Falling Off Air

by Catherine Sampson

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Robin Ballantyne’s life is finally coming together. After learning she was pregnant with twins and being abandoned by her irresponsible boyfriend, Adam, she’s settling into life as a single mother. But one night, after putting the children to bed, she hears an argument and suddenly, a body falls past her window. Running outside, she finds the body of Paula Carmichael, a renowned activist. When the police find Robin’s name in Paula’s diary and a connection through ex-boyfriend Adam, Robin becomes the prime suspect. She must figure out who killed Paula before she loses her freedom, her children, and her life.

Release date: August 1, 2009

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 320

Sample

THE shouting starts at around seven in the evening. A hot day, an oppressive dusk, and my neighbors the length of the street
fling their windows wide open in the vain hope of admitting a breeze. The air smells singed. At first the voices are no more
than a whisper. I have gone to the front of the house to put out the rubbish and, this being prime soap time, I assume the
noise is scripted and broadcast. One of the voices is male, one female, but this early in the argument restraint still keeps
them low if urgent, and I cannot tell one word from another even if I wanted to.


Within half an hour, shrieks of indignation and hoots of ridicule are bouncing off our terraced, slate-clad walls, then back
onto the curlicued red-brick mansions opposite. The voices seem to be amplified in the still air, and accusation and counteraccusation
flow in through the open windows undistorted and devastating. By this point I am kneeling on the floor wrestling the twins
into their pajamas but I am soon distracted by the yelling. I sit back on my heels to listen, letting go of Hannah, who crawls
off cheerfully, believing herself for once victorious in the nightly struggle to go to bed naked. I am tempted to go to the
window to get a better sense of where the voices are coming from, but they have enough problems without me sticking my nose
in.


“Of course you don't understand, you selfish bastard,” a woman screams, “you won't let me …” Here her voice continues, something
about spending money, but a man's voice is overlaid, calling the woman a bitch repeatedly until she falls silent. Unchallenged
now by her, he gains in volume. “You're a lying, blood-sucking whore,” he yells, his voice breaking with emotion, muttering
something that I cannot hear, then roaring, “What the fuck's been going on in my house?”


“Your house? Your …” She—whoever she is—comes back at him enraged, but then a third voice intervenes, the light, anxious tones
of a child, and there is no more screaming.


I grimace, my mind's eye in someone else's sitting room, windows open, a frightened girl or boy summoning the courage to say
something, anything, to shut his parents up. The argument is ugly even at a distance. The red cloud of rage lifts, of course,
apologies can be made, accusations retracted. In this case, however, it is difficult to see how life can continue as normal,
unless calling your wife a lying whore is normal.


My neighbors, both sides of the street, are a modest lot. They don't yell in public, they don't venture into the street naked,
and God forbid they'd smile a hello to a stranger, but weather like this strips everyone down. We have been promised rain,
but instead it just gets hotter and hotter, the air heavier and heavier for three days in a row. When the rain comes, it will
empty the heavens.




I was depositing William in his crib as the first clap of thunder broke above us and the rain descended like a waterfall,
drumming suddenly against the window like someone trying to get in. I wondered whether our house was waterproof. It seemed
unlikely that such a flimsy structure could be anything more than splashproof. It is perhaps overstating it even to call it
a house. The real estate agent talked about “council house chic.” God knows how long it took him to dream that one up. It's
like a little flat turned vertical, standing upright on its own patch of earth, its walls barely solid enough to hold it up.
There are two feet of paved ground in front with a low concrete wall that has no function except to serve as our boundary,
and a tiny garden at the back fenced with flimsy wood and chicken wire. Inside, mostly by virtue of its size, the house is
cozy. I've had no time to do much to it, so it remains much as it was when I bought it, complete with garish paintwork and
stained carpets. The best and warmest thing about it is an open fireplace. The agency advertised it as a “period feature,”
and it is indeed a Victorian fireplace. Of course when the house was built forty years ago that particular Victoria was long
gone.


This is not the house I would have chosen. It is the house I could afford. A single income, double child-care bills, and zero
windfall on the horizon all added up to the smallest mortgage I could find. Our house and its little string of neighbors are
a gray British version of shanty-town shacks compared to the red-brick Victoriana that graces the opposite pavement. They
have intruder alarms and leaded windows like jewels in their heavy wooden doors. I have a doorbell that plays “Greensleeves”
off-key and a cracked window at the back where next door's eleven-year-old hit it with a tennis ball.


By eight o'clock I'd fed, bathed, and wrestled Hannah and William into their cribs, and plugged bottles of milk into their
rosebud mouths. I felt as though I'd run a marathon. I wiped the sticky remains of the twins' teatime from my sleeves, poured
myself a glass of merlot, and twitched the sitting-room curtain open, perching on the arm of the chair to watch the storm.
My back was aching and I rolled my shoulders, feeling the crunch at the base of my neck, trying to ease the stress. The combined
weight of the twins was now much the same as that of a baby elephant. Outside the ominously oppressive day had given way to
an angry night. The trees and shrubs in the gardens opposite shuddered, and rain fell in great swathes through the orange
darkness, tossed and twisted by the wind.


The family who lived opposite hadn't pulled their curtains shut yet, and I could see the cool blue of their high walls, the
brass picture lights above framed prints. I frowned. Was it my imagination or could I hear voices again, straining over the
storm. Surely everyone would have shut their windows. Unless, I thought, one was too distraught to notice a gale howling outside.
A fork of lightning lit up the sky and then, just a moment later, a clap of thunder burst and shook my frail little house.
Still, unlikely as it was, my ears caught at fractions of words, at shrieks and wails that seemed too human to belong to the
storm. I gazed up the street, then down it, but the rain had driven everyone inside.


I am about to pull the curtains and shut out the weather when, at the margin of my vision, a woman falls out of the sky. I
do not see how it began. All I see is that she falls, feet first but tipping forward, arms stretched out as if to break her
fall, her clothes as chaotically twisted and tossed as the rain, and the weight of her body carrying her down through the
currents of air straight to the earth like an anchor. For a moment my brain cannot register what my eyes quite clearly see,
what my ears hear: a scream that tangles with the whine of the wind so that they become one miserable chord. The moment she
hits the ground the sound becomes thin again, just the wind on its own once more. The weather and everything else of no consequence
is fixed in my mind for good now because of that moment of violence; scar tissue forming around the memory.


I stood up in agitation, my heart pounding, eyes wide, staring at the heap in the pathway of the house on the other side of
the road. What should I do? What could I do? Energy flooded to my muscles and I ran, flinging open my front door, damp air
filling my lungs. I reached her, squatted down, had to force myself to look closely. Until that point some part of me believed
that the wind and the rain must have played a trick on my ears and on my eyes, but it was as I feared. The broken heap was,
or had been, a woman. She was wearing something flowing and loose that was now caught around limbs that had broken on impact,
and long hair covered her head, her face turned into the ground. The rain was driving against the top of my own head, pouring
down into my eyes and I had to peer, eyes half shut, down at her. It seemed to me that another, darker, liquid was seeping
from under her head, but I couldn't be sure. I couldn't tell if she was breathing so I laid my fingertips lightly on her back
to see whether I could sense a rise and fall. I could detect nothing.


I stretched my neck back, straining my eyes against the darkness and the elements. Where had she come from? On the third story
a tiny wrought-iron balcony extended from the brickwork. I got to my feet, my hair hanging in wet ropes across my face. I
could do nothing for her. If she was still alive she would drown if she stayed here. I was wasting time. She needed an ambulance.
I took four paces to the front door and rapped on it, then kept my finger pressed on the doorbell. There was just one anonymous
doorbell, which meant the house was not divided into flats, that it was occupied by one family or one person, perhaps the
one person who lay shattered on the ground behind me. Yet even as the thought occurred to me I knew it was not the case, knew
I'd seen other people letting themselves in at this door. A big well-dressed man, grungy teenagers, these were the images
that came to mind. No one, however, came to the door.


The noise of the rain, like waves slamming against a shoreline, meant I could not hear whether there was movement inside the
house. I took a step back. There was only one light on as far as I could see, and that was in the third-floor room with the
balcony. I stepped back farther, and I could see now that there were French windows opening out and that drapes of some light
fabric had been lifted by the wind and were blowing into the night. I banged on the door again, shouted, then gave up. I turned
back toward my house, making for the nearest telephone, then stopped dead in my tracks. My front door had blown shut. Hannah
and William were inside. My hands went to my head, clutching great handfuls of sopping hair.


