Falling Off Air Read online

  Later that night, when the body and the boy had both gone, a young woman, Detective Constable Mann, took my statement. She had stamina, and I fed her stamina on cups of tea. She tried every way she knew to stir my memory, to search it for the thing I did not even know I knew, for the elusive glimpse of the unusual, the out of place, the clue. I was pleased by her doggedness because I needed to have what I had seen examined and reexamined. I needed to repeat it aloud, and to someone other than myself. I needed to have it recorded.

  From my work I know that what is remembered as the truth may be only a version of the truth, so I knew I would return to this record that D.C. Mann produced to check and retune my memory in the days to come. By the early hours of the morning my statement was a marvel of description on everything from the state of the weather to the exact angle at which the woman had fallen, the altitude at which I had first spotted the body falling, the degree of lifelessness with which the woman's body had lain broken on the saturated ground.

  I recited to D.C. Mann what I could remember of the screamed argument earlier in the evening. It was strange to sit there in my kitchen in the midnight silence and calmly recite the words “whore” and “bitch.” I told her I had no idea which house the argument came from, no idea whether it had anything at all to do with the woman's death that came later. I was telling her about the argument only because she wanted to know the story of the whole evening, from beginning to end. Then I hesitated. When she pressed me to say what was on my mind, I told her that I thought I had heard voices again just before the woman had fallen, but that—and this I stressed—could have been sheer fancy. This time there were no words to give her, no splinters of sentences, just my impression that I had heard voices mixed with the noise of the storm. She did not want to use words like “impression” in the statement, wanted me to firm it up, but I could not. I ended up wishing I hadn't even mentioned it.

  The woman, she said, had not yet been formally identified, but I learnt the name of the family who lived at the house from which she had fallen. She said the house belonged to the Carmichaels. I told her the name meant nothing to me. I read my statement and reread it. My words had been transformed into police language. I would not myself have chosen to describe the woman who died as “Caucasian female, middle-aged, wearing light-colored nightdress.” Just as I would not, in my first breath of description, have described D.C. Mann as black, although she was. The statement simply did not sound like me, yet nothing that Mann had written was inaccurate. I signed every page, scratching lines through the empty space at the bottom of the last page so that nothing could be added. Every detail was there, but nothing I had witnessed was the slightest clue to the heart of the matter: why this woman had fallen and how.

  Chapter 2

  THE electronic mangling of “Greensleeves” roused me from sleep. It took a moment for the memory of the night before to hit me, but when it did it fell like a sledgehammer. I hauled myself from my bed, my eyes barely open, and pulled on the same jeans, T-shirt, and sweater that I'd peeled off three hours before. I could smell sweat on them, and fear. I peered at the clock. It was six A.M. Even standing upright I could still feel sleep, like the pull of gravity, dragging me back toward my bed. I resisted it and padded barefoot to the front door.

  A large man stood there, the man I'd seen entering what I now knew to be the Carmichael house. His broad face was working in distress, his eyes red and heavy. He wore a creased business suit that I guessed he had put on yesterday morning and had not yet had a chance to change.

  “They said you saw her fall,” he said, and I was surprised to hear an American accent. He stepped inside without further introduction.

  I closed the door behind him and led him the two steps that constituted my hallway. Upstairs I could hear the twitter of the twins' voices, awoken by the doorbell. I ignored them. I knew I had a few minutes' grace while they chatted before calling for me. I opened the door to the sitting room, wondering absentmindedly why I'd closed it, then remembered as a blast of damp air hit us both. He followed me in and stood staring at the broken window. D.C. Mann had been due to go off duty when she'd finished taking my statement, but instead of going home she'd helped me sweep up the glass and then vacuum, to make sure we got it all up before the children started crawling around on it.

  “Next time take a key,” she'd suggested drily.

  She'd tried ringing a couple of twenty-four-hour glass repair shops too, but the earliest anyone could come was nine. So we'd found a grimy plastic sheet in a cupboard and taped it across the window.

  Between us we'd done a pretty good job, but overnight the wind had dislodged some of the tape with the result that we might as well have been standing in the street outside. Carmichael gestured interrogatively at the window.

  “My wife …?” he asked, confused. How, after all, could she have fallen out of his house and into mine?

  “No, no, something else,” I reassured him. I invited him to sit down. I doubt he even heard me, he was so agitated, and because he did not sit down neither did I. I stood hugging my sweater around me and watching him pace like a caged animal in my tiny room. He seemed to fill the space and reach the ceiling. I had the feeling that he was used to assuming control of situations and places and that, unable to control this situation, he was doing his best to master at least the ground under his feet. He paused by the fireplace and examined the framed photographs I'd put there, picking each up and replacing it, forming a line much straighter than the original display. I don't have many strangers visiting the house, and his attention unsettled me until I realized it was only this attempt to impose order that was stopping him falling apart.

  “I'm so sorry,” I told him. “How is your son?”

  “Kyle. He's not … He's sleeping, the doctor gave him something. Look, I don't understand,” he turned toward me, making a visible effort to articulate his confusion, “what happened.”

