Mr Green went out most days. He had lived for years in one room, so he went out even if he had nothing to buy and although climbing back again up those stairs nearly killed him every time. The note, which suddenly appeared under his door when he was making himself his fifteenth cup of tea of the day, worried him intensely. This wasn’t because he even considered not complying with the request in it. He was afraid of young people, especially young males, and he would have done far more than make a special journey to buy a loaf in order to avoid offending the tall fair one or the small dark one, whichever this Foster was. What worried him was not knowing whether his neighbour meant a cut or uncut loaf, and also being entrusted with a pound note which still seemed to Mr Green a large sum of money. But when he had drunk his tea he took his string bag and put on his overcoat and set off.

A young man in a bluejacket caught him up a little way down the road. Asking the way to somewhere, Mr Green supposed. He did what he always did, shook his head and kept on walking, though the young man persisted and was quite hard to shake off. Because the cut loaf was more expensive than the uncut Mr Green didn’t buy it. He bought a large white tin loaf, crusty and warm, carefully wrapping it in tissue paper himself, and in the shop next door he bought the Evening Standard. This he paid for out of his own money. Then he went for a little walk in his own silence along the noisy Broadway, returning home by a different route and not taking too long about it because it would be wrong and inconsiderate to keep a sick man waiting.

Half-way up the stairs he had to stop and rest. Bridey Flynn, coming home from the Rose of Killarney, caught up with him and passed him, not speaking to him but reading out of curiosity the note which lay spread out on the flat top of the newel post. She disappeared round a bend in the stairs. Mr Green placed the change from the pound note, a fifty-pence piece and two tens and a one, on the note and carefully wrapped the coins up in it. Then he laboriously climbed the rest of the stairs. At the top he put the folded newspaper on the floor outside Marty Foster’s door, the loaf on top of the newspaper and the little parcel of coins on top of the loaf. He tapped on the door, but he didn’t wait.

Nigel didn’t at once go to the door. He thought it was probably old Green who had knocked but he couldn’t be positive and he had cause to be nervous. Between the time he had put the note under old Green’s door and now, the doorbell had rung several times, in fact half a dozen times. The second time it rang Nigel pushed Joyce up into the corner of the sofa and stuck the barrel of the gun, safety catch off, hard into her chest. She went grey in the face, she didn’t make a sound. But Nigel hardly knew how he had borne it, listening to that bell ringing, ringing, down there. He gritted his teeth and tensed all his muscles.

It was about half an hour after that that there was a tap at the door. Nigel was still, though less concentratedly, covering Joyce with the gun. At the knock he jammed it against her neck. When he heard the sound of Mr Green’s whistling kettle he went cautiously to the door. He opened it a crack with his left hand, keeping Joyce covered with the gun in his right. There was no one on the landing. Bridey was in the bathroom, he could see the shape of her through the frosted glass in the bathroom door.

The sight of the bread, and the smell of it through its flimsy wrapping, made him feel dizzy. He snatched it up with the newspaper and the package of change and kicked the door shut.

Joyce saw and smelt the bread and gave a sort of cry and came towards him with her hands out. He was still pointing the gun at her. She hardly seemed to notice it.

‘Sit down,’ said Nigel. ‘You’ll get your share.’

He didn’t bother to cut the loaf, he tore it. It was soft and very light and not quite cold. He gave a hunk to Joyce and sank his teeth into his own hunk. Funny, he had often read about people eating dry bread, people in ancient times mostly or at least a good while ago, and he had wondered how they could. Now he knew. It was starvation which made it palatable. He devoured nearly half the loaf, washing it down with a cup of water with whisky in it. Now his hunger was allayed, the next best thing to bread Mr Green could have bought him was a newspaper. Before he had even finished eating, he was going through that paper page by page.

They had found the Escort in Dr Bolton’s garage. Not that they put it that way – ‘a shed in Epping Forest’. They’d be on to him now, he thought, via the commune, via that furniture guy, that school friend of Marty’s. He turned savagely to Joyce.

‘Look, all I ask is you lie low for two goddamned days. That’s a thousand quid a day. Just two days and then you can talk all you want.’ Inspiration came to Nigel. ‘You don’t even need to keep the money. If you’re that crazy, you can give it back to the bank.’

Joyce didn’t answer him. She hunched forward, then doubled up with pain. The new bread was having its effect on a stomach empty for five days. As bad as Marty, as bad as that little brain, thought Nigel, until he too was seized with pains like iron fingers gripping his intestines.

At least it stopped him wanting to eat up all the remaining bread. The worst of the pain passed off after about half an hour. Joyce was lying face-downwards on the mattress, apparently asleep. Nigel looked at her with hatred in which there was something of despair. He thought he would have to give her an ultimatum, she either took the money and promised to keep quiet for a day or he shot her. It was the only way. He couldn’t remember, but still he was sure his fingerprints must be somewhere on that Ford Escort, and they’d match them with his prints in the commune, his parents’ home, every surface of it, being wiped clean daily, he thought. John Something, the furniture guy, would link him with Marty Foster and then . . . How long had he got? Maybe they were already in Notting Hill now, matching prints. Had Marty ever been to the commune? That was another thing he couldn’t remember.

If he was going to South America it wouldn’t make much difference whether he shot Joyce or not. He would try to do it when the house was empty but for old Green. And he would like to do it, it would be a positive pleasure. Although he knew the view from the window by heart, could have drawn it accurately or made a plan of it, he nevertheless went to the window and looked out to check on certain aspects of the lie of the land. This house was joined to only one of its neighbours. Nigel eased the window up – the first time it had been opened since Marty’s occupancy – and craned his neck out. Joyce didn’t stir. He was seeking to confirm that, as he remembered from the time before all this happened and he was free to come and go and roam the streets, no curtains hung at the windows of the second-floor flat next door. This was in the adjoining house. It was as he had thought, the flat was empty and there would be no one on the other side of the kitchen wall to hear a shot. Very likely the people in the lower flats were out at work all day.

He had withdrawn his head and was closing the window when he noticed a man standing on the opposite pavement. Nigel closed the window and fastened the catch. There was something familiar about the man on the pavement, though Nigel couldn’t recall where he had seen him before. The man was wearing jeans and a dark pullover and a kind of zipper jacket or anorak, and he had thickish fair-brown hair that wasn’t very short but wasn’t long either. He looked about thirty-five.

Nigel decided he had never seen him before, but that didn’t make him feel any better. The man might have been waiting for someone, but if so it was a strange place to choose, outside a church in a turning off Chichele Road. He could be a policeman, a detective. It could be he who had kept on ringing the bell. Nigel told himself that the man’s clothes looked new and his get-up somehow contrived, as if he wasn’t used to wearing clothes like that and wasn’t quite at ease in them. He made himself turn away and sit down and go through the paper once more.