‘We can’t leave her tied up when we get on the A12,’ he said. ‘There’s windows in the back of this motor. Right?’

‘I do have eyes,’ said Nigel, and he climbed over the seat and undid Joyce’s hands and took the gags off her mouth and her eyes. Her face was stiff and marked with weals where the stockings had bitten into her flesh, but she swore at Nigel and she actually spat at him, something she had never in her life done to anyone before. He stuck the gun against her ribs and wiped the spittle off his cheek.

‘You wouldn’t shoot me,’ said Joyce. ‘You wouldn’t dare.’

‘You ever heard the saying that you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb? If we get caught we go inside for life anyway on account of we’ve killed Groombridge. That’s murder.’

‘Get it, do you?’ said Marty. ‘They couldn’t do any more to us if we’d killed a hundred people, so we’re not going to jib at you, are we?’

Joyce said nothing.

‘What’s your name?’ said Nigel.

Joyce said nothing.

‘OK, Miss J. M. Culver, be like that, Jane, Jenny or whatever. I can’t introduce us,’ Nigel said loudly to make sure Marty got the message, ‘for obvious reasons.’

‘Mr Groombridge’s got a wife and two children,’ said Joyce.

‘Tough tit,’ said Nigel. ‘We’d have picked a bachelor if we’d known. If you gob at me again I’ll give you a bash round the face you won’t forget.’

They turned on to the A12 at twenty-five past two, following the same route Alan Groombridge had taken twenty minutes before. There was little traffic, the rain was torrential, and Marty drove circumspectly, neither too fast nor too slowly, entering the fast lane only to overtake. By the time the police had set up one of their checkpoints on the Colchester bypass, stopping all cars and heavier vehicles, the Ford Escort was passing Witham, heading for Chelmsford.

Joyce said, ‘If you put me out at Chelmsford I promise I won’t say a thing. I’ll hang about in Chelmsford and get something to eat, you can give me five pounds of what you’ve got there, and I won’t go to the police till the evening. I’ll tell them I lost my memory.’

‘You’ve only got one shoe,’ said Marty.

‘You can put me down outside a shoe shop. I’ll tell the police you had masks on and you blindfolded me. I’ll tell them . . .’ the greatest disguise Joyce could think of ‘. . .  you were old!’

‘Forget it,’ said Nigel. ‘You say you would but you wouldn’t. They’d get it out of you. Make up your mind to it, you come with us.’

The first of the rush hour traffic was leaving London as they came into it. This time Marty got on to the North Circular Road at Woodford, and they weren’t much held up till they came to Finchley. From there on it was crawling all the way, and Marty, who had stood up to the ordeal better than Nigel, now felt his nerves getting the better of him. Part of the trouble was that in the driving mirror he kept his eye as much on those two in the back of the car as on the traffic behind. Of course it was all a load of rubbish about Nigel killing that bank manager, he couldn’t have done that, and he wouldn’t do anything to the girl either if she did anything to attract the attention of other drivers. It was only a question of whether the girl knew it. She didn’t seem to. Most of the time she was hunched in the corner behind him, her head hanging. Maybe she thought other people would be indifferent, pass by on the other side like that bit they taught you in Sunday School, but Marty knew that wasn’t so from the time when a woman had grabbed him and he’d only just escaped the store detective.

He began to do silly things like cutting in and making other drivers hoot, and once he actually touched the rear bumper of the car in front with the front bumper of the Escort. Luckily for them, the car he touched had bumpers of rubber composition and its driver was easy-going, doing no more than call out of his window that there was no harm done. But it creased Marty up all the same, and by the time they got to Brent Cross his hands were jerking up and down on the steering wheel and he had stalled out twice because he couldn’t control his clutch foot properly.

Still, now they were nearly home. At Staples Corner he turned down the Edgware Road, and by ten to five they were outside the house in Cricklewood, the Escort parked among the hundred or so other cars that lined the street on both sides.

Nigel didn’t feel sympathy, but he could see Marty was spent, washed up. So he took the gun and pushed it into Joyce’s back and made her walk in front of him with Marty by her side, his arm trailing over her shoulder like a lover’s. On the stairs they met Bridey, the Irish girl who had the room next to Marty’s, on her way to work as barmaid in the Rose of Killarney, but she took no notice of them beyond saying an off-hand hallo. She had often seen Nigel there before and she was used to Marty bringing girls in. If he had brought a girl’s corpse in, carrying it in his arms, she might have wondered about it for a few minutes, but she wouldn’t have done anything, she wouldn’t have gone to the police. Two of her brothers had fringe connections with the IRA and she had helped overturn a car when they had carried the hunger strike martyr’s body down from the Crown to the Sacred Heart. She and her whole family avoided the police.

Marty’s front door had a Yale lock on it and another, older, lock with a big iron key. They pushed Joyce into the room and Nigel turned the iron key. Marty fell on the mattress, face-downwards, but Joyce just stood, looking about her at the dirt and disorder, and bringing her hands together to clasp them over her chest.

‘Next we get shot of the vehicle,’ said Nigel.

Marty didn’t say anything, Nigel kicked at the mattress and lit the wick of the oil heater – it was very cold – and then he said it again. ‘We have to get shot of the car.’

Marty groaned. ‘Who’s going to find it down there?’

‘The fuzz. You have to get yourself together and drive it some place and dump it. Right?’

‘I’m knackered.’ Marty heaved himself up and pushed a pile of dirty clothes on to the floor. ‘I got to have a drink.’

‘Yeah, right, later, when we’ve got that car off our backs.’

‘Christ,’ said Marty, ‘we’ve got four grand in that bag and I can’t have a fucking drink.’

Nigel gritted his teeth at that. He couldn’t understand why there hadn’t been seven like that guy Purford said. But he managed, for Jane or Jenny’s benefit, a mid-Atlantic drawl. ‘I’ll drive it. You stay here with her. We’ll tie her up again, put her in the kitchen. You’ll go to sleep, I know you, and if she gets screeching the old git next door’ll freak.’

‘No,’ said Joyce.

‘Was I asking you? You do as you’re told, Janey.’

They got hold of Joyce and gagged her again and tied her hands behind her and tied her feet. Marty took off her shoe to stop her making noises with her feet and shut the kitchen door on her. She made noises, though not for long.

The rain had stopped and the slate-grey sky was barred with long streaks of orange. Nigel and Marty got as far away from the kitchen door as they could and talked in fierce whispers. When the traffic slackened Nigel would take the car and dispose of it. They looked longingly at Marty’s radio, but they dared not switch it on.

7

For a couple of hours the police suspected Alan Groombridge. No one had seen the raiders enter the bank. They set up road blocks just the same and informed the Groombridge and Culver next-of-kin. But they were suspicious. According to his son and his father-in-law, Groombridge never went out for lunch, and the licensee of the Childon Arms told them he had never been in there. At first they played with the possibility that he and the girl were in it together, and had gone off together in his car. The presence of Joyce’s shoe made that unlikely. Besides, this theory presupposed an attachment between them which Joyce’s father and Groombridge’s son derided. Groombridge never went out in the evenings without his wife, and Joyce spent all hers with Stephen Hallam.