  “I didn't see … I saw her falling, that's all. I was looking out of that window.” I gestured toward it, and he walked to the place where I had stood and looked out through the drizzling rain toward his own house as if he expected to see her falling still. “I saw her falling, and then, when … she was on the ground I went to her, but there was nothing I could do, so I called the ambulance.”

  “You didn't see how it happened?”

  Surely he must already know this from the police, unless they had decided for some reason to leave him in ignorance. I shook my head. The uncontrolled dive had haunted my night. What could make a woman loosen her hold on safety and step out into the void, surrender herself to plummet unchecked, inevitably to shatter on the earth below?

  “Did she say anything to you?” His eyes fixed on mine, and I was struck by their blue intensity. “They said there was some time between her falling and you calling the ambulance.”

  I tried to ignore the implicit criticism, shook my head.

  “I'm almost certain she was already dead when I reached her. There was a man from a few doors down who was with her for a few minutes after me, but I really think she was dead by then.”

  He nodded, glaring through watery eyes, then touched his fingers to his lips like a child. Upstairs there was a bang, then a wail. He jumped, his nerves giving him away.

  “I'm sorry,” I gestured upward, “I have to go and get them …”

  He frowned as though I had added a whole new level of complexity to an already impossible situation.

  “I have children upstairs,” I explained, making for the door.

  When I came back downstairs a few moments later he was back by the photographs. He turned as soon as I entered the room and resumed his interrogation without apparently registering the fact that I had a pungent child wriggling under each arm.

  “Did you see anyone?”

  “See anyone?” I repeated stupidly. Did he mean inside the house? Outside? Then I realized it made no difference. I bent down, put the children on the floor so they could move around and play—I hoped w
e'd got all the glass out of the carpet the night before—but they were hungry and uncomfortable and they just sat there and bawled.

  “No one,” I told him.

  “But they said there was shouting, arguing.”

  “That was earlier,” I corrected him, then remembered the wisps of argument I fancied I'd heard through the storm just before his wife fell. “I've no idea whether that was connected or not.”

  “Of course not. That is for the police to say. What I am trying to determine is whether you had any reason to believe my wife was with anyone before she died.”

  “As I said, I saw nothing and no one until your wife fell,” I said, a little abruptly. I had made myself clear the first time.

  He seemed to recover himself slightly, looking down at the children as though seeing them for the first time. Hannah's nappy was about to burst.

  “I was out at a dinner, my wife didn't want to come,” he explained to me. I had to strain to hear his voice over the children. “My elder son was at a friend's house for a sleepover. He doesn't know yet.” He glanced at his watch. “I have to go. I have to go get him.” His mouth worked again, and I thought I saw his chin tremble. He took a deep shuddering breath, and must have remembered that he had not introduced himself. “I'm Richard, Richard Carmichael,” he said, holding out his hand and making an attempt at the social niceties. “We've been neighbors for a while now, six months almost.”

  “I'm Robin Ballantyne.” I took his hand and we shook. I could feel the misery seeping from the flesh of his palm. Then, made unthinking by the children's demands for attention, I asked, “Did you know that your wife might do this?”

  He didn't like the question, withdrew his hand immediately.

  “How could I expect this from Paula?” he snapped.

  Well, if I didn't like him so much as glancing at my photographs he was allowed to be a little prickly when I asked him if his newly dead wife had been suicidal. After that he made for the door, muttering that he would see himself out. I made a move to go after him. I might even have apologized for my insensitivity, but Hannah grabbed my leg and wouldn't let go. I heard the door slam.

  I gazed down at the children, overwhelmed by my lack of sleep. They were shouting as though they'd been abandoned in a snowstorm at the top of a mountain without food or drink. At moments like these I never knew where to start. Milk or nappies? Hannah or William? Milk, nappies, milk, nappies, Hannah, William, Hannah, William—it was like a crazed chant. My hands started to do the right things, gathering wipes, clean nappies, placing bottles of milk in the microwave, and all the time this other part of my head was working on something else entirely. He'd called his wife Paula. Paula Carmichael.

  The only Paula Carmichael I'd heard of was a prominent social activist. She was a Labour member of parliament who sat on the back benches and irritated the party leadership. But that was almost marginal to who she was: so flamboyant and inspiring in her public speaking that during the past year or two she had begun to make a social conscience fashionable again. She had hundreds and thousands of people volunteering to do good works on their Saturday mornings. Even the home counties had become a hotbed of Carmichaelites. Some of them had added a zero or two to their regular charitable giving. Others had actually got off their gin-logged backsides to try and find someone, anyone, in their affluent communities to help. More a poet than a politician, she used the power of her rhetoric to shame men on both sides of the house. “All over this country volunteers are picking up your pieces,” she'd famously harangued the prime minister on one occasion, “sticking together lives that should never have been broken, attempting to cure with compassion and a collection box what should have been prevented by good government.”

