept apart from all the others, under lock and key in the safe; the volume Carmichael goes to after his wife's death, after he has made allegations about the documentary. When he reads what is there, he decides to shut up. The subject of the documentary is safer left untouched. Full and unexpurgated, in the diary Paula beats her breast with the guilt and the awfulness of it.

  Paula is there, with Ned Sennet who has provided the heroin for Sean Morris to do his bit on film. It is Ned too, who has found the abandoned shed as an appropriately grotty setting for the filming. Paula is there with Suzette, who has the camera. After Sean Morris vomits, the boy briefly seems to lose interest in the drug. Ned starts haranguing him. They had an arrangement, he reminds the boy. Suzette snaps at Sean. Things are getting out of hand and she is panicking. Paula tries to pour oil on troubled water. She tells Ned and Suzette to shut up. She goes and talks to the boy.

  “If you don't want to do this, don't,” I told him. “Don't listen to them. You can just go home.” The boy looked at Ned, and I could see he wanted to, of course he wanted to, vomiting or not. It was only afterwards I realized there was money involved too. What was I thinking? Just walk away, I said, but that was for me, covering my back, pretending I'd given him a choice. This boy, hardly older than Kyle, had no family to go home to, not a penny in his pocket, and his body was screaming at him for heroin. I've been over it in my head a million times to find some excuse for myself, and there is no escaping it. Murder? Manslaughter? I was at best criminally naive. And still there is more. I was speaking to him the way I speak to Kyle if there's something I want him to do but he's reluctant. I've learned the more I push Kyle, the less likely he is to do it. So I tell him, it's okay, you don't have to. I pretend I don't care. And then Kyle shrugs and does whatever it is. I tell myself that what I said made no difference, Sean wanted to do it. So why do I spend every minute of every day sick at myself?

  Sean injects the drug, and Paula watches as he dies, and records and replays the scene in her mind for the months of her life that remain. With every replay her conscience condemns her. Yet Paula remains silent. She listens, blankly, to Suzette's logic. If Paula reveals what has happened, all that she has worked for will be destroyed, the good work will stop, the volunteers will return to cynicism. The boy was a drug addict, Suzette says, he would have died anyway. They were unfortunate bystanders, in the wrong place at the wrong time, that is all. Paula, stunned by what has happened, knows something Suzette does not. Paula is already covering up the theft of Carmichaelite funds. One scandal might be weathered, but two will bring the whole thing tumbling down around her ears. If she makes a public mea culpa for her involvement in the boy's death, the press will take the Carmichaelite organization to pieces. The theft of funds will be discovered, and then the cover-up. The organization will not survive. Paula hears what Suzette says, stays silent for a day, then for a week, and Ned, like a vulture, knows his prey. “You've stayed silent,” he says to her, “that's enough to condemn you. Now I want money.” So, from simple silence she progresses to the payoff. It starts at five hundred pounds a month and goes up to a thousand. Paula has already forked out thousands to cover up the theft. Now the drain on their finances is enough to make even Richard Carmichael take notice that something is wrong.

  Here then, among the papers Richard Carmichael has hidden, is the true suicide note.

  I have tried to go on knowing that I am flawed, and recognizing that we are all flawed. I've even tried to convince myself that this makes me a better and more tolerant person. But Ned has moved in a few doors down, like the devil himself, and he comes by and knocks on the door once in a while, when he thinks no one else is in, and I put cash in his hand. I am incapable now even of believing words like “better,” “more tolerant.” I of all people. I of ALL people. I OF ALL PEOPLE. I am a shoddy thing. I have sold my soul. I can no longer contemplate my own reflection. Tonight he came here. I told him there would be no more. I refused to give him anything and he became angry. For a full hour, with Kyle in the other room, Ned berated me. If I cut off the payments, he'll expose me. I was shaking. I was crying, but I will not be spineless again. I stuck to my vow. I will not pay you, I told him. I would rather die. He left, and I realized that in fact now I have no option but to die. He will expose me. My children will hate me, I have no choice.

