Falling Off Air (8 page)

Finney bent his head over my statement again.

“That's not as clear as it might be,” he grumbled.

“Sorry, sir,” Mann muttered.

“‘May have heard,’” Finney repeated the phrase with disgust. “What the hell does that mean?”

Neither I nor D.C. Mann answered, and after a second he asked, “Do you often hear voices?”

“Only when I'm not taking my medication.” I gave him a hard look.

“Your medic …?” He trailed off, uncertain how to continue, then saw that I was winding him up.

“No, I do not hear voices,” I said firmly. “There was a lot of noise from the storm. I thought I heard something that sounded
like a voice, but I may have been mistaken. I wish I'd never mentioned it. I was just trying to be helpful.” Finney pursed
his lips, then turned again to Mann.

“Have you asked anyone else in the street whether they heard voices around the time Carmichael fell?”

“There's some confusion.” Mann was relieved to be able to offer him something by way of reply. “We've had a couple of people
saying they heard shouting in the street around that time, but of course Miss Ballantyne was the only one who saw her fall,
so she's the only one who even knows exactly what time we're talking about. And immediately after she'd fallen, Miss Ballantyne
started shouting in the street herself, and I think that's what our witnesses heard. The storm may have distorted Miss Ballantyne's
voice, because nobody seems to have been able to tell us what she was shouting.”

“I don't think that's true,” I interrupted. “I think they heard, I think they just don't want to admit that they heard me
yelling for help but didn't open their doors.”

Finney was silent for a minute, reading over the statement again.

“Try and clarify that,” he said shortly.

Mann grimaced.

“Now, moving on, last night you told D.C. Mann that you didn't know the woman who died.”

“I didn't recognize her,” I clarified. “It was dark and I scarcely saw her face.”

“In fact,” he had the transcript of my TV interview in front of him, “you'd met her twice.”

“I said I thought I'd bumped into her,” I said, frowning. “Paula—I think it was her—said a total of four words to me.”

“You implied you were friends on TV.”

“I said I thought I'd bumped into her,” I repeated.

Finney blew softly, not hurrying.

“So what were these four words?”

“Been there, done that.”

“‘Been there, done that,’” he repeated it slowly, wonderingly.

I explained the context then, that I'd been struggling with small children in the supermarket, but Finney still looked bemused.

“I think Carmichael was being sympathetic,” D.C. Mann interjected, “saying she'd been through that too.”

“Been through what?” Finney scowled and I saw D.C. Mann cringe.

“Dealing with small children,” D.C. Mann spelled out, remembering at the last minute to add, “sir.”

Finney went a little paler, as though one of us had mentioned menstruation. He breathed deeply, then fired a series of questions
at me. I say fired, but he had this slow, deep delivery that meant you only felt the kick afterward.

“Did you ever visit the Carmichaels?”

“I told you, I don't know them.”

“Were you ever inside their house?”

“No.”

“Did you speak on the phone?”

“No, what is this? I told you, I—”

“Did you have mutual friends?”

“No.”

That last question and answer started to bother me, but I was too distracted to think why.

Finney's eyebrows rose.

“Well, you'll have to help me out here, Miss Ballantyne,” he said. “We've been spending a lot of time looking through Mrs.
Carmichaels things, as you can imagine.”

Looking for a suicide note, I speculated, but I wasn't about to open my mouth.

“Mrs. Carmichael left a lot of papers,” Finney went on, “and I mean
a lot.
It's still early days, so we're still paddling in the shallows, so to speak, but we've come across a bit of a mystery, and
I'm hoping you can put me straight.”

Here I was gripped by a sense of foreboding so strong that I felt deprived of oxygen. Finney looked up questioningly at me
and I managed to jerk my head to indicate that he should go on.

“Could we open a window in here?” I asked.

Mann got up and went over to the window, fiddled with the catch for a moment, then turned and shrugged at me apologetically.
Finney did not seem to have noticed her failed efforts.

“Mrs. Carmichael kept diaries,” he was saying. “She kept work diaries, she kept family diaries, she kept a personal diary.
We're drowning in diaries. How she found time to do anything but write in her diaries I do not know. It's her personal diary
that we've been having a little look at, and in it she mentions you.”

My eyes fixed on Finney's. There was unhappiness there, there was impatience there, but I could see no shadow of a lie in
them.

“It mentions me,” I echoed.

“Yes. Can you tell me why that might be?”

“I can't imagine.”

Silence, and I knew he wanted me to talk into it.

“How do you know it's me?”

“Robin, two children, same names, right ages, living opposite. Same physical descriptions. Slim, red hair, green eyes …” He
paused to clear his throat. “Couldn't be anyone else.”

I forced myself to carry on breathing, tried to make my brain turn.

“There is no explanation that I can think of,” I said, as calmly as I could, “but maybe if I could see the context …”

He produced a photocopied sheet and pushed it across the table at me. His fingers brushed mine, and we each pulled our hands
away as if burnt. I stared across at him, then down at the sheet, trying to focus. Most of the page was blacked out. Only
one paragraph remained for me to read. I pulled the sheet closer to me and forced myself to concentrate.