  I had not seen the face of the woman who fell, or enough of the rest of her to identify her, and yet there was something even in the manner she had fallen, even in the voice that had called out through the night that was not unfamiliar. I would never have chosen to watch anyone die like that, but Paula Carmichael was a woman I knew something of, a woman I liked and respected. I felt ice form in my veins, and I shivered.

  On autopilot I cleaned and changed the babies in turn, lifted them one by one into their high chairs, then toasted bread and cut up apples and bananas. I poured milk into two cups and twisted lids onto them. With food and drink in front of them they stopped complaining. I turned on the radio, but before I got to hear so much as a headline the doorbell rang. I sighed, abandoned the children again and went to open the door. It was Jane. I had hardly seen her since she realized that I had a problem making child-free lunches—in fact I had a problem with child-free anything—and she had a problem with children. I let her in, along with another squall of rain. The whole house felt damp, as though the rain were leaking into its joints.

  Jane shook herself like a dog, spraying a mist of water all over me, then took off her raincoat, handed it to me, and raised her eyebrows.

  “What a thing to happen, eh?” she said.

  Jane is of Chinese descent, with a high forehead, sharp cheekbones, and black hair that hangs almost to her hips. She looks positively imperial. It's all undermined though when she arches an eyebrow, opens her mouth, and a strong Perth accent emerges. Her parents settled in Scotland in the late fifties, fleeing Mao and getting farther than most. Her mother and father, both physicists who spoke no English, opened what must have been one of the first Chinese restaurants north of the border. They retired after a couple of decades, but Jane's sister now ran the business, which had diversified into fish and chips years ago and was about to go up market and launch a Thai menu. Her parents, fearing her Scottish accent would hold her back, sent her to elocution lessons, but Jane refused to cooperate. Instead, defiantly, she became more Scottish than ever.

  Jane looked tired, the early morning light illuminating the dusting of feathery lines around her eyes and across her forehead.

  “You're up early,” I said.

  She gestured over her shoulder toward the Carmichael house.

  “I was working into the wee hours. I put two and two together. It was you who found her, was it not?”

  I nodded.

  “The address was on the agency copy,” she explained, heading into the sitting room. “I—” She stopped dead, staring at the window.

  “Come into the kitchen,” I turned to lead the way, “and I'll get you a towel for your hair.”

  I boiled the kettle while Jane arranged herself on an upright chair, rubbing the towel I gave her over her head and watching Hannah and William, not touching, not talking to them, clearly at a loss as to what to say. Well it's hard to coo over a baby when you've suggested to its mother that she have it aborted. Without someone to share the load they would ruin my life, she'd told me, and of course they had, in the nicest possible way.

  “Well,” she said at last with rare diplomacy, “they're thriving.” Then, with less diplomacy, “Hannah's the spitting image of Adam.”

  I scowled.

  “What? Do you not think so?” Jane protested.

  “I prefer to think they were an early experiment in cloning.”

  “William's got his mouth as well, so no one will believe you.”

  There was silence as I poured boiling water into the coffeepot, and I became very aware of my baggy sweater with a hole at one elbow and the remains of Hannah's regurgitated apple on the other. Under Jane's cool and elegant scrutiny I could feel the bags under my eyes swell to balloonlike proportions. I felt resentment prickle at my neck. I had not invited her here to observe me.

  I turned to face her, leaning my hips back against the counter, allowing the coffee to steep.

  “Why are you here?” I asked, although I had already as good as guessed.

  Jane held my gaze.

  “The police aren't ruling out foul play.” It was her work voice, confident, persuasive. “Did you see what happened? Was there anyone there but her?”

  Only the few of us who knew Jane very well could hear the slight incre
ase in pace, the increased intensity of the accent, the breathless undertone when she was on an adrenaline high. I could hear it now, and it confirmed my identification of the woman who had died. No garden variety Paula Carmichael would have excited Jane like this.

  “Why are you assuming she didn't kill herself?” I asked.

  “I'm not. But why should she?”

  I glared at her. I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach and my head was beginning to throb. There was a time, when I was working with Jane, when she held no terrors for me, I gave as good as I got or else I ignored her, but I knew I was about to be bullied and I was out of practice.

  “You'll do an interview for me, won't you? I haven't spoken to Jez yet, but I'm just going to hand him a fait accompli. We'll be doing a special tonight, and we'll get friends and family on board of course, but if you could do that ‘I saw her plunge out of the sky,’ moment, that would be a really moving counterpoint. Frankly, if you could talk to us, and not to anyone else, I'd really owe you.”

  We gazed at each other, and she must have misinterpreted my reluctance, because she plowed on.

  “When I say … I mean I don't see how we could actually pay you—”

  “Jane,” my hackles had risen, “talk to me like that and you can leave right now.”

  Silence, a couple of heartbeats long.

  “I'm sorry, I wasn't implying …”

  “Of course not.”

  “I only said it because I know Adam gives you nothing, and while he's busy swanning around on the telly here you are living in a slum bringing up his … For God's sake, it should be you editing Controversies tonight, not me … I cannot bear to see you—”

  I slammed a cup of coffee down in front of her so that a tidal wave of liquid slopped onto the table. It stopped her in midflow.