Marty handed over the money and said yes to everything. The mini-van was white and clean and, from the registration, only a year old. He drove it a few miles, parking outside a barber’s shop where he had his hair and beard cut off and his chin and upper lip closely shaved. He hadn’t really seen his own face for three years and he had forgotten what a small chin he had and what hollow cheeks. Depilation didn’t improve his appearance, though the barber insisted it did. At any rate, the Relyacar girl wouldn’t know him again. His own mother wouldn’t.

There was something else he had to do or buy, but he couldn’t remember what it was, so he drove back to pick up Nigel. He went over Battersea Bridge and up through Kensington and Kensal Rise and Willesden to Cricklewood where Nigel was waiting for him in Chichele Road.

‘Christ,’ said Nigel, ‘you look a real freak. You look like one of those Hare Krishna guys.’

Marty was a good driver. He had driven for his living while Nigel’s experience consisted only in taking out his father’s automatic Triumph, and he had never driven a car with an ordinary manual gear shift. Nor did he know London particularly well, but that didn’t stop him ordering Marty to take the North Circular Road. Marty had already decided to do so. Still, he wasn’t going to be pushed around, not he, and to show off his knowledge he went by a much longer and tortuous route over Hampstead Heath and through Highgate and Tottenham and Walthamstow. Thus it was well after eleven before they were out of London and reaching Brentwood.

When they were on the Chelmsford bypass, Nigel said, ‘The shooter’s OK and you’ve got your stocking. We can stuff the bread in this carrier. Let’s have a look at the gloves.’

Marty swore. ‘I knew there was something.’

Nigel was about to lay into him when he realized that all this time Marty had been driving the van with ungloved hands, and that he too had put his ungloved hands on the doors and the dashboard shelf and the window catches, so all he said was, ‘We’ll have to stop in Colchester and get gloves and we’ll have to wipe this vehicle over inside.’

‘We can’t stop,’ said Marty. ‘It’s half-eleven now.’

‘We have to, you stupid bastard. It wouldn’t be half-eleven if you hadn’t taken us all round the houses.’

It is twenty-three miles from Chelmsford to Colchester, and Marty made it in twenty minutes, somewhat to the distress of the mini-van’s engine. But there is virtually no on-street parking in Colchester whose narrow twisty streets evince its reputation as England’s oldest recorded town. They had to go into a multi-storey car park, up to the third level, and then hunt for Woolworth’s.

When the gloves were bought, woollen ones because cash was running short, they found they had nothing with which to wipe the interior of the van. Neither of them had handkerchiefs, so Nigel took off one of his socks. The rain, of which there had been no sign in London, was lashing down.

‘It’s twenty past twelve,’ said Marty. ‘We’ll never make it. We’d better do it Wednesday instead.’

‘Look, little brain,’ Nigel shouted, ‘don’t give me a hard time, d’you mind? How can we do it Wednesday? What’re we going to use for bread? Just drive the bugger and don’t give me grief all the goddamned time.’

The narrower roads to Childon did not admit of driving at seventy miles an hour, but Marty, his hands in green knitted gloves, did make it. They put the van in the lane behind the bank, up against the flint wall. Nigel got out and came cautiously to the gap in the wall, and there he was rewarded.

A middle-aged man, thin, paunchy, with greased-down hair, came out of the back door and got into the car that stood on the forecourt.

Half an hour before, Mrs Burroughs had come into the bank with a cheque drawn on the account of a firm of solicitors for twelve thousand pounds. She didn’t explain its source but her manner was more high-handed than usual. Alan supposed it was a legacy and advised her not to put it in her deposit account but to open a new account under the Anglian-Victoria Treasure Trove scheme which gave a higher rate of interest. Mrs Burroughs said offendedly that she couldn’t possibly do that without consulting her husband. She would phone him at his office and come back at two.

The idea of Mrs Burroughs, who lived in a huge house outside Childon and had a Scimitar car and a mink coat, acquiring still more wealth, depressed him so much that he broke his new rule and took the three thousand out of the safe while Joyce was busy talking about the price of beef with Mr Wolford. Strange to think, as he often did, that it was only paper, only pictures of the Queen and a dead Prime Minister and a sort of super-nurse, but that it could do so much, buy so much, buy happiness and freedom and peace and silence. He tore one of the portraits of Florence Nightingale in half just to see what it felt like to do that, and then he had to mend it with Sellotape.

He heard Mr Wolford go. There was no one else in the bank now and it was nearly ten to one. Joyce might easily come into his office, so he put the money into a drawer and went out to the lavatory where there was a washbasin to wash the money dirt off his hands. It looked like more rain was coming, but he’d go out just the same, maybe up to Childon Fen where the first primroses would be coming out and the windflowers.

Joyce was tidying up her till.

‘Mr Groombridge, is this all right? Mr Wolford filled in the counterfoil and did the carbon for the bank copy. I don’t know why I never saw it. Shall I give him a ring?’

Alan looked at the slip from the paying-in book. ‘No, that’s OK. So long as it’s come out clear and it has. I’m off to lunch now, Joyce.’

‘Don’t get wet,’ said Joyce. ‘It’s going to pour. It’s come over ever so black.’

He wondered if she speculated as to where he went. She couldn’t suppose he took the car just to the Childon Arms. But perhaps she didn’t notice whether he took the car or not. He walked out to it now, the back door locking automatically behind him, and got into the driving seat – and remembered that the three thousand pounds was still in his desk drawer.

She wouldn’t open the drawer. But the thought of it there and not in the safe where it should have been, would spoil for him all the peace and seclusion of Childon Fen. After all, she knew his combination, if she still remembered it, just as he knew hers. Better put it away. He went back and into his office, pushed to but didn’t quite close the door into the bank, and softly opened the drawer.

While he was doing so, at precisely one o’clock, Joyce came out from behind the metal grille, crossed the floor of the bank and came face to face with Marty Foster and Nigel Thaxby. They were between the open oak door and the closed glass door and each was trying to pull a black nylon stocking over his head. They hadn’t dared do this before they got into the porch, they had never rehearsed the procedure, and the stockings were wet because the threatening rain had come in a violent cascade during their progress from the van to the bank.

Joyce didn’t scream. She let out a sort of hoarse shout and leapt for the glass door and the key that would lock it.

Nigel would have turned and run then, for the stocking was only pulled grotesquely over his head like a cap, but Marty dropped his stocking and charged at the door, bursting it open so that Joyce stumbled back. He seized her and put his hand over her mouth and jammed the gun into her side and told her to shut up or she was dead.

Nigel followed him in quite slowly. Already he was thinking, she’s seen our faces, she’s seen us. But he closed the oak door behind him and locked and bolted it. He closed and locked the glass door and walked up and stood in front of Joyce. Marty took his hand from her mouth but kept the gun where it was. She looked at them in silence, and her face was very pale. She looked at them as if she were studying what they looked like.