Robin goes back and forth to the supermarket like a mother bird with worms for her young. So much of her life is full of grim
determination. How lonely she must be at the end of the day when Hannah and William are asleep. She never seems to go out.
But yesterday I was walking across the Common to the underground. It was a real summers day, everyone going about with no
clothes on and radios blaring, and there she was, there they all were, lying sleeping in the sun. She'd rigged up an awning
for them so they were shaded, and she'd got hold of each of them even in her sleep, and you just knew that the slightest stirring
would waken her. They were all three in shorts and T-shirts. Oh, and the babies' little fat legs, and plump white arms, all
hither and thither. What abandon, what sheer joy to sleep in the sun. It's the first time I've seen them truly at ease. How
I envied them their innocence. I wanted to lie down on the grass beside them. Oh, how I wanted to sleep in the sun without
guilt.

I picked the sheet up and read it through again, cool and forensic. I was beyond feeling uneasy, beyond feeling that this
was all terribly strange. This, these words on the page, were beyond coincidence. This woman had watched me. She knew my name
and the names of my children. Instinctively my body and my brain reacted as if under threat, tensing, adrenaline racing to
prime me for fight or flight. I tried to calm myself, willed my heart to slow its pounding. She was dead, I told myself, there
was no one to fight or to flee. I examined the date on the diary entry. Early September, just weeks before. It was mid-October
now, and the extreme heat of the past few days was a strange climactic blip in the middle of an autumn that was fast advancing
toward winter. I remembered the day Paula described, remembered how refreshed I'd felt after that sleep: sleep without guilt,
without dreams, sleep without interruption. I'd had to wake the twins as the sun disappeared, so we could wend our happy way
home. I read the passage over and over again until I realized that Finney was impatient.

“Obviously she knew me,” I said slowly, exactly, needing to convey this distinction, “but I did not know her.”

Both D.C. Mann and Finney gazed at me in disbelief.

“Are you accusing Paula Carmichael of being a stalker?” Finney asked, almost amused. “Because I don't think that's going to
go down very well.”

After the interview with Finney I went for a walk on the Common. I knew the children were at Tanya's, knew I should pick them
up before Patrick's shift. Tanya had made it clear to me more than once that, while happy to help when they could, their lives
were already fraught with the demands of work and children. They needed a holiday, and they couldn't afford one, and here
was I taking advantage.

My head was full of questions, but they kept getting pushed to one side by Finney's smile, which lingered there far longer
than was decent. The man annoyed and intrigued me in equal measure. His attitude had been antagonistic, but the prospect of
tangling with him was not entirely unpleasant. Adrenaline was rushing through my bloodstream. Adrenaline and something else,
something seductive, was making my head light and threatening to dull my sense of danger. Paula Carmichael's death was unremittingly
awful. Yet here I was, just hours later, excited and intrigued by a man for the first time since Adam left. I was appalled
at myself. How could my emotional life be so distorted that a woman's death would have the effect of reawakening me to the
joys of sexual attraction? I was in a state of temporary insanity. I despaired.

I didn't just want to walk. I needed to walk. I needed to walk on my own. I walked as though my life depended on it, arms
swinging at my side. With every step I felt calmer.

I was scarcely aware of where I was walking, but I know the Common like the back of my hand. I know the large open lawn where
mothers push strollers and where for much of the year the wind howls across the flat expanse; I know the run-down playground,
where the slide is forever surrounded by metal barricades that entice the children in. I know the duck pond, the graffiti-covered
snack bar, the toilets with no paper and no running water, the sheltered wooded area where men cruise for sex of one kind
or another and prostitutes loiter just in view of the passing motorists.

I sat down on a bench and gazed at the spot where, in the summer, I had lain asleep on the ground and Paula Carmichael had
watched me. Had she sat down on this seat, I wondered, or hurried on by, briefcase under her arm, just as I had seen her that
day under the bridge. The grass where we had lain was now a muddy patch. Despite the sun, no one was lazing on the ground
today; it was still too damp from the storm. I sat there in solitude, but it was as though Paula sat with me, beside me on
the bench, silently challenging me to work out our connection. How did Paula know me? How did she know my children, my circumstances,
even my loneliness? Certainly she had lived as good as opposite me, but that in itself was not a sufficient explanation. None
of my neighbors could have put my name to my face let alone named my children.

“She doesn't know me from Adam,” I whispered to myself. It's a hazard of living alone.

Then the words I had said started to fade and reform in my head, and synapses sparked. What had Jane said? That Adam had worked
together with Paula Carmichael on a documentary. Of course that didn't mean they were so much as friends. It was probably
nothing. As far as I knew, Adam had remained pretty secretive about what had happened between us. Leaving children fatherless
was hardly something you boasted about at the dinner table. So the leap from knowing Paula to sharing his secrets with her,
to her living opposite me was all too much. I was clutching at straws, but there was only this one straw to clutch.

I was back at home with the children when Terry phoned. I was trying to get us all a late lunch. We were suffering from low
blood sugar and I was just managing to hold it down until the food was ready, but Hannah and William were falling apart. The
last thing I wanted was a work call.

“Terry, how are you doing?” Terry, my favorite manager. No doubt Maeve had told him to ring.

“Good, and you? Getting any sleep?”

“Here and there,” I said lightly. I felt about a hundred and three.