  Finney knows what he has found. He scratches his head, scribbles notes on a pad, frowning. The phone rings, and it is a call from D.C. Mann. Is he okay? Of course, he snaps, he's fine. She is used to him snapping and talks over him. She thinks he might be interested to know that the Penzance police rang earlier to say, just for your information, that Ballantyne is there, staying at a B and B. Finney grunts, hangs up, scratches his head again. He wonders where Sennet is, and who he is, and whether the police have ever questioned Suzette Milner in connection with anything at all. He shakes his head and consults his map. He does not like the thought of me alone at the end of the earth.

  It is Finney who finds me, not long after the attack they think. Early enough, they hope, to save me. He drives southwest through the night, disturbs Betty from her bed, pesters her for directions until she rolls her eyes and decides to accompany him because he's so dense, and heaves her flowery nightgown into the passenger seat. Without Betty he would have driven past the track that led to Suzette's cottage, foot hard down on the accelerator until he reached Land's End. They find an abandoned cottage, my abandoned car, a garage, doors left wide open, my body all but lifeless, bloodied, beaten around the head, dragged to the sea, and left for dead at the water's edge, my feet already floating, lifted by the tide.

  D.C. Mann arrives hours later, dispatched by an embarrassed superior. Chief suspect beaten nearly to death, and by whom? Another suspect, until now unsuspected. The humbled and humiliated suspect-lover, Finney, is quietly reinstated, but D.C. Mann is sent to save the day. She can speak to the press. She looks a treat on camera, and she at least will not break down if the former chief suspect dies, as is half expected. The same cannot be said of Finney.

  Betty has been a good listener. She is able to tell D.C. Mann who I've spoken to and what I've said. D.C. Mann is quite capable of putting two and two together. She murmurs these pieces of information to Finney in the waiting room, but he is not interested, so Mann leaves the hospital and goes to find Amey. Amey is not sleeping, has not slept since I knocked on his door the day before. He knows he must tell the truth—even if his project dies, and with it the people he tries to save. He tells Mann what she needs to know, he leads her to Bovin and to Kenny. She contacts her superiors in London, who contact Maeve, whose heart almost stops. The police search my house and take away the tapes. Copies are made.

  Suzette is running. She is falling apart. She was never cut out for this. Ever since Sean Morris's death she has barely been holding herself together. When Paula died she thought she would expire from fear. When she killed Adam, she thought she would disintegrate. Now, with her murderous attack on me, there is no more of herself to keep together. Everywhere she tries to run, people look at her. They can see on her face what she has done. Everywhere she runs, she sees Ned. He never did steal her car, she hid it in the garage herself, but she is truly frightened of him because she believes he killed Paula. She abandons her car. She heads for a train station and stands for an age in front of the departure board. There is nowhere she can go and not be found. She catches a
train, and then another, until she arrives at Heathrow. She stands and stares at another departure board. She is shaking and crying, and everyone is staring.

  Ned Sennet hears what has happened on the radio news while he is driving. His mouth forms a silent “Oh,” and then an admonitory, “Suzette.” He drives on to Plymouth, parks his hired car, retrieves his luggage, and walks away. He will keep on the move, and he will invent another new identity. He hasn't killed anyone, and he has little in the way of a conscience, but he knows that people will come looking for him now.

  My mother clasps my children to her breast and sobs, relieved only that she does not have to find words to tell them what has happened. They are so young. They will forget me. She stays in London, huddled tight with my sisters and my children until the surgery is over and word comes that I am at least still breathing. Then, in the middle of the night, Tanya piles them all into her car and drives them southwest, to join the party in the waiting room. Lorna sits in her chair staring out of the window. She has been told. She is with me. I can feel her.

  Chapter 36

  MONTHS have passed, months of recuperation first in the hospital and then at home, months of letting go of my children so that others can look after them while I am bedbound. My mother is still busy at work, so she has organized a corps of helpers. Even Lorna has been drafted in to sit with me.

  “This is a change,” I said to her the first time she appeared in my sickroom.

  “As if I've got nothing better to do,” she said good-naturedly.

  She stroked my shaved head for a moment, then settled down in the armchair next to my bed. We talked a little, laughed a little, and after a while we both closed our eyes for a rest.