‘I take it you can let me have a bank reference?’

The blood rushed into Alan’s face.

‘It’s usual,’ said the landlord. ‘I’ve got to protect myself.’

‘I was going to pay you in cash.’

‘Maybe, but I’ll still want a reference. How about your employer or the people where you’re living now? Haven’t you got a bank?’

In the circumstances, the question held a terrible irony. Alan didn’t know what to say except that he had changed his mind, and he got out of the house as fast as he could, certain the landlord thought him a criminal, as indeed he was. No one knew more than he about opening bank accounts. It was impossible for him to open one, he had no name, no address, no occupation and no past. Suddenly he felt frightened, out there in the alien street with no identity, no possessions, and he saw his act as not so much an enormity as an incredible folly. In all those months of playing with the banknotes, he had never considered the practicalities of an existence with them illicitly in his possession. Because then it had been a dream and now it was reality.

He could go on living, he supposed, at the Maharajah. But could he? At four pounds fifty a night, that little hole with its sink and its gas ring was going to cost him as much as one of the flats he had seen on offer in the agency window. He couldn’t go on staying there, yet he wouldn’t be able to find anywhere else because it was ‘usual’ to ask for a bank reference.

Occasionally in the past he had received letters asking for such a reference, and his replies had been discreet, in accordance with the bank’s policy of never divulging to any outsider the state of a customer’s account. He had merely written that, yes, so-and-so banked at his branch of the Anglian-Victoria, and that apparently had been satisfactory. He felt sick at the thought of where his own account was – with the Childon sub-branch and in a name that today was familiar to every newspaper reader.

An idea came to him of returning home. It wasn’t too late to go back if he really wanted to. He could say they had taken him and had let him go. He had been blindfolded all the time, so he hadn’t seen their faces or where they had taken him. The shock had been so great that he couldn’t remember much, only that he had saved some of the bank’s money which he had deposited in a safe place. Perhaps it would be better not to mention the money at all. Why should they suspect him if he gave himself up now?

It was a quarter past three. It was not on his watch but on a clock on a wall ahead of him that he saw the time. And beside the clock, on a sheet of frosted glass, were etched the A and the V, the vine leaves and the crown, that were the emblems of the Anglian-Victoria Bank. The Anglian-Victoria, Paddington Station Branch. Alan stood outside, wondering what would happen if he went in and told the manager who he was.

He went into the bank. Customers were waiting in a queue behind a railing until a green light came on to tell them a till was free. A tremendous impulse took hold of him to announce that he was Alan Groombridge. If he did that now, in a few days’ time he would be back behind his own till, driving his car, listening to Pam talking about the cost of living, to Pop quarrelling with Christopher, reading in the evenings in his own warm house. He set his teeth and clenched his hands to stop himself yielding to that impulse, though he still stood there at the end of the queue.

Steadily the green lights came on, and one customer moved to a till, then another. Alan stayed in the queue and shifted with it as it passed a row of tables spread with green blotters. A man was sitting at one of the tables, making an entry in his paying-in book. Alan watched him, envying him his legitimate possession of it.

The time was half-past three, and the security man moved to the door to prevent any late-comer from entering. Alan began framing words in his mind, how he had lost his memory, how the sight of that emblem had recalled to him who he was. But his clothes? How could he explain his new clothes?

Looking down at those jeans brought his eyes again to the man at the table. The paying-in book was open for anyone to see that two hundred and fifty pounds was about to be paid in, though Paul Browning hadn’t been so imprudent as actually to place notes or cheques on it. Alan knew he was called Paul Browning because that was the name he had just written on a cheque book request form. And now he added under it, in the same block capitals, his address: 15 Exmoor Gardens, London NW2.

As a green light came up for the woman immediately in front of Alan in the queue, Paul Browning joined it to stand behind him. With a muttered ‘Excuse me’, Alan turned and made for the door.

He had found a bank reference and an identity, and with the discovery he burned the last fragile boat that could have taken him back. The security man let him out politely.

9

Joyce woke up first. With sleep, her confidence and her courage had come back. The fact that the others – those two pigs, as she called them to herself – still slept on, made her despise more than fear them. Fancy sleeping like that when you’d done a bank robbery and kidnapped someone! They must want their heads tested. But while she despised them, she also felt easier with them than she would have done had they been forty or fifty. Disgusting and low as they were, they were nevertheless young, they belonged with her in the great universal club of youth.

She got up and put on her clothes. She went into the kitchen and washed her hands and face under the cold tap, a good cold splash like she always had in the mornings, though she usually had a bath first. Pity she couldn’t clean her teeth. What was there to eat? No good waiting for those pigs to provide something. Like the low people they were, they had no fridge, but there was an unopened packet of back bacon on a shelf of that bookcase thing, and some eggs in a box and lots of tins of baked beans. Joyce had a good look at the bacon packet. It might be a year old, for all she knew, you never could tell with people like that. But, no. Sell by March 15, it said. She put the kettle on, and Flora margarine into a frying pan, and lit all the other gas burners and the oven to warm herself up.

The misery of Mum and Dad and Stephen she had got into better perspective. She wasn’t dead, was she? Stephen would value her all the more when she turned up alive and kicking. They were going to let her go today. She wondered how and where, and she thought it would be rather fun telling it all to the police and maybe the newspapers.

The roaring of the gas woke Marty and he saw Joyce wasn’t on the sofa. He called out, ‘Christ!’ and Joyce came in to stand insolently in the doorway. There are some people who wake up and orientate themselves very quickly in the mornings, and there are others who droop about, half-asleep, for quite a long time. Joyce belonged in the first category and Marty in the second. He groaned and fumbled for the gun.

‘For all you know,’ said Joyce, ‘I might have a couple of detectives out here with me, waiting to arrest you.’

She made a big pot of strong tea and found a packet of extended life milk. Nasty stuff, but better than nothing. She heard Marty starting to get up and she kept her head averted. He might be stark naked for all she could tell, which was all right when it was Stephen or one of her brothers coming out of the bathroom, but not that pig. However, he was wearing blue pants with mauve bindings, and by the time he had come into the kitchen he had pulled on jeans and a shirt.

‘Give us a cup of tea.’

‘Get it yourself,’ said Joyce. ‘You can take me to the toilet first.’

She was a full five minutes in there, doing it on purpose, Marty thought. He was on tenterhooks lest Bridey came out or old Green. But there was no one. The lavatory flushed and Joyce walked back, not looking at him. She passed Nigel who was sitting on the mattress with his head in his hands, and went straight to the sink to wash her hands. All the bacon in the pan, two eggs and a saucepanful of baked beans went on to the plate she had heated for herself. She sat down at the kitchen table and began to eat.