William Boyd - Restless

This was a lie, she thought. He just doesn't want me to think this is the end of the road.

She reached for the door latch with her left hand and with her right looped a stray lock of hair that had fallen, back behind her ear. A natural gesture, a womanly reflex.

'Switch the lights off,' he said.

She needed light.

'Listen,' she said, 'I have more money.'

The fingers of her right hand that were in her hair touched the rubber eraser on the Mesilla Motor Lodge pencil that she had slipped in amongst her bunched and gathered folds of hair – one of the half-dozen new, sharpened, complimentary pencils that had been laid out on the blotter beside the notepaper and the postcards. New and newly sharpened with the name Mesilla Motor Lodge, Las Cruces, stamped in gold along their sides. This was the pencil she had picked up and slid into her hair as the Mexican peered briefly out of the door, checking on his car.

'I can get you another ten thousand,' she said. 'Easy. In one hour.'

He chuckled. 'Get out.'

She grabbed the sharp pencil in her hair and stabbed him in the left eye.

The pencil went in smoothly and instantly without resistance, almost to its full six-inch length. The man gave a kind of gasp-inhalation and dropped his gun with a clatter. He tried to raise his trembling hands to his eye as if to draw the pencil out then fell back against the door. The end of the pencil with the rubber eraser stuck out an inch above the punctured jelly of his left eyeball. There was no blood. She knew immediately from his absolute stillness that he was dead.

She switched out the lights and stepped out of the car. She was shivering, but not excessively, telling herself that she had probably been a minute or two from her own death – the moment of life-or-death exchange – she felt no shock, no horror, at what she had done to this man. She forced herself away from that topic and tried to be rational: what now? What next? Run away? Perhaps there was something to be salvaged from this disaster: one step at a time, use your brain, she said to herself – think. Think.

She climbed back into the car and drove it a few yards off the road behind a clump of greasewood bushes and killed the lights. Sitting there in the dark beside the dead Mexican she methodically considered her options. She switched on the interior light above the rear-view mirror and picked up the gun, using her handkerchief to keep her prints off it. She opened his jacket and replaced it in his shoulder holster. There was still no blood from his wound, not even a trickle – just the end of a pencil sticking out of his unblinking eye.

She went through his pockets and found his wallet and his identification: Deputy Inspector Luis de Baca. She also found some money, a letter and a bill of sale from a hardware store in Ciudad Juárez. She put everything back. A Mexican policeman would have been her killer: it made no sense at all. She switched off the light again and carried on thinking: she was safe for a short while, she knew – she could flee back to her friends one way or another now – but tracks had to be covered.

She stepped out of the car again and paced about thinking, planning. There was a sickle moon casting no light and it was getting colder. She hugged her arms to her chest, crouching down at one stage when a truck bumped along the road to Leopold but the sweep of its headlights didn't come close. A plan began to form slowly and she teased it out in her mind, second-guessing, raising objections, considering advantages and disadvantages. She opened the boot of the car and found a can of oil, a rope and a spade. In the dashboard glove compartment was a flashlight, some cigarettes and chewing gum. It seemed to be his own car.

She walked a few paces along the road to Leopold where the corner was and saw, with the flashlight, that the arroyo at the bend was little more than a gulley about twenty feet deep. She started the car, switching on the headlights and drove to the edge, gunning the engine as she left the road, making the wheels spin, scattering gravel. She let the car roll to the very edge of the gulley and put on the handbrake. She made a final check, picked up her bag and stepped out, releasing the handbrake as she did so. The car began to move forward slowly and she ran round the back and pushed. The car toppled over the gulley rim and she listened to the heavy thump and tear of metal as it nosedived to the gulley floor. She heard the windscreen pop out and the shatter of glass.

With the flashlight she picked her way down to the wreck. One headlight was still on and the hood had buckled and sprung open. There was a smell of petrol leaking and the car had canted over forty-five degrees on the passenger side. She was able to wrench open the driver's door and put the gear lever into fourth. Luis de Baca had fallen forward in the descent and smashed his forehead on the dashboard. A small trickle of blood was now running from his eye to his moustache. The moustache filled and began to drip blood on to his shirt. She hauled him over to the driver's side noticing that one of his legs looked broken, skewed at an odd angle. Good, she thought.

She took the map out of her bag and carefully tore a large corner off it, leaving 'LUFTVERK' and the lines for San Antonio and Miami. She put the rest of the map in her bag, then, taking out a pen and spreading the torn corner on the bonnet, wrote notes on it in German: 'Wo befinden sich die Ölreserven für den transatlantischen Verkehr?' and 'Der dritte Gau scheint zu gross zu sein.' In the margin she wrote a small sum adding up some figures: 150,000 plus 35,000 = 185,000 then some meaningless letters and numbers – LBF/3, XPD 77. She smeared the torn corner against de Baca's bloodstained shirt and crumpled it up, then she slipped it under the shoe of his unbroken leg. She put the 3,000 dollars in the glove compartment in the dashboard under a road map and an instruction manual. Then with her handkerchief she wiped down the surfaces and the steering wheel, taking particular care with the gear lever. Finally she heaved de Baca up and propped him against the steering wheel so she could see his face. She knew that what she had to do next would be the hardest but she was so involved in the construction of the accident that she was operating almost automatically, with conscious efficiency. She scattered some windscreen glass over him and snapped off a bent windscreen wiper, tearing away the rubber blade.

She reached for the pencil in his eye and drew it out. It came easily, as if oiled, and with it blood welled up and flowed over the lids. She jammed the end of the windscreen wiper into the wound and stepped backwards. She left the door open and made a final check with the flashlight. Then she picked up her bag, scrambled up the gulley side and walked back along the road towards Highway 80. After about half a mile she left the road and buried the remains of the map, the flashlight and the pencil under a rock. She could see the lights of cars on the highway and the glow of lights from Berdino's main street. She headed off again. She knew what she had to do next: call the police and anonymously report a crashed car in a gulley between the highway and Leopold. A taxi would take her back to the Mesilla Motor Lodge. She would pay her bill and drive through the night to Albuquerque. She had done everything she could but she could not stop thinking as she walked into a Texaco gas station on the outskirts of Berdino – the truth had to be faced: someone, somehow, had betrayed her.

I STOOD IN FRONT of David Bomberg's portrait of Lucas Romer for a good twenty minutes, searching for clues, I suppose, and also trying to identify the man my mother had met in 1939 in order to distinguish him from the man I was about to meet in 1976.