She gave him the letter. It was happy and affectionate. Stewart said he had had a call from his father all about her and her new man, and why didn’t she and her Paul go and live in the cottage on Dartmoor?

‘Could we, please, Paul?’

‘I don’t know . . .’

‘We could just go and see if you liked it. I could write to the woman in the village who looks after it and get her to air it and warm it, and we could be there by the weekend. Ambrose’ll be home on Saturday but I’d leave the house immaculate for him. He won’t mind my not being here, he’ll be glad to be rid of me at last. Paul, can we?’

‘I’ll do whatever you want,’ he said. ‘You know that.’

He began to drink the tea she had made him. She sat opposite him at the table, her elbows on it, her chin in her hands, her eyes sparkling with anticipation. He smiled back at her and his smile was full of tenderness, yet much as he loved being with her, much as he wanted to share his whole life with her, he wished then that he could briefly be alone. It was impossible. There would be a cruelty in broaching it, he thought, after he had supposedly been all those hours with his wife. But he longed very much for solitude in which to think about what course of action next to take.

Una began talking to him about Dartmoor and the cottage itself. It would be a good place to hide in, he thought, after he had phoned the police and they had rescued Joyce and Joyce had told them the truth about him. They would never look for him in a private house in so remote a place. But before he could phone and certainly before he could leave, he must have more information. He must know for sure that Joyce’s kidnapper, the boy whose walnut-nailed finger had scooped up the change and Marty Foster were one and the same.

‘Shall we go on Friday?’ said Una.

He nodded. It gave him three days.

As their eyes met across the table, his troubled, hers excited, anxious, hopeful, some twenty miles to the south of them John Purford’s aircraft was touching down at Gatwick.

21

Nigel and Marty had never thought of counting the notes they had stolen. They would only have done so if the question of dividing it had come up. Soon after he awoke on the morning of Tuesday, 26 March, after he had drunk some warm water, Nigel took the money out, spread it on the kitchen table and counted it. He didn’t know how much they had spent but there was over four thousand left – four thousand and fifteen pounds, to be precise. The amount they had taken, therefore, had been somewhat in excess of what he had supposed. He divided it into two equal sums and tied up each of the resultant wads with a black stocking. Then he put them back into the bag with the bunch of Ford Escort keys.

He and Joyce had eaten nothing since the chicken soup at midday on Saturday, and not much for two days before that. Nigel was no longer hungry. Nor did he feel particularly weak or tired, only light-headed. The visions of a future in which he dominated Joyce had been replaced by even more highly coloured ones in which he had Marty at his mercy in some medieval torture chamber. He saw himself in a black cloak and hood, tearing out Marty’s fingernails with red-hot pincers. Once he was out of there he was going to get Marty, hunt him if necessary to the ends of the earth, and then he was going to come back and finish Joyce. He didn’t know whom he hated most, Joyce or Marty, but he hated them more than he hated his parents. The former had succeeded the latter as responsible for all his troubles.

Since Sunday Joyce had spent most of the time lying on the sofa. She hadn’t washed or combed her hair or cleaned her teeth. Dust lay everywhere once more and the bed linen smelt sour. Once she had understood that Marty wasn’t coming back, that she was alone with Nigel, that there wasn’t going to be anything to eat, she had retreated into a zombie-like apathy, a kind of fugue, from which she was briefly aroused only by the ringing of the doorbell on Monday afternoon. She had wanted to know who it was and had tried to get to the window, but Nigel had caught her and thrown her back, his hand over her mouth. And then they had both faintly heard a bell ringing in the next room and Bridey going downstairs, and she had known to her despair what Nigel had known to his relief, that it had only been some salesman or canvasser at the door.

On the following morning it was nearly twelve before she dragged herself to the kitchen and, having drunk a cup of water, leant back against the sink, her face going white. When she drank water she could always feel the shock of it, teasingly trickling down, trace its whole passage through her intestines. She hadn’t looked directly at Nigel, much less spoken to him, since Monday morning, for whenever she allowed her eyes to meet his it only brought on a spasm of hysterical crying. Twice a day perhaps she would go limply towards the door, and Nigel would take this as a signal to escort her to the lavatory. She was weak and broken, a butt for Nigel’s occasional violence. She believed that everything had been destroyed in her, for she no longer thought with longing or anguish of Stephen or her parents, or of escape or of keeping herself decent and nice. Aeons seemed to have passed since she had been defiant and bold. She was starving to death, as Nigel had told her to, and she supposed – for this was all she thought of now – that she would grow weaker and weaker and less and less conscious of herself and her surroundings until finally she did die. She walked to the door and waited there until Nigel slouched over to take her outside.

When they were both back in the room, Nigel spoke to her. He spoke her name. She made no answer. He didn’t use her name again, it was almost painful to him to bring it out, but said:

‘We can’t stay here. You said once, you said if we let you go you wouldn’t talk to the police.’

Stress and starvation had taken from Nigel’s speech that disc jockey drawl and those eclectic idioms, and tones of public school and university re-asserted themselves. Joyce wondered vaguely at the voice which was beautiful and like someone in a serious play on the television, but she hardly took in the sense of the words. Nigel repeated them and went on:

‘If you meant that, straight up, we can get out of here.’ He looked at her hard, his eyes glittering. ‘I’ll give you two thousand,’ he said, ‘to get out of here and go and stop in a hotel for two weeks. Give me two weeks to get out of the country, get clear away. Then you can go home and squeal all you want.’

Joyce absorbed what he had said. She sat in silence, nervously fingering her chin where a patch of acne had developed. After a while she said, ‘What about him? What about Marty?’

‘Who’s Marty?’ shouted Nigel.

It was hard for Joyce to speak. When she spoke her mouth filled with saliva and she felt sick, but she did her best.

‘What’s the good of two thousand to me? I couldn’t spend it. I couldn’t tell my fiancé. It’d be like Monopoly money, it’d be just paper.’

‘You can save it up, can’t you? Buy shares with it.’ Memories of his father’s advice, often derided in the commune, came back to Nigel. ‘Buy goddamned bloody National Savings.’

Joyce began to cry. The tears trickled slowly down her face. ‘It’s not just that. I couldn’t take the bank’s money. How could I?’ She wept, hanging her head. ‘I’d be as bad as you.’

With a gasp of rage, Nigel came at her, slapping her face hard, and Joyce fell down on the mattress, shaking with sobs. He turned away from her and went into the kitchen where the money was in the carrier bag. The bunch of car keys was there too, but Nigel had forgotten all about the silver-blue Ford Escort he had hidden in Dr Bolton’s garage twenty-two days before.