Nigel was obliged to pour tea for both of them and start cooking more bacon. He did it clumsily because he too was a slow waker. ‘One of us’ll have to go out,’ he said, ‘and get a paper and more food.’

‘And some booze, for Christ’s sake,’ said Marty.

‘How about me going?’ said Joyce pertly.

‘Be your age,’ said Nigel, and to Marty, ‘You can go. I’ll be better keeping an eye on her.’

Joyce ate fastidiously, trying not to show how famished she was. ‘When are you going to let me go?’

‘Tomorrow,’ said Marty.

‘You said that yesterday.’

‘Then he shouldn’t have,’ snapped Nigel. ‘You stay here. Get it? You stay here till I’m good and ready.’

Joyce had believed Marty. She felt a little terrible tremor, but she said with boldness, ‘If he’s going out he can get me a pair of shoes.’

‘You what? That’d be marvellous, that would, me getting a pair of girl’s shoes when they know you’ve lost one.’

‘Get her a pair of flip-flops or sandals or something. You can go to Marks in Kilburn. She’ll only get a hole in her tights and then we’ll have to buy goddamned tights.’

‘And a toothbrush,’ said Joyce.

Marty pointed to a pot, encrusted with blackened soap, in which reposed a toothbrush with splayed brown tufts.

‘Me use that?’ said Joyce indignantly. She thought of the nastiest infection she could, of one she’d seen written on the wall in the Ladies’ on Stantwich Station. ‘I’d get crabs.’

Nigel couldn’t help grinning at that. They ate their breakfast and Marty went off, leaving Nigel with the gun.

Joyce wasn’t used to being idle, and she had never been in such a nasty dirty place before. She announced, without asking Nigel’s permission, that she intended to clean up the kitchen.

Marty would have been quite pleased. He didn’t clean the kitchen himself because he was too lazy to do so, not because he disapproved of cleaning. Nigel did. He had left home partly because his parents were always cleaning something. He sat on the mattress and watched Joyce scrubbing away, and for the first time he felt some emotion towards her move in him. Until then he had thought of her as an object or a nuisance. Now what he felt was anger. He was profoundly disturbed by what she was doing, it brought up old half-forgotten feelings and unhappy scenes, and he kept the gun trained on her, although her back was turned and she couldn’t see it.

About an hour later Marty tapped at the door, giving the four little raps that was their signal to each other. He threw a pair of rubber-thonged sandals on to the floor and dropped the shopping bag. His face was white and pinched.

‘Where’s Joyce?’

‘That’s her name, is it? In the kitchen, spring-cleaning. What’s freaking you?’

Marty began taking a newspaper folded small out of his jacket pocket. ‘No,’ said Nigel. ‘Outside.’ They went out on to the landing and Nigel locked the door behind them. He spread out a copy of the same newspaper Alan Groombridge had read some hours before. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘What does it mean? We never even saw the guy.’

‘D’you reckon it’s some sort of trick?’

‘I don’t know. What would be the point? And why do they say seven thousand when there was only four?’

Marty shook his head. ‘Maybe the guy did see us and got scared and went off somewhere and lost his memory.’ He voiced a fear that had been tormenting him. ‘Look, what you said to the girl about killing him – that wasn’t true, was it?’

Nigel looked hard at him and then at the gun. ‘How could it be?’ he said slowly. ‘The trigger doesn’t even move.’

‘Yeah, I meant – well, you could have hit him over the head, I don’t know.’

‘I never saw him, he wasn’t there. Now you tear up that paper and put the bits down the bog. She’s got to go on thinking we’ve killed Groombridge and we’ve got to get out of here and get her out. Right?’

‘Right,’ said Marty.

Joyce finished cleaning the kitchen and then she cleaned her teeth with the toothbrush Marty had bought. She had to use soap for this, and she had heard that cleaning your teeth with soap turned them yellow, but perhaps that was only if you went on doing it for a long time. And she wasn’t going to be there for a long time because tomorrow they were going to let her go.

Nigel sharply refused to allow her to go down to the bathroom, so she washed herself in the kitchen with a chair pushed hard against the door. Her mother used to make a joke about this fashion of getting oneself clean, saying that one washed down as far as possible and up as far as possible, but what happened to poor possible? Thinking of Mum brought tears to Joyce’s eyes, but she scrubbed them away and scrubbed poor possible so hard that it gave her a reason for crying. After that she washed for herself to wear tomorrow the least disreputable of Marty’s tee-shirts from the pile on the bed. She wasn’t going to confront the police and be reunited with her family in a dirty dishevelled state, not she.

Marty went out again at seven and came back with whisky and wine and Chinese takeaway for the three of them. Joyce ate hers in the kitchen, at the table. The boys had theirs sitting on the living room floor. The place was close and fuggy and smelly from the oil heater and the oven which had been on all day, and condensation trickled down the inside of the windows. When she had finished eating, Joyce walked in and looked at Nigel and Marty. The gun was on the floor beside the plastic pack with chow mein in it. They didn’t use plates, pigs that they were, thought Joyce.

She had never been the sort of person who avoids issues because it is better not to know for certain. She would rather know.

‘You’re going to let me go tomorrow,’ she said.

‘Who said?’ Nigel put his hand over the gun. He forgot to be a mid-Atlantic-cum-sixties-hippy-drop-out and spoke, to Marty’s reluctant admiration, in the authoritative public school tone of his forbears. ‘There’s no question of your leaving here tomorrow. You’d go straight to the police and describe us and describe this place. We took you with us to avoid that happening and the situation hasn’t changed.’ He remembered then and added, with a nasal intonation, ‘No way.’

‘But the situation won’t change,’ said Joyce.

‘I could kill you, couldn’t I? Couldn’t I?’ He watched her stiffen and then very slightly recoil. It pleased him. ‘You be a good girl,’ he said, ‘and do what we say and stop asking goddamned silly questions, and I’ll think of a way to work it for the lot of us. I just need a bit of hush. Right?’

‘Have a drop of Scotch,’ said Marty who was cheered and made affable by about a quarter of a pint of it. Joyce wouldn’t. Nor would she accept any of the Yugoslav Riesling that Nigel was drinking. If the situation hadn’t changed and wasn’t going to change, she would have to think of ways to change it. The first duty of a prisoner is to escape. Her uncle who had been a prisoner of war always said that, though he had never succeeded in escaping from the Stalag Luft in which for four years he had been incarcerated. She had never thought of escaping before because she had believed they would release her, but she thought about it now.

When they had settled down for the night and the boys were asleep, Marty snoring more loudly than her father did – Joyce had formerly thought young people never snored – she got up off the sofa and tip-toed into the kitchen. Earlier in the day she had found a ball-point pen while scraping out thick greasy dirt from under the sink, and she had left it on the draining board, not supposing then that she would have any use for it. She hadn’t much faith in this pen which had probably been there for years, perhaps before the time of the present tenant. But once she had wiped the tip of it carefully on the now clean dishcloth and scribbled a bit on the edge of a matchbox to make the ink flow, she found it wrote quite satisfactorily. Enough light came in from outside to make writing, if not reading, possible. Like Alan Groombridge, Joyce found the constant blaze of light shining in from street lamps throughout the night very strange, but it had its uses. She sat at the table and wrote on a smoothed-out piece of the paper bag in which the sandals had been: