Falling Off Air (5 page)

Maeve stood up and whisked a briefcase from beside her desk, dropped a floppy disk into it, snapped it shut, and made for
the door. I got to my feet, wondering how I'd ended up in this particular mess.

“But for God's sake, Robin, get a haircut. There's a limit to what I can swing.” She paused again, remembered what she was
supposed to say, then added sweetly, “Did you bring any photos of the little ones?”

I shook my head. I'd never been this far from them before, never needed to consult a photograph.

I headed straight for the bathroom and spent long minutes looking in the mirror. There were days I didn't look in the mirror
from the time I got up in the morning to when I dropped into bed at night. I mean of course I washed when I had the time,
but the finer points of grooming had sunk to the bottom of my list of priorities and it showed. I had never plastered myself
in makeup but even I had to agree that I needed something to counteract the deathlike pallor of my skin, something to disguise
the bags under my green eyes, something to give my lips a little life. And then there was the hair. It made my scalp prickle
just to look at it. I combed some water in with my fingers and tried to push it into shape, any shape. I splashed cold water
on my face and rubbed it dry with a paper hand towel in an effort to produce some color. I stared hard in the mirror again,
but all I could see was a thin shabby woman with lank red hair and a blotchy face.

“What a loser,” I said aloud to my reflection.

Behind me a toilet flushed and a door banged open. A woman emerged from the stalls and came to wash her hands at the basin.
She was wearing black, well-cut trousers and a tailored jacket over a clingy purple T-shirt with a gold chain at her neck.
Her hair was highlighted blond, cut close to her head. She ignored me, gave herself a brief, approving glance in the mirror
while she dried her hands, then strode out, her heels clattering in a businesslike fashion on the tiled floor.

I went to find Jane, skulking through the hushed corridors in case I ran into old colleagues. When I found her, I saw it in
her eyes too. It was beginning to piss me off.

“I know, I know,” I told her. “I should have smartened myself up a bit.”

She didn't actually say yes, you're right, but she looked it. I had to admire her. She'd been working half the night, then
out to see me in the early hours, and here she was back at her desk, not caring about sleep when there was a story to cover.
She still looked tired, but she'd done something to her hair, twisting it up on top of her head and skewering it with what
looked like a hatpin. Jane is aware that she works in an open-plan office. It's one of the secrets of her success. She is
always on show.

I filched a chair from the desk behind Jane's and rolled it over to sit next to her. A television monitor hung from a bracket
on the ceiling, showing Corporation news output. Jane's underlings wouldn't be in until later that day, and the desks in front
of her were empty, but people working on earlier programs were occupying desks around the edges of the room. I felt more at
home here, where at least fifty percent of the workforce was wearing jeans. I couldn't vouch for it, but some of them may
even have borne traces of their children's breakfast.

“What are you doing here?”

“I came to apologize for shouting at you about Adam.”

“Accepted. So what are you really doing here?”

“I went to see Maeve. She offered me a job.”

Jane raised her eyebrows.

“EGIE. Ethical guidelines implementation editor.” I was keeping my voice low. For all I knew people high and low were fighting
for the job.

“A poisoned chalice,” Jane murmered back. “In fact a great big vat of arsenic.”

“Quite.”

“What are you going to do?”

“What do you think? Turn it down.”

Jane pulled a face and leaned close to me. “No one's job is safe,” she said, “not even Maeve's. You may not be able to pick
and choose.”

I started to ask her more but she shook her head, indicating with her eyes that this was not the time or place.

“Later,” she insisted. “But to get back to my original question, what are you doing here?”

“Paula Carmichael,” I changed the subject. “What are they saying?”

“Too early to draw any conclusions. That's the police. Shocked and saddened by the loss of a true friend, that's the prime
minister thinking she's probably more use to him dead than alive. Meanwhile everyone else is speculating wildly.”

Jane was tapping at her keyboard, summoning up the agency copy on Paula Carmichael. I read over her shoulder and learnt quite
a bit: That Paula Carmichael was forty-nine when she died. That Richard Carmichael, aged fifty-six, was the stepfather of
the boys, that Paula Carmichael's first marriage had ended in divorce. That Richard Carmichael had also been married before,
and that his American wife had alleged he had beaten her, and that she was an alcoholic. That Paula and Richard had met at
a government-sponsored seminar on the social responsibilities of business enterprises. That Paula's social activism frequently
took her far away from home. That one of the sons, George, had been arrested for being drunk and disorderly at a football
match. That their Lambeth house was worth at least a million pounds, but that Richard had lost close to that gambling on the
stock market. That Paula Carmichael's former husband was now living in Aix-en-Provence and running a café with a new wife.
All this, I guessed, must have been collated from library clippings. Editors had just summoned up the Paula Carmichael file
and reworked the news stories that had come up in the past two or three years since she became well known. There hadn't been
sufficient time for anyone to do any proper digging.

“But nothing that tells us why she jumped …” I murmured.

“So she did jump?” Jane seized on my terminology.

I shook my head, irritated. “I don't know. I've told you, I didn't see.”

“Looks to me like they've got the husband lined up as the killer.”

Jane looked at the television set and tapped my arm to make me look too. It took me a second, because Gladstone Road looked
fresh and new, and not like where I lived at all. Then I realized they were showing the front of the Carmichael house, and
that there were photographers blocking the road outside. Whoever was filming must be standing right outside my front door.
Even inside it perhaps.

“Shit,” I muttered. I wondered how my mother was coping.

