‘You the police?’

A more self-confident man might have agreed that he was. Alan, trying to think up an excuse for wanting a stranger’s name and address, disclaimed any connection with the law and thrust his hand into his pocket, seeking inspiration. All he could produce was a five-pound note, a portrait of the Duke of Wellington.

‘He dropped this as he was leaving.’

‘You took your time about it,’ said the girl.

‘I’ve been away.’

She said quickly, greedily, ‘Sure and I’ll give it him. Foster’s his name, Marty Foster, I know him well.’

The note was snatched from his fingers. He began to insist, ‘If you could just tell me . . ?’

‘Don’t you trust me, then?’

He shrugged, embarrassed. Several pairs of eyes were fixed on him. He got down off his stool and went out. If the girl knew him well, spoke of him therefore as a frequenter of the pub, he couldn’t be Joyce’s kidnapper, could he? Alan knew he could, that all that meant nothing. But at least he had the name, Foster, Marty Foster. What he could do now was phone the police and give them Marty Foster’s name and describe him. He crossed the road and went into a phone box and looked in the directory. There was no police station listed for Cricklewood. Of course he could phone Scotland Yard. A superstitious fear took hold of him that as soon as he spoke they would know at once where he was and who he was. He came hurriedly out of the phone box and began to walk away in the direction of Exmoor Gardens, towards Alison where he was supposed to be and looking for another phone box in a less exposed and vulnerable place.

By the time he had found it he knew he wasn’t going to make that call. It was more important to him that the police shouldn’t track him down than that they should be alerted to hunt for a Marty Foster who very likely had no connection at all with the Childon bank robbery. So he continued to walk aimlessly and to think. In the little shopping parade among the ovals named after mountain ranges, he went into a newsagent’s and bought an evening paper. As far as he could see, there was nothing in it about Joyce. At three-fifteen he thought he might reasonably go back to Una now, and he retraced his steps to Cricklewood Broadway to wait for a bus going south.

The bus was approaching and he was holding out his hand to it when he saw the girl from the Rose of Killarney. She had come out of a side door of the pub, and crossing the Broadway, walked off down a side street. Alan let the bus go. He thought, maybe she’ll go straight to this Foster’s home with the money, that’s what I’d do, that’s what any honest person would do, and then he gave a little dry laugh to himself at what he had said. He followed her across the road, wishing there were more people about, not just the two of them apparently, once the shopping place and the bus routes were left behind. But she didn’t look round. She walked with assurance, cutting corners, crossing streets diagonally. Suddenly there were more shops, a launderette, a Greek delicatessen; on the opposite side a church in a churchyard full of plane trees, on this a row of red brick houses, three storeys high. The girl turned in at the gate of one of them.

Alan hurried, but by the time he reached the gate the girl had disappeared. He read the names above the bells and saw that the topmost one was M. Foster. Had Foster himself let her in? Or had it been the mother or wife with whom his imagination had earlier invested the man with the mutilated finger? He crossed the road and stood by the low wall of the churchyard to wait for her. And then? Once she had left, was he also going to ring that bell? Presumably. He hadn’t come so far as this to abandon his quest and go tamely home.

Time passed very slowly. He pretended to read the notice board and then really read it for something to do. He walked up the street as far as he could go while keeping the house in sight, and then he walked back again and as far in the other direction. He went into the churchyard and even examined the church which he was sure was of no architectural merit whatsoever. Still the girl hadn’t come out, though by now half an hour had gone by.

M. Foster’s was the topmost bell. Did that mean he lived on the top floor? It might not mean that he occupied the whole of the top floor. For the first time Alan lifted his eyes to the third storey of the house with its three oblong windows. A young man was standing up against the glass, immobile, flaccid, somehow even from that distance and through that glass giving an impression of a kind of hopeless indolence. But he wasn’t Foster. His hair was blond. Alan stopped staring at him and, making up his mind, he went back across the road and rang that bell.

Nobody came down. He rang the bell again, more insistently this time, but he felt sure it wasn’t going to be answered. On an impulse he pressed the one below it, B. Flynn.

The last person he expected to see was the barmaid from the Rose of Killarney. Her appearance at the door, not in her outdoor coat but with a cup of tea in one hand and a cigarette in the other, made him feel that he had walked into one of those nightmares – familiar to him these days – in which the irrational is commonplace and identities bizarrely interchangeable.

She said nothing and he had no idea what to say. They stared at each other and as he became aware that she was frightened, that in her look was awe and fear and repulsion, she put her hand into the pocket of her trousers and pulled out the five-pound note.

‘Take your money.’ She thrust it at him. ‘I’ve done nothing. Will you leave me alone?’ Her voice trembled. ‘Give it him yourself if that’s what you’re wanting.’

Alan still couldn’t understand, but he questioned, ‘He does live here?’

‘On the top, next to me. Him and his pal.’ She began to retreat, rubbing her hands as if to erase the contamination of that money from them. The cigarette hung from her mouth.

Alan knew she thought he was the police in spite of his denial. She thought he was a policeman playing tricks. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘How does he talk? Has he got an accent?’

She threw the cigarette end into the street. ‘Bloody English like you,’ she said, and closed the door.

Una was waiting for him in the hall. The front door had yielded under the pressure of his hand, she had left it on the latch, presumably so that she could the more easily keep running out to see if he was coming.

She rushed up to him. ‘You were so long.’ She sounded breathless. ‘I was worried.’

‘It’s only just gone five,’ he said vaguely.

‘Did you have a bad time with Alison?’

He had almost forgotten who Alison was. It seemed ridiculous to him that Una should be concerned about that happy secure woman who had nothing to do with him or her, but he seized on what might have happened that afternoon as an excuse for his preoccupation.

‘She was quite reasonable and calm and nice,’ he said, and he added, not thinking this time of Paul Browning’s wife, ‘She thinks I shouldn’t have left. She says I’ve ruined her life.’

Una said nothing. He followed her through the big house to the kitchen where she began to busy herself making tea for him. Her flying-fox face was puckered so that the lines on it seemed to presage the wrinkles of age. He put his arms round her.

‘What is it?’

‘Did it make you unhappy, seeing Alison?’

‘Not a bit. Let’s forget her.’ He held Una tight, thinking what a bore it was, all this pretence. He was going to have to fabricate so much, interviews with solicitors, financial arrangements. Why had he ever said he was married? Una was herself married, so the question of marriage between them couldn’t have arisen. It seemed to him that she must have read at least some part of his thoughts, for she moved a little aside from him and said:

‘I heard from Stewart. By the second post.’