Falling Off Air (12 page)

“I'm not suggesting you were, but what went wrong?”

She heaved a deep breath and put her head on one side, looking at me with some amusement.

“Why all the interest?”

“For God's sake, Suzette, the woman killed herself in front of me.”

“Or was killed,” she reminded me quietly. She thought for a moment, fiddling with the table setting again, then looked up
at me.

“This isn't for general release,” she said, “because it all got extremely messy. Basically, we did a lot of filming and then
Paula pulled out. She wanted a puff piece, no negative stuff, just two hours of how wonderful Paula Carmichael is … or was,
I should say. When I pointed out that we weren't in the business of hagiographies she refused to cooperate.”

I frowned. The waitress arrived at our table and refilled our teacups with green tea.

“Couldn't you have gone ahead with what you had? It must have been financially crippling to dump the whole thing.”

“It cut Paradigm's projected revenue by more than thirty percent last year.” Suzette sounded grim. “Anyway, it's over. I really
don't feel like going through it all over again. Carmichael's retracted, so there's no more to be said.”

“But why would he have made it up? It makes no sense.”

Suzette speared a slice of apple with a cocktail stick.

“Paula Carmichael had a big ego,” she said, keeping her voice low, her eyes flitting around us to see if anyone was listening
in. I would have thought her paranoid if it were not for the fact I myself had recognized two former colleagues at another
table. Paula Carmichael was, after all, still news. “If Paula got depressed it was because she thought she was going to get
great publicity and then she realized we were going to show her warts and all, and she didn't like that. But no one wants
to think their wife is as self-obsessed as that. Maybe her husband just saw it differently.”

She popped the apple into her mouth. I considered what she had said.

“So what were her warts?”

Suzette chewed and swallowed. She thought for a moment.

“She was a megalomaniac. She thought we should treat her like Mother Theresa. I'm not going to go into all the stuff that
happened, because it would take forever, but she seemed to have left reality behind some time ago, and that's the nice way
of putting it.”

“Everyone's eulogizing her now.”

“Yes,” Suzette gave a wry smile, “well, that's the power of the media, for you. For the most part, she handled it like a pro.
We just took our brief very seriously. Too seriously for her.”

I sat back on the bench and looked at Suzette. Maybe Paula had always been too good to be true. I felt a little sad. Since
her death I'd kept that exchange in the supermarket with me, that grin, the sympathetic, “Been there, done that.” I didn't
want to hear that she'd been a cynical media manipulator.

“Still, you don't jump out of a window because someone didn't show you due respect.”

“Maybe,” she said harshly, “if you're Paula Carmichael you think it will immortalize you.”

I shook my head. It wasn't worth arguing.

“Adam and Paula got on well, didn't they?” I was guessing, but if it was Adam who had told Paula about me, as I suspected
it was, that surely pointed to friendship.

Suzette watched me carefully. “What do you mean?”

“I heard they got on really well.”

“Really?”

“You didn't see any evidence of it?”

“They seemed to get on fine, I mean Adam is always professional, but I didn't see much of them together. I really have no
idea what they got up to, I wasn't with them every minute of the day …”

Suzette appeared to have misunderstood my question, and to resent it.

“I'm not suggesting an affair or anything like that,” I said.

“Oh.” Suzette was quiet for a moment. “Well, I don't know then. I suppose I would say that Adam kept out of the arguments
about the content of the documentary,” she said eventually. “He was working on other projects at the same time, it probably
didn't mean that much to him when the whole thing fell through.”

I managed to get a seat on the Northern Line, and gazed at the ads above the heads opposite. There was a poem about urban
greenery that kept me occupied for the length of time it took me to read its four lines. Teenage girls in uniform were standing
by the doors, their arms draped around each other's shoulders, whispering and then once in a while bursting into giggles.
Next to me a middle-aged man with a huge paunch and purple veins on his cheeks smelled of urine. I'd done all the thinking
I could about Paula Carmichael. I needed some other distraction. I looked in my bag to see whether I had left a book or a
magazine in there. I hadn't, but I came across the letters I had shoved in on my way out. I thumbed through and pulled one
out of the pile, a fresh white WH Smith envelope. I frowned. It had been addressed in a hand I did not recognize, to Adam's
flat, my old address, then redirected in what looked like Adam's hand. It surprised me, for a minute, that he knew my new
address. Then I realized when we had spoken on the telephone he had not asked where he should come to see me. This thought
delayed me for a moment, but somewhere around Waterloo I opened the envelope, unfolded two sheets of handwritten paper, and
started to read.

My dear Robin,

I hesitate to approach you in person since an unfortunate misunderstanding with your sister earlier today.

My heart began to pound and I glanced back at the top of the page. No address, but it was dated the day on which Paula Carmichael
had fallen. The wrong address and redirection had taken nearly a week. I continued to read.

I am afraid that because of her bad feelings towards me Tanya misinterpreted my visit. Please let me assure you that I have
only the best of intentions. I just wish to make contact with the daughters I have never forgotten while I still can.

If you would consider meeting me, I will be in the lobby of the Victoria and Albert Museum on Monday at 4. Perhaps we could
have tea.

I raised my head, but if you asked me what I was staring at I couldn't have said. We were pulling into Stockwell. The doors
opened, people got out, people got in. Just as the doors were closing I pushed my way out and onto the platform, and stood
there, reading to the end of the letter. When I had read it through once, right down to the signature, which read, “Your father,
Gilbert,” I started at the top and read it again. I read and reread. At least three trains came and went. I was elbowed and
kicked by the hordes rushing on and off. Then I stopped reading. I looked at my watch. It was three minutes past four.

