Falling Off Air (37 page)

“Suze, where have you been? I thought you were dead.”

“Don't say that!” Her voice was high, verging on hysteria. “Robin, he's stolen my car, I'm stuck here all alone in the middle
of nowhere—”

“Suze,” I interrupted her, “where are you?”

“I've rented this place on the road to Mousehole,” she wailed, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “I'm only
a couple of miles from you, but I can't drive anywhere because I haven't got a car, and he's going to come back and—”

“Suze,” I took a deep breath, “who's going to come back?”

“He's called Ned.” Suzette's voice became falsetto. “He's a lunatic.”

For a moment I didn't reply. Sean Morris's death returned to me with a force that took me by surprise.

“Were you there when the boy died?” I demanded.

“What?” For a moment I had shocked Suzette back to baffled normality. There was, after all, no way she could know that I knew.
Her voice was a full octave lower.

“Were you there when he died? Amey knows he died. Did you see what you'd done?”

I heard Suzette whimper, and then she broke down. She was talking, but I couldn't make head or tail of it: She was speaking
into the phone, then away from it, her voice a sobbing, shrieking mess. Eventually the words got clearer, and I understood
that she was denying my allegation, and that she was angry.

“How can you think I would do that?” Her voice was low, intense, accusatory. “You are my friend, you should believe in me.
Did I ever accuse you of killing Adam? Did I?”

I was silent, and she carried on speaking, fast and furious.

“Even when everyone else thought you did it, I didn't. Did I even ask you? Did I show any doubt?”

I thought back to our meeting in the Corporation canteen after Adam's death. No, Suzette had not doubted me. Everyone else
had wanted something from me, either a denial or an explanation, even Jane.

Suzette was still speaking.

“You think you're better than me, that you have some moral high ground? You think I'm some sort of sleaze, capable of murder,
and you're not?”

“Suzette, where are you?” I broke in. She was right. I owed her more than this.

“Why do you care?” She was fanning the flames of her own anger.

“We should talk,” I said. “You're right. I want to talk to you.”

She didn't exactly warm to me, but she calmed down enough to give me an address. When I hung up I checked the directions with
Betty and she drew me a map. I was to head for the esplanade, drive toward Newlyn. In Newlyn I was not to head inland, but
instead keep to the coast and go from Fore Street to Cliff Road. Somewhere along that road Suzette had said I would see a
painted sign to the house. Finney would have to wait.

S
OMEHOW, in the dark, I found her. It was a tiny place, a one-story converted barn, set back all on its own, about fifty yards
inland from the coastal road. I stepped out of the car onto earth and took a deep breath of night air. The rain had stopped
but the wind was still up, and it made me shiver. Above me I could see the stars, around me the hills, behind and below me
the sea. Nowhere could I see a car. I banged on the door, which was a two-piece affair that had once belonged on a stable,
and Suzette let me in and hugged me. The entrance hall was lit by a glass lamp overhead, and it cast a ghostly pallor over
her face. Suzettes eyes were red-rimmed and her hands were shaking. Even in good lighting she would have looked a wreck.

“Christ, I needed to see a friendly face,” she said to me, and she teetered on the edge of tears again, biting her lip and
shaking her head. She headed through a door into a kitchen beyond. It was a cozy room. A pine dresser was filled with willow
pattern plates and a red cloth covered a dining table that could have seated six. There was an open fireplace with logs of
wood stacked next to it.

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.

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?