Falling Off Air (28 page)

“I'll just give him a ring then.”

“Please don't,” I started to say, but she was quicker than she looked, and she had already finished dialing.

“David,” she dragged out the second syllable of his name, tapping her fingernails on the desk. “I've got a lady by the name
of Robin Ballantyne here with her children, and she says she wants to surprise you.” She turned her back to us then, and whispered
into the phone. When she turned toward us and hung up, her eyes were even more anxious.

“Okay,” she said grudgingly, “you'll have to leave the stroller here.” She gave me directions, and I set off with one lead
weight wriggling under each arm. Hannah was, at least technically, walking now, but we wouldn't get anywhere very fast.

I would have liked to linger. The children shrieked with excitement at the glass cabinets full of stuffed gorillas and emus,
then stared in stunned awe at ten-foot-high tribal masks from Africa. Frederick John Horniman, nineteenth-century tea merchant
and traveler, amassed such a large collection of artifacts and natural history specimens in his house that it is said his
wife got thoroughly fed up.

David was waiting for us outside his office door. Shyer and slighter than Adam, with lighter coloring, he had frequently been
written off (not least by his parents) as a pale imitation of his brother. His quiet scholarship had gone unnoticed and unpraised.
If he felt bitter about it, he did not let it show. Now his face was worried, but as I approached I was relieved to see that
his lips twitched in an involuntary smile of greeting.

“Robin, hello,” he said, then peered into Hannah's face and said softly, “My God, she's the spitting image. No wonder …” He
let his sentence trail off and turned his scrutiny to William's face.

“Hello, little man,” he said softly. “Well, you're your mother's son.”

“David,” I blurted out, moved by his kindness. “I didn't kill Adam.”

He looked at me for a moment with the same careful attention he'd given the children.

“Come in,” he said.

Inside, his office could have been any academic's study, except for the presence, lying on a table in the center of the room,
of an ancient Egyptian mummy in an unlidded crate, looking more like a cocoon than anything human, layers of yellowing cloth
concealing the brutal interactions of time and flesh.

“I don't usually have a roommate. He's supposed to be going out on loan, but he got mislaid and ended up here.” He gazed down
fondly at the body. “Actually I'm getting quite used to the company. He's been here all morning, and he's heard more about
my family than I care to think.”

I released the children onto the floor and they scurried like insects under the table. David pointed me to the only chair,
and I sat down while he perched against his desk, his bottom threatening to destabilize a leaning tower of books. He looked
around for something to entertain the children with, and picked up an armful of academic magazines and put them on the floor.

“There,” he said, “they can shred them for me. Save me some energy.”

For a moment we watched as first William, then Hannah, got the idea, and within minutes the floor was awash with torn ethnographical
treatises, footnotes scattered and bibliographies turned to confetti.

“My mother is not doing well,” he said. Then, with a sigh, “Nor is my father.”

“I understand all that,” I said impatiently. “I'm not unsympathetic, but they have to back off. How can I make them understand
that I didn't kill their son? If only I could talk to them about what happened that night. There's evidence that the police
aren't releasing …”

“It's really not a matter of evidence, is it?” David said mildly. “You tell me you didn't kill Adam and I am prepared to believe
you, but that is all it amounts to: a balance of probabilities, and those very probabilities assessed according to my subjective
view of who you are … The longer I'm a scientist, the more I realize there is no such thing as science. There is only what
we choose to believe and the accumulation of whatever evidence we require to give it some validity. I choose to believe you
didn't kill Adam, and because of that I'm prepared to do what I can to help you, but my parents choose to believe the opposite
and will continue to do so until they have another name and another face that they can blame.”

I gazed down at the children. It would be torture for them to grow up in the world David painted, the children of a mother
who might or might not be a murderer. I would not be able to expect them to defend me. If they chose to doubt me I could do
nothing about it.

“How about a gesture of good faith?” I said eventually. “I won't try to convince them I didn't kill Adam, and they can visit
the twins. I won't be there. They can go to my mother's house, and she will be there, and you will be there, and you will
give me your word that you won't let them try anything silly.”

David thought for a moment, then shook his head.

“What's the point?” he asked.

“To buy me time. To defuse them a bit.”

David licked his lips.

“I don't really want to get involved,” he said, carefully avoiding my eyes.

David Wills, like Frederick John Horniman, was a great traveler. David's parents had not clung to him, nor he to them. They
got on with their own lives.

“I'm stuck in the middle here,” he said. “I'm in a very difficult position—”

“Try my position,” I snapped.

He lifted his head and his eyes met mine. He heaved a sigh.

