Adam parked Kit’s battered old VW Golf in the little street in Hammersmith by the river. It was one in the morning and he had been on a round trip, via Ealing, to see his grandparents’ old house. He had set it on fire before leaving the UK a year before and it was boarded up, standing like a blackened, rotten tooth in an otherwise perfect mouth. He was still technically the legal owner but there was no chance of his ever being able to reclaim it. No doubt the council would eventually take possession. Sitting outside in the road, looking up at it and remembering the events that had led up to his escape abroad, he had felt extraordinarily detached. The thirty-plus years he had endured there, both with his grandparents and then after their deaths on his own, along with the final, absurdly dramatic denouement, meant nothing. He was dead to it all and everything it represented. It was as though the house embodied somebody else’s foul history rather than his own.
Checking that there was nobody around, he got out of the car and locked it. It had been raining and as he walked along the street, his footsteps echoed on the wet pavement. A cat scuttled away under a car, the only sign of life. The houses were small and low-built, traditional two up, two down. What estate agents referred to picturesquely as ‘cottages’, trying to turn their mean proportions into a virtue. He had never been to the house before but he had memorised the address and he remembered what she had told him a while back about the layout when he had asked her to describe it. Sitting room and study on the ground floor, with a kitchen at the back. Two bedrooms and a bathroom on the first floor. It had been a pleasant enough dinner, until she had later spoiled it.
He stopped in front of the house, on the opposite side of the street, and looked up. It was dark inside, the curtains on both floors still open. She slept at the front, he remembered her saying. So she wasn’t back home yet. He had the keys in his pocket and for a moment he fancied letting himself in and having a snoop around. But he wasn’t ready yet. He wasn’t quite there. Fucking Gunner was putting him off his stride, making him feel unusually nervous. No point in doing something spur of the moment and risk ruining things. He would come back again when he was better prepared.