While still in Crete, Dr and Mrs Bolton had received a telegram announcing that Dr Bolton’s mother had died. Old Mrs Bolton had been ninety-two and bedridden, but nevertheless when one’s mother dies, whatever the circumstances, one can hardly remain abroad enjoying oneself. Dr Bolton found the Ford Escort before he had even taken the suitcases out of his own car. He unpacked one of these in order to retrieve, from where it was wrapped round his sandals, the relevant copy of the Daily Telegraph. Having checked that his memory wasn’t tricking him, he phoned the police.

They were with him in half an hour. Dr and Mrs Bolton were asked to make a list of all the people who knew they had no lock on their garage and also knew they were to be away on holiday.

‘Our friends,’ said Dr Bolton, ‘are not the kind of people who rob banks.’

‘I don’t doubt that,’ said the detective inspector, ‘but your friends may know people who know people who are less respectable than they are, or have children who have friends who are not respectable at all.’

Dr Bolton was obliged to agree that this was possible. The list was a very long one and the Thaxbys were only added by Mrs Bolton as an afterthought and not until the Thursday morning. She couldn’t remember whether or not she had told Mrs Thaxby. In this case, said the detective inspector, it wasn’t a matter of when in doubt leave out, but when in doubt be on the safe side. Mrs Bolton said it was laughable, the Thaxbys of all people. Maybe they had children? said the inspector. Well, one boy, a very nice intelligent responsible sort of young man who was at present a student at the University of Kent.

Which went to show that Nigel’s mother had not been strictly honest when recounting her son’s activities to her friends.

A few hours after Mrs Bolton had given this vital piece of information to the police, John Purford at last got in touch with them. It wasn’t that he was afraid or stalling, but simply that he didn’t know the Childon bank robbery had ever taken place. The event had almost slipped his mother’s mind. After all, it had been more than three weeks ago, the manager and the girl were sure to be dead, it was a tragedy, God knows, but life has to go on. This was what she said in defence when John saw a little paragraph in the paper about the car being found. He told his partner the whole thing, including the business in the back of the car with Jillian Groombridge. He said it must all be in his head, mustn’t it? He had been at school with Marty Foster.

‘That’s no argument,’ said the partner. ‘There were folks must have been at school with Hitler, come to that.’

‘You think I ought to tell the police?’

‘Sure you ought. What have you got to lose? I’ll come with you if you want. They won’t eat you. They’ll be all over you, nice as pie.’

In fact, the police were not particularly nice to John Purford. They thanked him for coming to them, they appreciated that he was able precisely to point out on a street plan the café where he had met Marty Foster and Nigel Something, but they scolded him soundly for giving away information of that kind and asked him, to his horror, if he knew the age of Jillian Groombridge.

They seized upon the fairly unusual christian name of Nigel. A couple on Dr Bolton’s list had a son called Nigel. The police went to Elstree. Dr and Mrs Thaxby said their son was in Newcastle. They gave the police the address of the Kensington commune, and there Samantha’s mother was interviewed. She also said Nigel was in Newcastle. Marty Foster’s father didn’t know where his son was, hadn’t set eyes on him for two years and didn’t want to. The police found Mrs Foster who was living with her lover and her lover’s three children in a council house in Hemel Hempstead. She hadn’t seen Marty for several months, but when she had last seen him he had been on the dole. Immediately the police set about tracing Marty Foster’s address through the files of the Ministry of Social Security.

Nigel got his passport out of the rucksack and read it. Mr N. L. Thaxby; born 15.1.58; Occupation: student; Height: six feet; Eyes: blue. The passport had only been used twice, Nigel not being one of those enterprising and adventurous young people who hitch-hike across Europe or drive vans to India. He thought he’d take a flight to Bolivia or Paraguay or somewhere they couldn’t extradite you. He’d have about fifteen hundred pounds left, and once he was there he’d contact some newspaper, the News of the World or the Sunday People, and sell them his story – for what? Five grand? Ten?

Twice more he had asked Joyce to take two thousand as the price of silence, and twice more she had refused. This time he went up to her with the gun levelled and watched her flinch and begin to put up her hands to her face. He wondered vaguely if she felt like he did as the result of their long fast, drugged as if with one of those substances that don’t stupefy but make the head light and dizzy and change the vision and bend the mind. Certainly, she looked at him as if he were a ghost or a monster. He thought of shooting her there and then and keeping all the money for himself, but it was broad daylight and he could hear Bridey in the next room and, beyond the other wall, old Green’s whistling kettle.

‘What did you say it for if you didn’t mean it? Why did you say you wouldn’t talk?’ Nigel pushed one of the bundles of money into her face. He rubbed it against her tears. ‘That’s more than you could earn in a year. Would you rather lie here bleeding to death than have two grand for yourself? Would you?’

She pushed the money away and covered her face, but she didn’t speak. Nigel sat down. Standing made him feel a bit faint. He was acutely aware that he was doing it all wrong. He shouldn’t be pleading for favours but compelling by force, yet he began to plead and to cajole.

‘Look, it doesn’t have to be for two weeks, just long enough to let me get out of the country. You can go to a big hotel in the West End. And they’ll never find out you’ve had the money because you can spend it. Don’t you realize you can go to a jeweller’s and spend the whole lot on a watch or a ring?’

Joyce got up and went to the door. She stood at the door, waiting wordlessly, until Nigel came over and listened and unlocked it. Joyce went into the lavatory. Behind her door Bridey was playing a transistor. Nigel waited tensely, wondering what was the point of a deaf man having a whistling kettle. It was whistling again now. Nigel heard it stop and thought about Mr Green until a clear plan began to form in his mind, and he wondered why he had never considered Mr Green from this aspect before. Nobody ever spoke to him because they couldn’t make themselves understood, no matter how loud they shouted, and he hardly ever spoke because he knew the answers he might receive would be meaningless to him. Of course the plan was only a temporary measure and it might not, in any case, work. But it was the only one he could think of in which, if it didn’t work, there would be no harm done.

The idea of at last getting something to eat made him hungry again. The saliva rushed, warm and faintly salty, into his mouth. He could revive and perhaps bribe Joyce with food. She came out of the lavatory and he hustled her back into the room. Then he hunted in there and in the kitchen for an envelope, but he had no more luck than Joyce had had when she wanted to write her note, and he had to settle as she had done for a paper bag or, in this case, for part of the wrapping off Marty’s cigarette carton. Nigel wrote: ‘In bed with flu. Could you get me large white loaf?’ Of all the comestibles he could have had, he chose without thinking man’s traditional staff of life. He folded the paper round a pound note. Joyce was lying on the sofa face-downwards, but let him only be out of sight for more than a couple of minutes, he thought, let him start down those stairs, and she’d be off there raring to go as if she’d just got a plateful of roast beef inside her. The saliva washed round the cavities and pockets of his mouth. He went out on to the landing and pushed the note under Mr Green’s door, having remembered to sign it: M. Foster.