From the office Alan Groombridge heard Joyce shout and he heard Marty’s threat. He knew at once what was happening and he remembered, on a catch of breath, that conversation with Wilfred Summitt last Wednesday. His hands tightened on the bundle of notes, the three thousand pounds.

The Anglian-Victoria directed its staff to put up no resistance. If they could they were to depress with their feet one of the alarm buttons. The alarms were on a direct line to Stantwich police station where they set in motion a flashing light alert system. If they couldn’t reach an alarm, and in Joyce’s case it was perhaps impossible, they were to comply with the demands of the intruders. There was an alarm button under each till and another under Alan’s desk. He backed his right foot and put his heel to it, held his heel above it, and heard a voice say:

‘We know you’re on your own. We saw the manager go out.’

Where had he heard that voice before, that curious and ugly mixture of cockney and Suffolk? He was sure he had heard it and recently. It was a very memorable voice because the combination of broad flat vowels with slurred or dropped consonants was so unusual. Had he heard it in the bank? Out shopping? Then the sense of the words struck him and he edged his foot forward again. They thought he was out, they must have seen him get into his car. Now he could depress the alarm without their having the faintest idea he had done so, and there-by, if he was very clever, save three thousand of the bank’s money. Maybe save all of it once he’d remembered who that strange voice belonged to.

‘Let’s see what’s in the tills, doll.’

A different voice, with a disc jockey’s intonation. He heard the tills opened. His foot went back again, feeling for the button embedded in the carpet. From outside there came a clatter of coin. A thousand, give or take a little, would be in those tills. He lifted his heel. It was all very well, that plan of his, but suppose he did save the three thousand, suppose he stuffed it in the clothes cupboard before they came in, how was he going to explain to the bank that he had been able to do so?

He couldn’t hear a sound from Joyce. He lowered his heel, raised it again.

‘Now the safe,’ the Suffolk or Suffolk-cockney voice said.

To reach it they must pass through the office. He couldn’t press the alarm, not just like that, not without thinking things out. There was no legitimate reason why he should have been in his office with three thousand pounds in his hands. And he couldn’t say he’d opened the safe and taken it out when he heard them come in because he wasn’t supposed to know Joyce’s combination. And if he’d been able to save three, why not five?

Any minute now and they would come into the office. They would stuff the notes and the coin – if they bothered with the coin – into their bag and then come straight through here. He pulled open the door of the cupboard and flattened himself against its back behind Joyce’s evening dress, the hem of which touched the floor. Madam, is there any armour in your chamber that I might cover my poor body withal . . . ?

He had scarcely pulled the door closed after him when he heard Joyce cry out.

‘Don’t! Don’t touch me!’ And there was a clatter as of something kicked across the floor.

Lancelot’s words reminded him of the questions he had asked himself on Saturday night. Would he ever have such panache, such proud courage? Now was the time. She was only twenty. She was a girl. Never mind the bank’s suspicions, never mind now what anyone thought. His first duty was to rescue Joyce or at least stand with her and support her. He fumbled through the folds of the dress to open the door. He wasn’t afraid. With a vague wry amusement, he thought that he wasn’t afraid because he didn’t mind if they killed him, he had nothing to live for. Perhaps all his life with its boredom, its pain and its futility, had simply been designed to lead up to this moment, meeting death on a wet afternoon for seven thousand pounds.

He would leave the money in the cupboard – he had thrust it into the pockets of his raincoat which hung beside Joyce’s dress – and go out and face them. They wouldn’t think of looking in his raincoat, and later he’d think up an explanation for the bank. If there was a later. The important thing now was to go out to them, and this might even create a diversion in which Joyce could escape.

But before he touched the door, something very curious happened. He felt into the pockets to make sure none of the notes was sticking out and against his hands the money felt alive, pulsating almost, or as if it were a chemical that reacted at the contact with flesh. Energy seemed to come from it, rays of power, that travelled, tingling, up his arms. There were sounds out there. They had got the safe open. He heard rustling noises and thumps and voices arguing, and yet he did not hear them. He was aware only of the money alive between and around his fingers. He gasped and clenched his hands, for he knew then that he could not leave the money. It was his. By his daily involvement with it, he had made it his and he could not leave it.

Someone had come into the office. The drawers of his desk were pulled out and emptied on to the floor. He stood rigid with his hands in the coat pockets, and the cupboard door was flung open.

He could see nothing through the dark folds of the dress. He held his breath. The door closed again and Joyce swore at them. Never had he thought he would hear Joyce use that word, but he honoured her for it. She screamed and then she made no more sound. The only sound was the steady roar of rain drumming on the pantiled roof, and then, after a while, the noise of a car or van engine starting up.

He waited. One of them had come back. The strange voice was grumbling and muttering out there, but not for long. The back door slammed. Had they gone? He could only be sure by coming out. Loosening his hold on the money, he thought he would have to go out, he couldn’t stay in that cupboard for the rest of his life. And Joyce must be somewhere out there, bound and gagged probably. He would explain to her that when he had heard them enter the bank he had taken as much money as he had time to save out of the safe. She would think him a coward, but that didn’t matter because he knew he hadn’t been a coward, he had been something else he couldn’t analyse. It was a wrench, painful almost, to withdraw his hands from his pockets, but he did withdraw them, and he pushed open the door and stepped out.

The desk drawers were on the floor and their contents spilt. Joyce wasn’t in the office or in the room where the safe was. The door of the safe was open and it was empty. They must have left her in the main part of the bank. He hesitated. He wiped his forehead on which sweat was standing. Something had happened to him in that cupboard, he thought, he had gone mad, mentally he had broken down. The idea came to him that perhaps it was the life he led which at last had broken him. He went on being mad. He took the money out of his coat pockets and laid it in the safe. He went to the back door and opened it quietly, looking out at the teeming rain and his car standing in the dancing, rain-pounded puddles. Then he slammed the door quite hard as if he had just come in, and he walked quite lightly and innocently through to where Joyce must be lying.

She wasn’t there. The tills were pulled out. He looked in the lavatory. She wasn’t there either. While he was in the cupboard, hesitating, she must have gone off to get help. Without her coat, which was also in the cupboard, but you don’t think of rain at a time like that. Over and over to himself he said, I was out at lunch, I came back, I didn’t know what had happened, I was out at lunch . . .

Why had she gone instead of pressing one of the alarm buttons? He couldn’t think of a reason. The clock above the currency exchange rate board told him it was twenty-five past one and the date 4 March. He had gone out to lunch, he had come back and found the safe open, half the money gone, Joyce gone . . . What would be the natural thing to do? Give the alarm, of course.