“Shit, shit, shit,” I heard myself shout.

I had left them safe in bed, of course, but at that moment, in the face of sudden death, neither fire nor earthquake seemed
impossible or even unlikely. I vaulted the brick wall between the house with the pale blue walls and its neighbor. I hammered
on the door with one hand while I pressed the bell with the other. For a moment I thought I heard footsteps, but then nothing.
No one. I could have sworn someone was on the other side of the door.


“Please open the door,” I shouted. “I need your help.”

Still nothing.

“It's an emergency,” I yelled.

I gave up, climbed over the fence into the next pathway, pounded on that door with the same results, gave up, clambered over
a low hedge, tried again. There were three bells here, three flats. I pressed all three with my palm, kept pressing and thumping
at the door, my fist numb. All of a sudden the door opened and a young man peered out, outraged at my invasion. We had passed
each other in the street many times but never so much as nodded hello. Tall and athletic, with cropped hair, he was dressed
in a short raincoat, carrying an umbrella, dry as a bone, getting ready to venture out and get soaked.


“For Christ's sake, what—?” He took in my bedraggled state, my crazed eyes, and I saw him want to close the door in my face.
But he didn't. Anyway I wasn't going to let him. I was half inside already.


“Your phone,” I gasped, dripping all over his threshold. “I have to phone for an ambulance.”

He let me shove past him and stood awkwardly, hands pushed angrily into his pockets, while I grabbed the phone on the hall
table and dialed 999. All the time I spoke to emergency services, telling them about the woman who had fallen, and about my
house locked with my children inside, I was looking at him, needing him to understand too and to help me. He had the sense
to keep quiet, anyway, while I spoke. The anger lifted from his face as he listened, and the expression was replaced by one
of shock. By the time I'd given my address, he was heading out into the rain, leaving me alone in his hallway.


I hung up, then looked around. How long would it take them to get here? I couldn't wait. There was nothing but the hall table,
a spindly antique affair about a foot square, no room for anything but the telephone, which I tipped onto the floor. I lifted
the table, liking the look of its long legs, and I ran back across the road with my loot. The man had stopped by the woman,
bending over her. I didn't stop to see what he was doing. I stepped over my front wall and swung the table at the window,
holding it by its legs, leaving the wooden edge of the tabletop to do its demolition work and turning my face away as the
glass shattered. I bashed around a bit more to get rid of the shards of glass, then dropped what was left of the table. It
was more delicate than I'd thought, and it hadn't fared well. I pulled off my sweater and wrapped it around my hands for protection,
then pulled myself carefully over the sill and into my sitting room. I pounded up the stairs and into the tiny room that was
the twins' bedroom. Inside all was quiet, two cotton-suited bottoms stuck in the air, faces half-hidden in the mattress, lips
working, dreaming of sucking.


I stood there for a minute just looking down at them, catching my breath. So peaceful. I had an overwhelming desire to stay
here and stand guard over them. Outside I heard sirens approaching. I turned and left the room. I ran back down the stairs,
grabbed my keys from the kitchen table and, just to make double sure, wedged open my front door with a copy of the Guardian.

The street was full of flashing blue lights. Not only that: This street, abandoned as a ghost town when I had needed help,
when I had shouted and yelled for help, was now as populated as a rush-hour station. Faces peered from windows and from behind
half-open front doors. The more adventurous had grabbed some sort of protective clothing and made their way into the street,
where they stood in ones and twos, not really knowing how to talk to each other, not wanting to be involved, curious nevertheless
and therefore conversing. How to form a community, I thought. Kill one of them.


Suddenly the door of the house from which the woman had fallen burst open. A slight figure raced from it and before anyone
could move, hurled itself on the woman's body. An animal cry rose into the night sky and my blood ran cold. The small figure,
scarcely more than a child, was hugging the limp flesh, burying his face in her wet hair, for all the world as though he was
trying to breathe life back into her. Then the police and paramedics closed in, forcing the boy away, protecting what could
no longer be protected. He tried to fight them off, pint-sized fists pummeling the living bodies that dragged him tenderly
from the dead. The rain hissed down, drowning his shrieks and drenching us all.




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.


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 we'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. . .