By this time the red Vauxhall had passed through Childon on its way to Stantwich. Its driver was a young man called Peter Johns who was taking his mother to visit her sister in Stantwich General Hospital. They met a police car with its blue lamp on and its siren blaring, indeed they came closer to colliding with it than they had done with the mini-van, and these two near-misses afforded them a subject for conversation all the way to the hospital.

At ten to three the police called on Mrs Elizabeth Culver to tell her the bank had been robbed and her daughter was missing. Mrs Culver said it was kind of them to come and tell her so promptly, and they said they would fetch her husband who was a factory foreman on the Stantwich industrial estate. She went upstairs and put back into her wardrobe the dress she had been going to wear that evening, and then she phoned the Toll House Hotel to tell them to cancel the arrangements for the silver wedding party. She meant to phone her sisters too and her brother and the woman who, twenty-five years before, had been her bridesmaid, but she found she was unable to do this. Her husband came in half an hour later and found her sitting on the bed, staring silently at the wardrobe, tears streaming down her face.

Pamela Groombridge was ironing Alan’s shirts and intermittently discussing with her father why the phone hadn’t been answered when she rang the bank at twenty to two and two o’clock and again at three. In between discussing this she was thinking about an article she had read telling you how to put coloured transfers on ceramic tiles.

Wilfred Summitt was drinking tea. He said that he expected Alan had been out for his dinner.

‘He never goes out,’ said Pam. ‘You know that, you were sitting here when I was cutting his sandwiches. Anyway, that girl would be there, that Joyce.’

‘The phone’s gone phut,’ said Pop. ‘That’s what it is, the phone’s out of order. It’s on account of the lines being overloaded. If I had my way, only responsible ratepayers over thirty’d be allowed to have phones.’

‘I don’t know. I think it’s funny. I’ll wait till half-past and then I’ll try it again.’

Pop said to mark his words, the phone was out of order, gone phut, kaput, which wouldn’t happen if the army took over, and what was wanted was Winston Churchill to come back to life and Field Marshal Montgomery to help him, good old Monty, under the Queen of course, under Her Majesty. Or it just could be the rain, coming down cats and dogs it was, coming down like stair-rods. Pam didn’t answer him. She was wondering if the colour on those transfers would be permanent or if it would come off when you washed them. She would like to try them in her own bathroom, but not if the colour came off, no thanks, that would look worse than plain white.

The doorbell rang.

‘I hope that’s not Linda Kitson,’ said Pam. ‘I don’t want to have to stop and get nattering to her.’

She went to the door, and the policeman and the police-woman told her the bank had been robbed and it seemed that the robbers had taken her husband and Joyce Culver with them.

‘Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God,’ said Pam, and she went on saying it and sometimes screaming it while the policeman fetched Wendy Heysham and the policewoman made tea. Pam knocked over the tea and took the duty-free Bristol Cream out of the sideboard and poured a whole tumblerful and drank it at a gulp.

They fetched Christopher from the estate agent’s and when he came in Pam was half-drunk and banging her fists on her knees and shouting, ‘Oh, God, oh, God.’ Neither the police-woman nor Wendy Heysham could do anything with her. Christopher gave her another tumblerful of sherry in the hope it would shut her up, while Wilfred Summitt marched up and down, declaiming that hanging was too good for them, pole-axing was too good for them. After the electric chair, the pole-axe was his favourite lethal instrument. He would pole-axe them without a trial, he would.

Pam drank the second glass of sherry and passed out.

Wiser than those who had made his escape possible, Alan avoided the narrow lanes. He met few cars, overtook a tractor and a bus. The rain was falling too heavily for him to see the faces of people in other vehicles, so he supposed they would not be able to see his. There wasn’t much petrol in the tank, only about enough to get him down into north Essex, and of course it wouldn’t do to stop at a petrol station.

His body was still doing all the work, and that level of consciousness which deals only with practical matters. He couldn’t yet think of what he had done, it was too enormous, and he didn’t want to. He concentrated on the road and the heavy rain. At the Hadleigh turn he came out on to the A12 and headed for Colchester. The petrol gauge showed that his fuel was getting dangerously low, but in ten minutes he was on the Colchester bypass. He turned left at the North Hill roundabout and drove up North Hill. There was a car park off to the left here behind St Runwald’s Street. He put the car in the car park which was unattended, took out his sandwiches, locked the car and dropped the sandwiches in a litter bin. Now what? Once they had found his car, they would ask at the station and the booking office clerk would remember him and remember that he had passed through alone. So he made for the bus station instead where he caught a bus to Marks Tey. There he boarded a stopping train to London. His coat, which was of the kind that is known as showerproof and anyway was very old, had let the rain right through to his suit. The money had got damp. As soon as he had got to wherever he was going, he would spread the notes out and dry them.

There were only a few other people in the long carriage, a woman with two small boys, a young man. The young man looked much the same as any other dark-haired boy of twenty with a beard, but as soon as Alan saw him he remembered where he had heard that ugly Suffolk-cockney accent before. Indeed, so great was the resemblance that he found himself glancing at the boy’s hands which lay slackly on his knees. But of course the hands were whole, there was no mutilation of the right forefinger, no distortion of the nail.

The first time he had heard that voice it had asked him for twenty five-pence pieces for a pound note. He had pushed the coins across the counter, looked at the young bearded face, thought, Am I being offhand, discourteous, because he’s young? So he had put the coins into a bag and for a brief instant, but long enough to register, seen the deformed finger close over it and scoop it into the palm of the hand.

Suppose he had remembered sooner, this clue the police would seize on, would it have stopped him? He thought not. And now? Now he was in it as much as the man with the beard, the strange voice, the walnut fingernail.

Some sort of meeting was in progress in the village hall at Capel St Paul, and among the cars parked in puddles on the village green were two Ford Escorts, a yellow and a silver-blue. The fifth key that Marty tried from his bunch unlocked the yellow one, but when he switched on the ignition he found there was only about a gallon of petrol in the tank. He gave that up and tried the silver-blue one. The tenth key fitted. The pointer on the gauge showed the tank nearly full. The tank of a Ford Escort holds about six gallons, so that would be all right. He drove off quickly, correctly guessing – wasn’t he a country lad himself? – that the meeting had begun at two and would go on till four.

The van he had parked fifty yards up the road. They made Joyce get out at gunpoint and get into the Ford, and Marty drove the van down a lane and left it under some bushes at the side of a wood. There was about as much chance of anyone seeing them on a wet March afternoon in Capel St Paul as there would have been on the moon. Marty felt rather pleased with himself, his nervousness for a while allayed.