His only consolation was that he could have an unlimited amount to drink. Yesterday he had drunk more than half a bottle of whisky and today he was going to finish it and start on the next one. He couldn’t understand why Nigel had begun being nice to Joyce, buttering her up and flattering her. What was the point when it was obvious the only way was to put the fear of God into her? Nigel had got him to buy her Woman and Nineteen and made him take the sheets and pillowcases to the launderette on the corner. Nigel, who liked dirt and used to say being clean was bourgeois! He poured himself a cupful of whisky.

‘You can get me some wool and some needles next time you go out,’ said Joyce. ‘I need a bit of knitting to pass the time.’

‘I’m not your slave.’

‘Do as she says,’ said Nigel. ‘Why not if it keeps her happy?’

The room was spotlessly clean. Joyce had even washed the curtains, and Nigel, with the aid of sign language and a pencil and paper, had borrowed an iron from Mr Green so that she could iron them and iron her own freshly washed blouse. Marty thought he must be off his head, that wasn’t the way to break her spirit. He glowered at her resentfully. She looked as if she were just about to set off for work in a job where one’s appearance counted for a lot.

Two hours earlier she had washed her hair. She had on a crisp neat blouse and a creaseless skirt, and now she was filing her nails. That was another thing Nigel had got him to fetch in, a nail file, and he’d said something about mascara. But Marty had jibbed at that. He wasn’t buying bloody silly mascara, no way.

Nigel didn’t say much all that day. He was thinking. Marty made him sick with his silly ideas and the way, most of the time, he was smashed out of his mind on whisky. He ought to be able to see they couldn’t get shot of Joyce. Where they went she must go. Only he knew they couldn’t take her out into the street with them, couldn’t steal another car while she was with them. Yet she must be with them, and the only way she could be was if she could somehow be made to be on their side. It was with some vague yet definite aim of getting her on his side that Nigel had started being nice to her. That was why he made Marty buy things for her and praised her appearance and the cleanliness of the place – though he hated it – and why, that evening, he got Marty to fetch in three great hunks of T-bone because Joyce said she liked steak.

There had been robberies, he thought, in which hostages had been so brain-washed by their captors that they had gone over to the kidnappers’ side and had even assisted in subsequent raids. Nigel didn’t want to do any Symbionese Liberation Army stuff, he had no doctrines with which to indoctrinate anyone, but there must be other ways. By Friday morning he had thought of another way.

He lay on the mattress in the yellow light that was the same at dawn as at midnight, shifting his body away from Marty who snored and smelt of sweat and whisky, and looking at the plump pale curve of Joyce’s cheek and her smooth pink eyelids closed in sleep. He got up and went into the kitchen and looked at himself in Marty’s bit of broken mirror over the sink. Beautiful blue eyes looked back at him, a straight nose, a mobile delicately cut mouth. Any polone’d go for me in a big way, thought Nigel, and then he remembered he mustn’t use that word and why he mustn’t, and he was flooded with fear.

Marty went out and brought back brown knitting wool and two pairs of needles and some proper toilet soap and toothpaste – and two more bottles of whisky. They didn’t bother to count the money or ration it or note what they had spent. Marty just grabbed a handful of notes from the carrier each time he left. He bought expensive food and things for Joyce and, in Nigel’s opinion, quantities of rubbish for himself, pornography from the Adult Book Exchange and proper glasses to put his whisky in and, now he could afford to smoke again, cartons of strong king-size cigarettes. And he stayed out longer and longer each day. Skiving off his duties, leaving him to guard Joyce, thought Nigel. It maddened him to see Marty sitting there, making them all cough with the smoke from his cigarettes, and gloating over those filthy magazines. He found he was embarrassed for Joyce when Marty looked at those pictures in front of her, but he didn’t know why he should be, why he should care.

Joyce scarcely noticed and didn’t care at all. She had the attitude of most women to pornography, that it was disgusting and boring and its lure beyond her comprehension. She was having interesting ideas about the gun. One of them was that it wasn’t loaded, and the other that it wasn’t a real gun. She had written on all her notes – there was a third one tucked inside her bra – that they had killed Alan Groombridge, but now she wondered if this were true. She only had their word for it, and you couldn’t believe a word they said. It might be a toy gun. She had read that robbers used toy guns because of the difficulty of getting real ones. It would be just like them to play about with a toy gun. If she could get her hands on that gun and find out that it was only a toy or not loaded, she would be free. She might not be able to unlock the door because the key was on a string round Nigel’s neck, but she would be able to run when they took her to the lavatory, or break one of the windows at night and scream.

But how was she ever going to get hold of the gun? They kept it under their pillows at night, and though Marty was a heavy sleeper, Nigel wasn’t. Or Robert, as she thought of him, and the dark one, as she thought of Marty. Sometimes she had awakened in the night and looked at them, and Robert had stirred and looked back at her. That was unnerving. Maybe one night, if the police didn’t come and no one found her notes, Robert would get drunk too and she would have her chance. She had stopped thinking much about Mum and Dad and Stephen, for when she did so she couldn’t keep from crying. And she wasn’t going to cry, not even at night, not in front of them. She thought instead about the gun and ways of getting hold of it, for she had as little faith in any plan Robert might concoct as the dark one had. They would keep her there for ever unless she escaped.

They ate smoked trout and Greek takeaway and cream trifle from Marks and Spencer’s on Friday night, and Marty drank half a bottle of Teacher’s. Everything was bought ready-cooked because Marty and Nigel couldn’t cook and Joyce wouldn’t cook for them. Joyce sat on the sofa with her feet up to stop either of them sitting there too. She had already completed about six inches of the front of her jumper, and she knitted away resolutely.

‘The fact is,’ she said, ‘you don’t know what to do with me, do you? You got yourselves in a right mess when you brought me here and now you don’t know how to get out of it. My God, I could rob a bank single-handed better than the two of you did. No more than a pair of babes in arms you are.’

Nigel kept his temper and even smiled. He could look pleasantly little-boyish when he smiled. ‘Maybe you’ve got something there, my love. We made a mistake about that. We all make mistakes.’

‘I don’t,’ said Joyce arrogantly. ‘If you do what’s right and keep to the law and face up to your responsibilities and get steady jobs you don’t make mistakes.’

‘Shut up!’ screamed Marty. ‘Shut your trap, you bitch! Who d’you think you are, giving us that load of shit? You want to remember you’re our prisoner.’

Joyce smiled at him slowly. She made one of the few profound statements she was ever to utter.

‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘I’m not your prisoner. You’re mine.’

12

The man called Locksley came home while Alan was putting his clothes away and stowing the money in one of the drawers of a Victorian mahogany tallboy. The door of the next room closed quietly, and for about an hour there penetrated through the wall soft music of the kind Alan thought was called baroque. He liked it and was rather sorry when it stopped and Locksley went out again.