A girl so devoted to her family as Joyce would never have chosen this particular day for such an enterprise. But had Groombridge taken the money, overturned the tills, left the safe open, and abducted the girl by force? These were ideas about which a detective inspector and a sergeant hazily speculated while questioning Childon residents. They were soon to abandon them for the more dismaying truth.

By five they were back where they had started, back to a raid and a double kidnapping. A lot of things happened at five. Peter Johns, driver of the red Vauxhall, heard about it on the radio and went to the police to describe the white mini-van with which he had nearly collided. Neither he nor his mother could describe the driver or his companion, but Mrs Johns had something to contribute. As the van edged past the Vauxhall, she thought she had heard a sound from the back of the van like someone drumming a heel on the floor. A single clack-clack-clack, Mrs Johns said, as of one shoe drumming, not two.

The next person to bring them information was the driver of a tractor who remembered meeting a Morris Eleven Hundred. The tractor man, who had a vivid imagination, said the driver had looked terrified and there had certainly been someone sitting beside him, no doubt about it, and his driving had been wild and erratic. There had been three bank robbers then, the police concluded, two to drive the van with Joyce in it, the third in Alan Groombridge’s car, compelling him to drive. The loss of the silver-blue Ford Escort was reported by its owner, a Mrs Beech.

By then Nigel Thaxby and Marty Foster and Joyce Culver were in Cricklewood and Alan Groombridge was in the Maharajah Hotel in the Shepherd’s Bush Road.

Literature had taught him that there were all sorts of cheap hotels and houses of call and disreputable lodging places in the vicinity of Paddington Station, so he went there first on the Metropolitan Line out of Liverpool Street. But times had changed, the hotels were all respectable and filled up already with foreign tourists and quite expensive. The reception clerk in one of them recommended him to Mr Azziz (who happened to be his cousin) and Alan liked the name, feeling it was right for him. It reminded him of A Passage to India and seemed a good omen.

Staying in hotels had not played an important part in his life. Five years before, when Mrs Summitt had died, she had left Pam two hundred pounds and they had spent it on a proper holiday, staying at an hotel in Torquay. Luggage they had had, especially Pam and Jillian, an immense amount of it, and he wondered about his own lack of even a suitcase. He had read that hotel-keepers are particular about that sort of thing.

The Maharajah was a tall late-nineteenth-century house built of brown brick with its name on it in blue neon, the first H and the J being missing. Yes, Mr Azziz had a single room for the gentleman, Mr Forster, was it? Four pounds fifty a night, and pay in advance if he’d be so kind. Alan need not have worried about his lack of luggage because Mr Azziz, who was only after a fast buck, wouldn’t have cared what he lacked or what he had done, so long as he paid in advance and didn’t break the place up.

Alan was shown to a dirty little room on the second floor where there was no carpet or central heating or washbasin, but there was a sink with a cold tap, a gas ring and kettle and cups and saucers, and a gas fire with a slot meter. He locked himself in and emptied his bulging pockets. The sight of the money made his head swim. He closed his eyes and put his head on to his knees because he was afraid he would faint. When he opened his eyes the money was still there. It was real. He spread it out to dry it, and he hung his raincoat over the back of a chair and kicked off his wet shoes and looked at the money. Nearest to him lay the portrait of Florence Nightingale which he had torn in half and mended with Sellotape.

Outside the window the sky was like orangeade in a dirty glass. The noise was fearful, the roar and throb and grind and screeching of rush traffic going round Shepherd’s Bush Green and into Chiswick and up to Harlesden and over to Acton and down to Hammersmith. The house shook. He lay on the bed, tossed about like someone at the top of a tree in a gale. He would never sleep, it was impossible that he would ever sleep again. He must think now about what he had done and why and what he was going to do next. The madness was receding, leaving him paralysed with fear and a sensation of being incapable of coping with anything. He must think, he must act, he must decide. Grinding himself to a pitch of thinking, he shut his eyes again and fell at once into a deep sleep.

Nigel delayed till half-past six, waiting for the traffic to ease up a bit. As far as he was concerned, when you drove a car your right foot was for the accelerator and the brake and your left one for nothing. He got into the Escort and started it and it leapt forward and stalled, nearly hitting the Range Rover in front of it because Marty had left it in bottom gear. Nigel tried again and more or less got it right, though the gears made horrible noises. He moved out into the traffic, feeling sick. But there was no time for that sort of thing because it was a full-time job ramming his left foot up and down and doing exercises with his left hand. He didn’t know where he was aiming for and it wouldn’t have been much use if he had. His knowledge of London was sparse. He could get from Notting Hill to Oxford Street and from Notting Hill to Cricklewood on buses, and that was about all.

The traffic daunted him. He could see himself crashing the car and having to abandon it and run, so he turned it into a side road in Willesden and sat in it for what seemed like hours, watching the main road until there weren’t quite so many cars and buses going past. It hadn’t been hours at all, it was still only a quarter past seven. He had some idea where he was when he found himself careering uncertainly down Ladbroke Grove, and after that signs for south of the river began coming up. He would take it over one of the bridges and dump it in south London.

He was scared stiff. He wished he had some way of knowing what was going on and how much the police had found out. The way to have found out was from Marty’s radio which the girl would have heard, and heard too that Groombridge was alive. Luckily, he’d managed to whisper to Marty not to switch it on. He was so thick, that one, you never knew what he’d do next.

The manual gear shift was getting easier to handle. He tried breathing deeply to calm himself, and up to a point it worked. What he really ought to do was hide the car somewhere where it wouldn’t be found for weeks. He knew he was a conspicuous person, being six feet tall and with bright fair hair and regular features, not little and dark and ordinary like Marty. People wouldn’t be able to remember Marty but they’d remember him.

He turned right out of Ladbroke Grove and drove down Holland Park Avenue to Shepherd’s Bush and along the Shepherd’s Bush Road, thus passing the Maharajah Hotel and forming one of the constituents of the noise that throbbed in Alan Groombridge’s sleeping brain. On to Hammersmith and over Putney Bridge. There were still about two gallons in the tank. In Wandsworth he put the car down an alley which was bounded by factory walls and where there was no one to see him. It was a relief to get out of it, though he knew he couldn’t just leave it there. He had grabbed a handful of notes out of the carrier. In these circumstances, Marty would have wanted a drink, but stress had made Nigel ravenously hungry. There was a Greek café just down the street. He went in and ordered himself a meal of kebab and taramosalata.

He might just as easily have chosen the fish and chip place or the Hong Kong Dragon, but he chose the Greek café and it gave him an idea. Beginning on his kebab, Nigel glanced at a poster on the café wall, a coloured photograph of Heraklion. This reminded him that before he had worked round to the subject of a loan, he had listened with half an ear to his mother’s usual gossip about her friends. This had included the information that the Boltons were going off for a month to Heraklion. Wherever that might be, Nigel thought, Greece somewhere. Dr Bolton, now retired, and his Greek wife, whom he was supposed to (or had once been supposed to) call Uncle Bob and Auntie Helena, lived in a house near Epping Forest. He had been there once, about seven years before, and now he recalled that Dr Bolton kept his car in a garage, a sort of shed really, at the bottom of his garden. An isolated sort of place. The car would now be in the airport car park, for his mother had said they were going last Saturday. Would the garage be locked? Nigel tried to remember if there had been a lock on the door and thought there hadn’t been, though he couldn’t be certain after so long. If there was and he couldn’t use the garage, he would push the car into one of the forest ponds. Thinking about the Boltons brought back to him that visit and how he, aged fourteen, had listened avidly to Dr Bolton’s account of a stolen car that had been dumped in a pond and not found for weeks.