I
tried all the same. And failed. By the time I walked into the great entrance hall of the V and A there was no man of any
age or any description anywhere to be seen. Still, I hung around for half an hour, reluctant to admit defeat, clinging to
the fantasy that he would appear, that I would know him, and that this part of my life, which had not been all right, would
be in some way transformed.

Afterward, when I gave up on him, I didn't want to talk to anyone about anything. My fathers letter and my subsequent failure
to meet him had revived a lifetime of regret in me. All that evening I stayed at home with my children and left the telephone
switched to the answering machine. A couple of times someone tried ringing but hung up when they got the machine. My mother
left a message—Lorna had raved about the acupuncture. Patrick left a message—I'd left a baby bottle at their house, did I
need it urgently? Suzette left a message—could I call her please?

I tried not to dwell on my father, and instead took pleasure in the domestic chores that so often frustrated me. I washed
my children and I hugged them tight and they laughed and prodded me, sticking little fingers up my nose, pulling my hair.
We rolled and played and laughed, and I wondered then why I could not live like this for every minute of every day.

Hannah had learned a whole new trick. She would push her little chair around, then abandon it for an instant, arms in the
air, and do a little knee-bend and a kick before reaching for her support again. William, who rarely got up off his bottom,
was a highly appreciative audience, applauding her and giggling wildly. It was the kind of moment that would have been good
to share with someone.

But not with D.C.I. Finney, who rang the doorbell in the middle of it. I still felt annoyed at him for making me feel ridiculous.
My face must have fallen when I opened the door and found him waiting.

“I rang you, but you didn't answer,” he said.

“And it didn't occur to you that I might be out,” I replied. Or that I might not want to see anyone.

“I've just been at the Carmichael house, your lights were on, and I could hear voices. Laughter actually. Either you were
in or something very strange was going on.”

“Elementary,” I conceded and let him in. “I'm afraid it's bath-time. Can we talk while I do that?”

He didn't look happy about it and eyed Hannah and William with barely concealed distaste, but I stood my ground.

“You can't just turn up on my doorstep at the children's bedtime and expect to conduct a formal interview.” It had been a
long day, and my voice was irritated, ready for a fight.

He grinned. It came out of nowhere, the same blast of sunlight that had dazed D.C. Mann. The smile created deep creases at
the side of his mouth. He must have been smiling like that since he was a kid. Then, as before, the grin vanished as quickly
as it had come, leaving just the shadow of good humor in his eyes. I stood stock still, transfixed. I had to tell myself to
break the spell.

“I'll just run the water,” I turned on my heel, “if you could keep an eye on them for a moment.”

I hurried up the stairs two steps at a time to the bathroom, turned on the taps, squirted in a dash of bubble bath and allowed
myself a couple of seconds with the mirror. The new haircut was holding up well to my neglect. I pushed the hair back behind
one ear, examined my profile, and set off downstairs again.

I'd been gone a little more than one minute, but the twins had left the sitting room and got to the bottom of the stairs,
where they were both wailing an insistent “Mama, Mama, Mama,” and hurling themselves at Finney's legs. He was standing at
the bottom of the staircase like a goalkeeper, trying to block their way up without actually bending to touch them, and looking
down at them with near panic in his eyes.

“Thank God,” he murmured as I reappeared.

“There is a gate you could have closed,” I pointed out.

I whisked the children away from his legs, one wriggling body under each arm. Finney followed me up to the bathroom, and stood
well back while I stripped the children, removed nappies, wiped bottoms, and dunked them into the water.

“Your choice of paint?” Finney asked. I glanced at the walls. Orange gloss, red trim. It had been like that when we moved
in. I scarcely noticed it anymore.

“Good warm colors,” I replied noncommittally.

The children had calmed down now they were in the water. Hannah was using a flannel to clean the sides of the bath and William
was sinking a plastic boat.

“Have you given any more thought to why you were in Paula Carmichael's diaries?” Finney asked.

“I think,” I said, “that we may have had a mutual friend. It's the only explanation I can come up with.”

“Who would that be?”

“That would be someone I'm going to speak to in the next couple of days.” I was watching Hannah and William, but I could see
Finney's face in the mirror, gray against the orange wall. “I'll find out whether that's the link or not. Then I'll let you
know.”

Finney was quiet for a moment. He must have known that I was warning him off.

“The diary's a problem for me,” he told me. “Anything I can't explain I have to dig into, that's my job, and so far I can't
explain the diary, which means it's a problem for you too.”

I mulled over what he had said in silence. It could have been an apology, and it could equally well have been a threat. Or
perhaps some kind of one-man good-cop-bad-cop routine. He was watching the children, but distractedly, as though his mind
were somewhere else. Belatedly I realized William had got hold of a bottle of shampoo and had already squirted liberal amounts
into the water.

“I need to ask you a few questions,” he said, “but they mustn't go anywhere else. I mean it.”

I turned toward him.

“You mean don't broadcast them.”

“Right. This is all secondhand, and …” He sighed. “Well, Richard Carmichael says that Kyle, the son who was home, saw a visitor—someone
who'd called before, and who she'd argued with—on the evening of her death.”

I frowned.

“You mean Kyle saw someone inside the house with his mother?”

Finney grimaced. I stared at him.

“Well did he or didn't he?”

“Carmichael won't let us speak to the boy at the moment. Says he's too upset. So, like I said, so far it's all secondhand.”

We exchanged a look that was, for the first time, the look of colleagues. Journalists and detectives both know what secondhand
information is worth.