As we watched, the door to the Carmichael house opened, and Richard appeared. A man emerged and stood behind his right shoulder,
a police officer I guessed. He wore a nondescript gray suit and his dark hair could have done with a brush, but even on television
you could see his eyes were busy, watching constantly, moving from the faces in the crowd to the faces of his uniformed officers,
who in turn kept glancing at him. Next to the gray-suited police officer, Carmichael was physically vast but he seemed to
have shrunk into himself, and when he spoke there was hurt and anger in his voice.

“I have a statement here asking for help with the police inquiries into the death of my wife, Paula.” He flourished a piece
of paper and cameras flashed. He cleared his throat. “But I'm going to tear it up and tell it how it is.” At this point the
gray-suited man beside him briefly closed his eyes, and I could have sworn he was praying.

“I know you British all think I should shut up and grieve. Let sleeping dogs lie and all that bull, but I'm a loudmouth American,
and I say it how it is. My wife was the best thing I ever saw about this country. By a long way. And you're all a bunch of
ungrateful bastards. You won't let anyone rise above you. You just have to knock them down.” Carmichael raged on, and the
journalists loved it, pressing in close with microphones, photographers jostling each other. I spotted at least three uniformed
officers looking expectantly at the gray-suited man, waiting for him to put a stop to it. But he just gazed into the middle
distance, apparently letting the unorthodox press statement wash over him, which wasn't perhaps as stupid as it looked. I
doubt anything could have stopped Carmichael in midflow, and it would have been an unsightly scene to have the police physically
restraining the widower. Carmichael ranted on.

“Some months ago my wife was making a documentary commissioned by the Corporation about her work, and all they wanted to do
was dig the dirt. They had no respect. They just wanted to humiliate her, and she began to doubt herself and everything she
had done. Ever since, she started to talk about retiring from public life, about stopping her work. Now this. She's gone now,
so are you happy?”

He stopped short then, as though he was going to say more, but changed his mind. Within a moment he had turned and vanished
again inside the house. The journalists surged forward. One, a young woman, tried to slide into the house through the open
door, only to find her way blocked by the gray-suited man. He nodded politely at her, stepped smartly into the house himself,
and shut the door in her face. I heard a guffaw of laughter from somewhere in the crowd of hacks. For a moment the television
screen went black, and then the coverage switched back to the studio.

I felt dizzy and the picture on the screen blurred in front of my tired eyes. I had a sense that something was deeply wrong,
that I found myself at the heart of something in which I had no part.

“Now there's a wee gem for the EGIE,” Jane snorted.

“Then it's someone else's problem,” I replied.

“What's someone else's problem?” The voice came from behind my shoulder, and I turned to find Suzette there, eyes bright,
her head cocked interrogatively.

“Everything.” I grinned at her. We hugged and her delicate frame felt tiny against me. I fancied I could even feel her heart
beating, like a bird's. “Everything is someone else's problem. I thought you didn't work here anymore.”

“I won't have anything to do with her,” Jane muttered, teasing, still gazing at the TV monitor. “She's a traitor. I don't
know how you can hug the wee thing.”

“I had a meeting,” Suzette explained, “so I thought I'd drop by, see if Jane was here to say hello. Don't ask me why, I suppose
I just felt the need to be abused. You're the last person I expected to see.”

We left Jane there, grumbling that it was all very well for those who had no work to do, and we headed out of the building
and walked until we found a coffee shop.

“It's twelve,” Suzette pointed out. “That's lunchtime.”

For someone so tiny, she eats like a horse. So we ordered coffee, and then we ordered baguettes. Suzette slipped out of her
coat, a lithe body with a dancer's poise. Her blond hair was scraped back from her porcelain features and she was dressed
in black as she almost always was, a tight sweater over a full skirt, ready to step like a swan into any corps de ballet.
She bent to brush some crumbs from her chair and managed to make it look like an elegant thing to do. When she speaks she
uses her delicate hands for emphasis. It makes whatever she says sound like music. She has the personality of a diva too.
She is capable of relaxing, but only when there is no alternative.

“You look great,” she said, sitting down, pulling her chair close.

“You're kidding,” I laughed.

“You look great considering, put it like that then,” she said, smiling. Suzette was busy, just as Jane was, but she had found
time to drop by many times over the past year. She had helped with the children once in a while and never came empty-handed:
nothing over the top, just a bottle of wine here and there, perfume for my birthday, fancy soap, little things that helped
me to feel human.

“And how have you been?” Sometimes I felt guilty. My own life was so full that I tended to forget Suzette had her own challenges.

Jane, Suzette, and me. We had worked our way up through the Corporation ranks together. Somehow the three of us had bonded
like iron and what had started off with shared lunches in the canteen became once-monthly dinners that lasted for hours and
had us all talking about our lives and our work in a way I believe none of us did with anyone else. If we'd been more alike
it probably wouldn't have worked, but Jane's arrogance was somehow balanced out by Suzette's self-doubt, and when Suzette's
cool logic was too much for us, then Jane would start giggling, and that would be an end of that. Whenever we were together
the conversation bounced around and went to interesting places. Strangely, we did better as a threesome than in any combination
of two.

“Well, I'm busy,” she said, stirring sugar into her coffee, “but I'm getting by.”

She was the only one of the three of us who'd been gutsy enough to break away from the Corporation. Jane had stayed inside
the organization and had become the editor of
Controversies,
while Suzette and I had both added camera skills to our production training. With the new generation of 3-chip cameras that
produce broadcast-quality footage from machines that weigh in at just over three pounds, a lot of our work was done without
the traditional camera crew. I'd stayed inside the Corporation too, but Suzette had always been less tolerant of bureaucracy,
and had never known how to fight her battles. She had always needed to be her own boss, and her own production company seemed
to have given her the freedom she needed. “But tell me about last night.”