It struck him fearfully that, once Joyce was set free or rescued, she would tell the police he hadn’t been in the bank when the men came. He thought about that for a while, sweating in the cold room. She would tell them, and they would begin tracing his movements from the car to the bus station, the bus to the train. He saw himself as standing out in all those crowds like a leper or a freak or – how had Kipling put it? – a mustard plaster in a coal cellar. But she might not know. It all depended on whether they had blindfolded her and also on how many of them there had been. If she had seen his car still in the yard, and then they had blindfolded her and put her in their car or van for a while before driving away . . . He clung on to that hope, and he thought guiltily of Pam and his children. In her way, Pam had been a good wife to him. It seemed to him certain that, whatever came of this, he would never live with her again, never again share a bed with her or go shopping with her to Stantwich or yield to her for the sake of peace. That was past and the bank was past. The future was liberty or the inside of a jail.

At seven he got up and, wearing his raincoat as a dressing gown, went to have a bath. The water was only lukewarm because, although he had three thousand pounds in his pockets, he hadn’t got a ten-pence piece for the meter. Shivering, he put his clothes on. The trousers didn’t look too bad. He packed the money as flat as he could, putting some of it into his jacket pockets, some into his trouser pockets, and the rest in the breast pocket of his jacket. It made him look fatter than he was. Mr Azziz didn’t provide breakfast or, indeed, any meals, so he went out to find a place where he could eat.

Immediately he was in the street, he felt a craven fear. He must be a marked man, he thought, his face better known than a royal prince’s or a pop star’s. It didn’t occur to him then that it had never been a habit in the Groombridge or Summitt families to sit for studio portraits or go in for ambitious amateur photography, and therefore no large recognizable image of his face could exist. By some magic or some feat of science, it would be brought to the public view. He slunk into a newsagent’s, trying to see without being seen, but the tall black headlines leapt at him. He stood looking at a counter full of chocolate bars until he dared to face those headlines again.

It was Joyce’s portrait, not his own, that met his eyes, Joyce photographed by Stephen Hallam to seem almost beautiful. Bank Girl Kidnap, said one paper; another, Manager and Girl Kidnapped in Bank Raid. He picked up both papers in hands that shook and proffered a pound note. The man behind the counter asked him if he had anything smaller. Alan shook his head, he couldn’t speak.

He had forgotten about breakfast and wondered how he could ever have thought of it. He sat on a bench on Shepherd’s Bush Green and forced himself to look at those papers, though his instinct, now he had bought them, was to throw them away and run away from them himself. But he took a deep breath and forced his eyes on to those headlines and that smaller type.

Before he could find a picture of himself, he had to look on the inside pages. They had put it there, he thought, because it was such a poor likeness, useless for purposes of identification, and adding no character to the account. Christopher had taken the snapshot of himself and Pam and Wilfred Summitt in the garden of the house in Hillcrest. Enlarged, and enlarged only to about an inch in depth, Alan’s face was a muzzy grinning mask. It might equally well have been Constable Rogers or P. Richardson standing there beside the pampas grass.

The other newspaper had the same picture. Were there any others in existence? More vague snapshots, he thought. At his wedding, that shotgun affair, gloomy with disgrace, there had been no photographers. He became aware that the paralysis of terror was easing. It was sliding from him as from a man healed and made limber again. He saw the mist and the pale sun, the grass, other people, felt the renewal of hunger and thirst. If he couldn’t be recognized, identified, he had little to fear. The relief of it, the slow easing that was now quickening and acquiring a sort of excitement, drove away any desire to read any more of the newspaper accounts. He forgot Joyce, who even now might be safe, might be at home once more with only a vague memory of events. He was safe and free, and he had got what he wanted.

A cup of tea and eggs and toast increased his sense of well-being. The papers he dropped thankfully into a bin. After a few minutes’ exploration, he found the tube station and got a train to Oxford Circus. Oxford Street, he knew, was the place to buy clothes. Every Englishman, no matter how sheltered the life he has led, knows that. He bought two pairs of jeans, four tee-shirts, some socks and underpants and a windcheater, two sweaters and a pair of comfortable half-boots. Jeans had never been permitted him in the past, for Pam said they were only for the young, all right for Christopher but ridiculous on a man of his age. He told himself he was buying them as a disguise, but he knew it wasn’t only that. It was to recapture – or to discover, for you cannot recapture what you have never had – his youth.

He came out of the shop wearing his new clothes, and this transformation was another step towards ridding him of the fear of pursuit. People, even policemen, passed him without a second glance. Next he bought a suitcase, and in a public lavatory deep below the street, he filled it with his working suit and that money-loaded raincoat.

The case was too cumbersome to carry about for long. No ardent reader of fiction could ever be in doubt about where temporarily to rid himself of it. He caught a train to Charing Cross, and there deposited the case in a left-luggage locker. At last he and the money were separated. Walking away, with only his wallet filled as he had so often filled it during those secret indulgences in his office, he felt a lightness in his step as if, along with the money, he had disburdened himself of culpability. So he made his way up to Trafalgar Square. He went into the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery and looked at the theatres in St Martin’s Lane and the Charing Cross Road, and had a large lunch with wine. Tonight he would go to the theatre. In all his life he had never really been to the theatre except once or twice to Stantwich Rep and to pantomimes in London when the children were younger. He bought himself a ticket for the front row of the stalls, row A and right in the middle, for Marlowe’s Dr Faustus.

Next to the theatre was a flat agency. It reminded him that he would need somewhere to live, he wasn’t going to stay at the Maharajah longer than he had to. But it wouldn’t be a flat. A few seconds spent studying the contents of the agency’s window told him anything of that nature would be beyond his means. But a room at sixteen to twenty pounds a week, that he could manage.

The girl inside gave him two addresses. One was in Maida Vale and the other in Paddington. Before he could locate either of them, Alan had to buy himself a London guide. He went to the Paddington address first because the room to let there was cheaper.

The landlord came to the door with an evening paper in his hand. Alan saw that he and Joyce were still the lead story, and his own face was there again, magnified to a featureless blur. The sight of it revived his anxiety, but the landlord put the paper down on a table and invited him in.

Alan would have taken the room, though it was sparsely furnished and comfortless. At any rate, it would be his to improve as he chose, and it was better than the Maharajah. The landlord too seemed happy to accept him as a tenant so long as he understood he had to pay a month’s rent in advance and a deposit. Alan had got out his wallet and was preparing to sign the agreement as A. J. Forster when the landlord said: