Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Courier International Ltd, Tiptree, Essex

ISBN 0 09 922330 9

To David Blass with love

In writing this novel, I needed help on some aspects of banking and on firearms. By a lucky chance for me, John Ashard was able to advise me on both. I am very grateful to him.

R.R.

1

Three thousand pounds lay on the desk in front of him. It was in thirty wads, mostly of fivers. He had taken it out of the safe when Joyce went off for lunch and spread it out to look at it, as he had been doing most days lately. He never took out more than three thousand, though there was twice that in the safe, because he had calculated that three thousand would be just the right sum to buy him one year’s freedom.

With the kind of breathless excitement many people feel about sex – or so he supposed, he never had himself – he looked at the money and turned it over and handled it. Gently he handled it, and then roughly as if it belonged to him and he had lots more. He put two wads into each of his trouser pockets and walked up and down the little office. He got out his wallet with his own two pounds in it, and put in forty and folded it again and appreciated its new thickness. After that he counted out thirty-five pounds into an imaginary hand and mouthed, thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five, into an imaginary face, and knew he had gone too far in fantasy with that one as he felt himself blush.

For he didn’t intend to steal the money. If three thousand pounds goes missing from a sub-branch in which there is only the clerk-in-charge (by courtesy, the manager) and a girl cashier, and the girl is there and the clerk isn’t, the Anglian-Victoria Bank will not have far to look for the culprit. Loyalty to the bank didn’t stop him taking it, but fear of being found out did. Anyway, he wasn’t going to get away or be free, he knew that. He might be only thirty-eight, but his thirty-eight was somehow much older than other people’s thirty-eights. It was too old for running away.

He always stopped the fantasy when he blushed. The rush of shame told him he had overstepped the bounds, and this always happened when he had got himself playing a part in some dumb show or even actually said aloud things like, That was the deposit, I’ll send you the balance of five thousand, nine hundred in the morning. He stopped and thought what a state he had got himself into and how, with this absurd indulgence, he was even now breaking one of the bank’s sacred rules. For he shouldn’t be able to open the safe on his own, he shouldn’t know Joyce’s combination and she shouldn’t know his. He felt guilty most of the time in Joyce’s presence because she was as honest as the day, and had only told him the B List combination (he was on the A) when he glibly told her the rule was made to be broken and no one ever thought twice about breaking it.

He heard her let herself in by the back way, and he put the money in a drawer. Joyce wouldn’t go to the safe because there was five hundred pounds in her till and few customers came into the Anglian-Victoria at Childon on a Wednesday afternoon. All twelve shops closed at one and didn’t open again till nine-thirty in the morning.

Joyce called him Mr Groombridge instead of Alan. She did this because she was twenty and he was thirty-eight. The intention was not to show respect, which would never have occurred to her, but to make plain the enormous gulf of years which yawned between them. She was one of those people who see a positive achievement in being young, as if youth were a plum job which they have got hold of on their own initiative. But she was kind to her elders, in a tolerant way.

‘It’s lovely out, Mr Groombridge. It’s like spring.’

‘It is spring,’ said Alan.

‘You know what I mean.’ Joyce always said that if anyone attempted to point out that she spoke in clichés. ‘Shall I make you a coffee?’

‘No thanks, Joyce. Better open the doors. It’s just on two.’

The branch closed for lunch. There wasn’t enough custom to warrant its staying open. Joyce unlocked the heavy oak outer door and the inner glass door, turned the sign which said Till Closed to the other side which said Miss J. M. Culver, and went back to Alan. From his office, with the door ajar, you could see anyone who came in. Joyce had very long legs and a very large bust, but otherwise was nothing special to look at. She perched on the edge of the desk and began telling Alan about the lunch she had just had with her boy friend in the Childon Arms, and what the boy friend had said and about not having enough money to get married on.

‘We should have to go in with Mum, and it’s not right, is it, two women in a kitchen? Their ways aren’t our ways, you can’t get away from the generation gap. How old were you when you got married, Mr Groombridge?’

He would have liked to say twenty-two or even twenty-four, but he couldn’t because she knew Christopher was grown-up. And, God knew, he didn’t want to make himself out older than he was. He told the truth, with shame. ‘Eighteen.’

‘Now I think that’s too young for a man. It’s one thing for a girl but the man ought to be older. There are responsibilities to be faced up to in marriage. A man isn’t mature at eighteen.’

‘Most men are never mature.’

‘You know what I mean,’ said Joyce. The outer door opened and she left him to his thoughts and the letter from Mrs Marjorie Perkins, asking for a hundred pounds to be transferred from her deposit to her current account.

Joyce knew everyone who banked with them by his or her name. She chatted pleasantly with Mr Butler and then with Mrs Surridge. Alan opened the drawer and looked at the three thousand pounds. He could easily live for a year on that. He could have a room of his own and make friends of his own and buy books and records and go to theatres and eat when he liked and stay up all night if he wanted to. For a year. And then? When he could hear Joyce talking to Mr Wolford, the Childon butcher, about inflation, and how he must notice the difference from when he was young – he was about thirty-five – he took the money into the little room between his office and the back door where the safe was. Both combinations, the one he ought to know and the one he oughtn’t, were in his head. He spun the dials and the door opened and he put the money away, along with the other three thousand, the rest being in the tills.

There came to him, as always, a sense of loss. He couldn’t have the money, of course, it would never be his, but he felt bereft when it was once again out of his hands. He was like a lover whose girl has gone from his arms to her own bed. Presently Pam phoned. She always did about this time to ask him what time he would be home – he was invariably home at the same time – to collect the groceries or Jillian from school. Joyce thought it was lovely, his wife phoning him every day ‘after all these years’.

A few more people came into the bank. Alan went out there and turned the sign over the other till to Mr A. J. Groombridge and took a cheque from someone he vaguely recognized called, according to the cheque, P. Richardson.

‘How would you like the money?’

‘Five green ones and three portraits of the Duke of Wellington,’ said P. Richardson, a wag.

Alan smiled as he was expected to. He would have liked to hit him over the head with the calculating machine, and now he remembered that last time P. Richardson had been in he had replied to that question by asking for Deutschmarks.

No more shopkeepers today. They had all banked their takings and gone home. Joyce closed the doors at three-thirty, and the two of them balanced their tills and put the money back in the safe, and did all the other small meticulous tasks necessary for the honour and repute of the second smallest branch of the Anglian-Victoria in the British Isles. Joyce and he hung their coats in the cupboard in his office. Joyce put hers on and he put his on and Joyce put on more mascara, the only make-up she ever wore.