Her future actions seemed simple. She wouldn’t try to get the key from Marty, for the two of them could easily overpower her and might hurt her badly. But in the morning, when one of them took her to the lavatory, she would run down the stairs, yelling at the top of her voice.

She decided not to take her clothes off again in case Nigel woke up and started pawing her about. That was a horrible thought when you considered that he was ill or not really a man at all. She came back and looked at him, still sleeping. Wasn’t it rather peculiar to make a toy gun with a trigger that wouldn’t move? The point with having a toy gun, she knew from her younger brother, was that you could press the trigger and fire caps. She wondered how you put the caps into this one. Perhaps by fiddling with that handle thing at the back? She pushed it but it wouldn’t move.

Joyce carried the gun to the kitchen window where the light was brightest. In that light she spotted a funny little knob on the side of the gun, and she pushed at it tentatively with the tip of her finger. It moved easily, sliding forward towards the barrel and revealing a small red spot. Although the handle thing at the back had also moved and dropped forward, no space for the insertion of caps had been revealed. But there wouldn’t be any point in putting caps in, thought Joyce, if you couldn’t move the trigger. Perhaps it was a real gun that had got broken. She raised it again, smiling to herself because she’d really been a bit of a fool, hadn’t she, letting herself be kept a prisoner for a week by two boys with a gun that didn’t work? She felt quite ashamed.

Levelling the gun at Nigel made her giggle. She enjoyed the sensation of threatening him, even though he didn’t know it, as for days he had threatened her. They’d killed Mr Groombridge with that, had they? Like hell they had. Like this, had they, squeezing a broken trigger that wouldn’t move?

Joyce squeezed it, almost wishing they were awake to see her. There was a shattering roar. Her arm flew up, the gun arc-ed across the room, and the bullet tore into the rotten wood of the window frame, lodging there, missing Nigel’s ear by an inch.

Joyce screamed.

17

Marty was off the sofa and Nigel off the mattress before the reverberations of the explosion had died away. Nigel seized Joyce and pulled her down on the bed, his hand over her mouth, and when she went on screaming he stuffed a pillow over her face. Marty knelt on the end of the mattress, holding his head in both hands and staring at the hole the bullet had made in the window frame. In all their heads the noise was still ringing.

‘Oh, Christ,’ Marty moaned. ‘Oh, Christ.’

Nigel pulled the pillow off Joyce and slapped her face with the flat of his hand and the back of his hand.

‘You bitch. You stupid bitch.’

She lay face-downwards, sobbing. Nigel crawled over the mattress and reached out and picked up the gun. He pulled a blanket round himself like a shawl and sat hunched up, examining the gun with wonder and astonishment. The room stank of gunpowder. Silence crept into the room, heavier and somehow louder than sound. Marty squatted, taut with fear, waiting for the feet on the stairs, the knock on the door, the sound of the phone down below being lifted, but Nigel only held and turned and looked at the gun.

The German writing on the side of it made sense now. With a thrill of excitement, he read those words again. This was a Bond gun he held in his hands, a Walther PPK. He didn’t want to put it down even to pull on his jeans and his sweater, he didn’t want ever to let it out of his hands again. He brooded over it with joy, loving it, wondering how he could ever have supposed it a toy or a replica. It was more real than himself. It worked.

‘That’s quite a weapon,’ he said softly.

In other circumstances, Marty would have been quite amused to have fooled Nigel about the gun for so long, and elated to have received his praise. But he was frightened and he was in pain. So he only muttered, ‘’Course it is. I wouldn’t pay seventy-five quid for any old crap,’ and winced as a twinge in his stomach doubled him up. ‘Going to throw up,’ he groaned and made for the door.

‘Just check what the scene is while you’re out there,’ said Nigel. He was looking at the small circular red indentation the moving of the safety catch had exposed. Carefully he pushed the catch down again and that thing on the back, which had always puzzled him but which he now knew to be the hammer, dropped down. Now the trigger would hardly move. Nigel looked at Joyce and at the hole in the window frame and he sighed.

Marty vomited for some minutes. Afterwards he felt so weak and faint that he had to sit down on the lavatory seat, but at last he forced himself to get up and stagger down the stairs. His legs felt like bits of wet string. He crept down two flights of stairs, listening. The whole house seemed to be asleep, all the doors were shut and all the lights off except for a faint glimmer under the red-haired girl’s front door. Marty hauled himself back up, hanging on to the banisters, his stomach rotating and squeezing.

He lurched across the room to the kitchen and took a long swig from the whisky bottle. Warm and brown and reassuring, it brought him momentary relief so that he was able to stand up properly and draw a deep breath. Nigel, hunched over Joyce, though she was immobile and spent and crying feebly, ordered him to make coffee.

‘What did your last slave die of?’ said Marty. ‘I’m sick and I’m not a bloody woman. She can make it.’

‘I’m not letting her out of my sight, no way,’ said Nigel. So no one made any coffee, and no one went to sleep again before dawn. Once they heard the siren of a police car, but it was far away up on the North Circular. Marty lay across the foot of the mattress, holding his stomach. By the time the yellow lamps had faded to pinky-vermilion and gone out, by the time a few birds had begun to sing in the dusty planes of the churchyard, they had all fallen asleep in a spreadeagled pile, like casualties on a battlefield.

Bridey went down with a bag of empty cans and bottles before she went to work. The red-haired girl, who had been lying in wait for her, came out.

‘Did you hear that funny carry-on in the night?’

‘What sort of carry-on?’ said Bridey cautiously.

‘Well, I don’t know,’ said the red-haired girl, ‘but there was something going on up the top. About half-three. I woke up and I said to my fella, ‘I thought I heard a shot,’ I said. ‘From upstairs,’ I said. And then someone came down, walked all the way down and up again.’

Bridey too had heard the shot, and she had heard a scream. For a moment she had thought of doing something about it, get even with that filthy-spoken bit of rubbish, that Marty. But doing something meant the police. Fetching the guards, it meant. No one in Bridey’s troubled family history had ever done so treacherous a thing, not even for worthy motives of revenge.

‘You were dreaming,’ said Bridey.

‘That’s what my fella said. “You were dreaming,” he said. But I don’t know. You know you sleep heavy, Bridey, and old Green’s deaf as a post. I said to my fella, “You don’t reckon we ought to ring the fuzz, do you?” and he said, “Never,” he said. “You were dreaming.” But I don’t know. D’you reckon I ought to have rung the fuzz?’

‘Never do that, my love,’ said Bridey. ‘What’s in it for you? Nothing but trouble. Never do that.’

They would never get out now, Nigel thought, they would just have to stick there. For weeks or months, he didn’t know how long, maybe until the money ran out. He found he didn’t dislike the idea. Not while he had that beautiful effective weapon. He nursed the gun as if it were a cuddly toy or a small affectionate animal, his fear of losing it to Marty, whose possession it was, keeping it always in his hands. If Marty tried to take it from him, he thought he would threaten Marty with it as he threatened Joyce, if necessary kill him. During that night, what with one thing and another, something in Nigel that had always been fragile and brittle had finally split. It was his sanity.