William Boyd - Restless

'How awful… Drunk driver? Joy-rider?'

'We don't know.' She tossed the magazine on the grass. 'The driver of the car ran away. They haven't found him yet.'

'Can't they identify him from the car?'

'The car was stolen.'

'I see… But what's it got to do with you.'

She turned to me. 'Doesn't it make you think? I've been in a wheelchair recently. I often shop in Chipping Norton.'

I had to laugh. 'Oh, come on ,' I said.

She looked at me: her gaze steady, unfriendly. 'You still don't understand, do you?' she said. 'Even after everything I've told you. You don't understand how they operate.'

I finished my whisky – I wasn't going down this tortuously twisting road, that was for sure.

'We'd better go,' I said, diplomatically. 'Thanks for looking after the boy. Did he behave well?'

'Impeccably. Excellent company.'

I called Jochen away from his hedgehog studies and we spent ten minutes gathering up his widely dispersed belongings. When I went into the kitchen I noticed there was a small assembly of packaged foodstuffs on the table: a thermos flask, a Tupperware container with sandwiches inside, two apples and a packet of biscuits. Odd, I thought, as I picked up toy cars from the floor, anyone would think she was about to go off on a picnic. Then Jochen called me, saying he couldn't find his gun.

Eventually we loaded the car and said goodbye. Jochen kissed his granny and when I kissed my mother she stood stiff – everything was too strange today, making no sense. I had to leave first, then I would tackle the anomalies.

'Are you coming into town next week?' I asked, nicely, in a friendly way, thinking I would have lunch with her.

'No.'

'Fine.' I opened the car door. 'Bye, Sal. I'll call.'

Then she reached for me and hugged me, hard. 'Goodbye, darling,' she said and I felt her dry lips on my cheek. This was even odder; she hugged me about once every three years.

Jochen and I drove away from the village in silence.

'Did you have a nice time with Granny?' I asked.

'Yes. Sort of

'Be precise.'

'Well, she was very busy, doing things all the time. Cutting things in the garage.'

'Cutting? What things?'

'I don't know. She wouldn't let me go in. But I could hear her sawing.'

'Sawing?… Did she seem different in any way? Was she behaving differently?'

'Be precise.'

'Touché. Did she seem nervous, jumpy, bad-tempered, strange.'

'She's always strange. You know that.'

We drove back to Oxford through the fading light. I saw black flights of rooks taking to the air from stubbly fields as the smoky light of evening blurred and hazed the hedgerows and the darkening copses and woods seemed as dense and impenetrable as if they had been cast from metal. I felt my headache easing and, taking this as a sign of general improvement, I remembered that I had a bottle of Mateus Rosé in the fridge. Saturday night in, telly on, twenty cigarettes and a bottle of Mateus Rosé: how could life get any better?

We ate supper (there was no sign of Ludger and Ilse) and watched a variety show on television – bad singers, clumsy dancers, I thought – and I put Jochen to bed. Now I could drink my wine and smoke a couple of cigarettes. But, instead, twenty minutes after I had washed up the dishes, I was still sitting in the kitchen, a mug of black coffee in front of me, thinking about my mother and her life.

On Sunday morning I felt about a hundred per cent better but my thoughts still kept returning to the cottage and my mother's behaviour the day before: the edginess, the paranoia, the packed picnic, the untypical touchy-feeliness… What was going on? Where could she be going with her sandwiches and thermos – and made up the night before, which would seem to indicate an early start. If she was planning a trip, why not tell me about it? And if she didn't want me to know, why leave the picnic out in such prominent display? And then I realised.

Jochen accepted the new arrangements to his Sunday with good grace. In the car we sang songs to pass the time: 'One Man Went to Mow', 'Ten Green Bottles', 'The Quartermaster's Store', 'The Happy Wanderer', ' Tipperary ' – these were songs my father had sung to me as a child, his deep vibrating bass filling the car. Like me, Jochen had a terrible voice – completely out of tune – but we sang along, lustily, carelessly, united in our dissonance.

'Why are we going back?' he asked between verses. 'We never go back the next day.'

'Because I forgot something, forgot to ask Granny something.'

'You could speak to her on the phone.'

'No. I have to speak to her, face to face.'

'I suppose you're going to have a row,' he said, wearily.

'No, no – don't worry. It's just something I have to ask her.'

And, as I had feared, the car was gone and the house was locked. I retrieved the key from under the flower pot and we went in. As before, everything was neat and orderly – no hint of a rapid departure, no sign of panic or fearful haste. I walked through the rooms slowly, looking around, looking for the clue, the anomaly that she would have left me, and, eventually, I found it.

On these baking sultry nights, who in their right mind would light a fire in their sitting-room? My mother had, clearly, as a cluster of charred logs lay in the grate, the ashes still warm. I crouched down in front of it and used the poker to disturb the pile, looking for the remains of burned papers – perhaps she was destroying some other secret – but there was no sign: instead my eye was caught by one of the logs. I picked it out with the fire tongs and ran it under the tap in the kitchen – it hissed as the cold water rinsed the ashes away – and the glossy cherrywood grain of the wood became immediately evident. I dried it off with some paper towels: there was no mistaking it, even half charred: it was obviously the main part of the butt of a shotgun, sawn off just behind the hand-grip. I went out to the garage where she had a small work-bench and kept her gardening implements (always oiled and neatly racked away). On the bench was a hacksaw and vice and scattered around it the small silver corkscrew frills of worked metal. The shotgun barrels were in a burlap potato sack under the table. She had taken no real care to hide them; indeed, even the shotgun butt had been more scorched than burned away. I felt a weakness in my gut: half of me seemed to want to laugh – half of me felt a powerful urge to shit. I understood, now, that I was beginning to think like her: she had wanted me to come back this Sunday morning to find her gone; she had wanted me to search her house and find these things and now she expected me to draw the obvious conclusion.

I was in London by six o'clock that evening. Jochen was safe with Veronica and Avril and all I had to do was find my mother before she killed Lucas Romer. I took the train to Paddington and, from Paddington, a taxi delivered me to Knightsbridge. I could remember the street that my mother had said Romer lived on, but not the number of the house: Walton Crescent was where I told the taxi driver to take me and drop me close to one end. I could see from my street map of London that there was a Walton Street – that seemed to lead to the very portals of Harrods – and a Walton Crescent that was tucked away behind and to one side. I paid the driver, a hundred yards off, and made my way to the Crescent on foot, trying all the while to think as my mother would think, to second-guess her modus operandi. First things first, I said to myself: check out the neighbourhood.

Walton Crescent breathed money, class, privilege, confidence – but it did so quietly, with subtlety and no ostentation. All the houses looked very much the same until you paid closer attention. There was a crescent-shaped public garden facing the gentle arc of four-storey, creamy stuccoed Georgian terraced houses, each with small front gardens and each with – on the first floor – three huge tall windows giving on to a wrought-iron filigreed balcony. The small gardens were well tended and defiantly green despite the hosepipe ban – I took in box hedges, roses, varieties of clematis and a certain amount of mossy statuary – as I began to walk along its curving length. Almost every house had a burglar alarm and many of the windows were shuttered or secured with sliding grilles behind the glass. I was almost alone on the street apart from a nanny wheeling a pram and a grey-haired gentleman who was cutting a low yew hedge with pedantic, loving care. I saw my mother's white Allegro parked across the street from number 29.