They have killed Mr Groombridge. They are keeping me in a room in London. She crossed out London and wrote in this street. I do not know the name of the street or the number of the house. There are two of them. They are young, about 20. One of them is little and dark. The first finger on his right hand has been injured. The nail is twisted. The other one is tall and fair. Please get me out. They are dangerous. They have a gun. Signed, Joyce Marilyn Culver.

Joyce thought she would wrap her message round the piece of pumice stone from the draining board and drop it out of the window. But she couldn’t open the window, though neither of the boys seemed to hear her struggling with it. Never mind, the lavatory window opened and she would throw it out of there in the morning. So for the time being she put the note in that traditional repository favoured by all heroines in distress, her bosom. She put it into the cleft between her breasts, and went back to the sofa. But first she favoured her captors with a look of contempt. If she had been in their place, she thought, she would have insisted on staying awake while her partner slept, and only sleeping while he stayed awake to watch. Look where getting drunk and passing out had got them! But in the yellow light the string with the key on it showed round the dark one’s neck, and the black barrel of the gun gleamed dully against the fair one’s slack hand.

At nine she was up and washed and dressed and shaking Marty who woke with a blinding headache and much hung over.

‘Go away. Leave me alone,’ said Marty, and he buried his face in the dirty pillow.

‘If you don’t get up and take me to the toilet I’ll bang and bang at that door with a chair. I’ll break the window.’

‘Do that and you’re dead,’ said Nigel, elbowing Marty out of the way and fishing out the gun. He had gone to bed fully clothed, and it was out of distaste for the smell of him that Joyce looked in the other direction. Nigel took her out on to the landing and leaned against the wall, seeing stars and feeling as if an army of goblins in hobnailed boots were forming fours inside his head. He mustn’t drink like that again, it was crazy. He wasn’t hooked on the stuff like that little brain, was he? He didn’t even really like it.

Joyce had her message wrapped round the pumice stone. She stood on the lavatory seat, wishing she could see something of what lay outside and below the window, but it was only a frosted fanlight that opened and this above her head, though not above the reach of her hand. The pumice dropped, and she trembled lest it make a bang which the fair one might hear when it touched the ground. She pulled the flush hard to drown any other sound.

The other one glowered at her when they were back in the room. ‘What d’you think you’re doing, wearing my tee-shirt?’

‘I’ve got to change my clothes, haven’t I? I’m not going to stay in the same thing day after day like you lot. I was brought up to keep myself nice. You want to take all that lot round the launderette. What’s the good of me cleaning the place up when it just pongs of dirty clothes?’

Neither of them answered her. Marty took the radio to the lavatory with him, but he couldn’t get anything out of it except pop music. Then he went off shopping without waiting for Nigel’s command. The open air comforted him. He was a country boy and used to spending most of his time outside; all his jobs but the parcel-packing one had been outdoor jobs, and even when living on the dole he had spent hours wandering about London each day and walking on Hampstead Heath. He couldn’t stand being shut up, scared as he was each time he saw a policeman or a police car. Nigel, on the other hand, liked being indoors, he didn’t suffer from claustrophobia. He liked dirty little rooms with shut windows where he could loaf about and dream grandiose Nietzschian dreams of himself as the Superman with many little brains and stupid women to cringe and do his bidding. The stupid woman was cleaning again, the living room this time. Let her get on with it if that was all she was fit for.

On her knees, washing the skirting board, Joyce said, ‘Have you thought yet? Have you thought when I’m going to get out of here?’

‘Look,’ said Nigel, ‘we’re looking after you OK, aren’t we? You’re getting your nosh, aren’t you? And you can drink as much liquor as you want, only you don’t want. I know this pad isn’t amazing, but it’s not that bad. You aren’t getting ill-treated.’

‘You must be joking. When are you going to let me go?’

‘Can’t you say anything else but when are you going to get out of here?’

‘Yes,’ said Joyce. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Robert Redford,’ said Nigel, who had been told he resembled this actor in his earliest films.

‘When am I going to get out of here, Robert?’

‘When I’m ready, Joyce. When my friend and I see our opportunity to get ourselves safely out of the country and don’t have to worry about you giving the police a lot of damaging information.’

Joyce stood up. ‘Why don’t you talk like that all the time?’ she said with an ingenuous look. ‘It sounds ever so nice. You could have a really posh accent if you liked.’

‘Oh, piss off, will you?’ said Nigel, losing his temper. ‘Just piss off and give me a bit of hush.’

Joyce smiled. She had never read Dr Edith Bone’s account of how, when condemned in Hungary to seven years’ solitary confinement, she never missed a chance to needle and provoke her guards, while never in the slightest degree co-operating with them. She had not read it, but she was employing the same tactics herself.

10

The police were told of a silver-blue Ford Escort seen on the evening of Monday, 4 March, in the Epping New Road. Their informant was one of the gang of gasmen who had been working on a faulty main outside Dr Bolton’s house, and the car he had seen had in fact been Mrs Beech’s car and its driver Nigel Thaxby. But when the police had searched Epping Forest for the car and dragged one of the gravel pit ponds, they abandoned that line of enquiry in favour of a more hopeful one involving the departure of a silver-blue Escort from Dover by the ferry to Calais on Monday night. This car, according to witnesses, had been driven by a middle-aged man with a younger man beside him and a man and a girl in the back. The man in the back seemed to have been asleep, but might have been unconscious or drugged. No one had observed the registration plates.

Alan Groombridge’s car was found in the car park in Colchester. His fingerprints were on its interior and so were those of his wife. There were several other sets of fingerprints, and these came from the hands of a Stoke Mill farm worker to whom Alan had given a lift home on the previous Tuesday. But the police didn’t know this, and it didn’t occur to the farm worker to tell them. By that time they had questioned Christopher and Jillian Groombridge about their friends and anyone to whom they might have talked and given information about the Childon branch of the Anglian-Victoria Bank.

At first it seemed likely that the leak had come from Christopher, he being male and the elder. But it was soon clear that Christopher had never shown the slightest interest in any of the bank’s arrangements, was ignorant as to how much was kept in the safe, and hadn’t those sort of friends anyway. All his friends were just like himself, law-abiding, prosperous, salesmen or belonging to fringe professions like his own, well-dressed, affluent, living at home in order the better to live it up. They regarded crime as not so much immoral as ‘a mug’s game’. As for Jillian, she made an impression on them of naïve innocence. All her time away from home, she said, had been spent with Sharon and Bridget, and Sharon and Bridget backed her up. They wouldn’t, in any case, have been able to give the name of John Purford because they didn’t know it. Perhaps there had been no leak, for nothing need have been divulged which local men couldn’t have found out for themselves. On the other hand, the mini-van, located soon after Mrs Beech’s complaint, had been hired in Croydon by a man with a big black beard who spoke, according to the Relyacar Rentals girl, with a north country accent. So the police, having turned Stantwich and Colchester and quite a large area of south London upside down, turned their attention towards Humberside and Cleveland.