“I'll suggest it to them,” he said heavily. He returned to his perusal of the children and I watched his face. He was fascinated
by them, and sad. His eyes kept returning to Hannah, so like her father.

“You must miss him,” I said.

He was unable to reply. He gulped convulsively.

“He was a good brother, wasn't he?” I am not sure why I needed to say this, but I had had so little chance to talk about Adam
with someone else who had loved him. It was not as though I was going to wax nostalgic with Suzette about Adam her lover.

David sighed again and covered his mouth with his hand. His head jerked and his hand went to his eyes, where tears had sprung,
removing his spectacles and rubbing. He shook his head, angry at himself, and after a moment he had recovered sufficiently
to speak.

“He gave me his old laptop,” he said, his mouth still trembling. I frowned, not understanding the significance. Perhaps, in
David's ivory tower, the gift of a laptop was the ultimate in brotherly love.

“He knew my laptop was broken and he wanted to upgrade.” David cleared his throat, then went on, “And I couldn't afford a
new one, so I was glad to take it. He didn't wipe the disk clean or anything, just unplugged it and handed it over.”

I was beginning to see where David was headed.

“When Adam was killed I opened up some of the old files, but I can't make head or tail of it. There's so much stuff, and I
don't know any of the people he refers to.”

“Have you shown it to the police?”

David shook his head wearily.

“Some of it's personal,” he said. “I couldn't bear to think of them reading it all in some police station somewhere. Besides,
what's the point?”

“What's the point?” I echoed in exasperation. “It might tell us something about who killed him.”

David snorted.

“Does it matter?” he asked. “Adam's gone. A clue here, a clue there, how is some bungling bobby going to piece together anything
that approximates to the truth? We'll never understand why it happened. Any attempt to re-create the past is doomed to failure,
and anything partial is flawed.”

I stared at him. I had had enough of David's approach to the issue of guilt and innocence.

“Can I borrow the laptop?” I said eventually.

He nodded. Then he knelt down and started to play with the children.

I
plug the laptop in as soon as I reach home. I start to feel my way around. David was right. There is a huge amount of stuff
here. What's more, there's no method, no order to it. In Word everything is shoved in under “My Documents”: letters to the
bank manager, notes to the milkman, lengthy scripts for whole television series, even what appears to be an outline for a
novel. I open it, knowing he would have hated me to see it. Set in Afghanistan it is a story of derring-do, of a dashing male
journalist who journeys across war-torn desert and who must decide between the importance of his story and the safety of his
source, a young and stunningly beautiful Afghan woman with ebony hair and silken skin. They have a lot of sex—some of it sounds
familiar.

I go to Outlook, and type in the password David has given me. The screen is filled with an inbox of old e-mails. There is
one from Maeve, full of praise for a one-off documentary on the Royal family. “You struck just the right note,” she writes,
“no fawning, plenty of straight talking of course, but some genuine admiration. Our viewers are tired of too much cynicism,
they like to switch off on an upbeat note. More of the same and your face will rarely be off the nation's television.” I scowl.
Perhaps I don't want to go back to documentary-making after all. Perhaps I am too jaded.

A howl. Startled, I turn to look for the children. They have both left their posts in front of the television. I rush into
the kitchen. Hannah has opened a cupboard and has pulled a heavy saucepan onto her foot. She isn't in pain, but is trying
to extricate herself. I pick her up and put the pan back in the cupboard. As I walk back into the hallway, Hannah toddling
behind me, I see that I have forgotten to close the gate and William is halfway up the stairs, his bottom swaying precariously,
like a mountaineer on a narrow ridge. I rescue him, but the message is clear. It is time to get out of the house, something
that we achieve without harassment.

We headed for the fair. The children were too young for the big wheel (and I was too old), but they could watch. I dragged
the stroller across ridges of mud, then across the gravel that had been spread over the car park that was the site of the
fair for the week. We wandered aimlessly, gazing upward at flashing lights and feats of engineering, great crashing chunks
of metal thrashing around in the air purposefully, as though pounding some vital component into shape. It was a freezing damp
afternoon and there were few takers. One lonely man was on the Hammer, clinging to his seat belt, his face pale, more often
upside down than right way up.

The sun made a brief appearance but at four, as if by clockwork, it seemed to extinguish itself. When Hannah started to cry
I realized it was getting seriously cold. I turned the stroller homeward. We passed the ticket booth for the Hammer. A small
group of kids was gathered there, taking possession of a handful of tickets. I paid no attention until I saw from the corner
of my eye a sudden movement, a kick, foot hard into stomach, and then heard a sob. I stopped and watched.

“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.