‘If I come to see him tomorrow,’ he said, ‘would you let me in?’

‘I don’t want any trouble now.’

‘You’ve only to let me into the house. I don’t mean into his place, I know you can’t do that.’

‘Well, if I open the door and a fella pushes past me,’ said Bridey with a sigh, ‘and makes his way up the stairs, it’s no blame to me, is it, and me standing no more than five foot two?’

Alan said, ‘I’ll come in the afternoon. Around four?’

Bridey didn’t tell him it was her day off, so she would be home all day and he could have come at ten or noon or in the evening if he’d wanted. She only nodded, thinking that that gave her a long time in which to change her mind, and got off her stool and went round the back out of his sight. Alan was sure she would only come back when more customers came in. He drank up his beer and went to catch the 32 bus.

Una was still out when he came back to Montcalm Gardens. It was nearly six. She walked in at five past with a bottle of wine, Monbazillac which he and she both liked, for their supper. It was quite a long time, while they were eating that supper, in fact, before he realized that she must have been home in his absence. The skirt and jumper she had on were different from what she had worn to go to the station and the hairdresser. But she didn’t ask him where he had been, and he volunteered no information. They went downstairs to say good-bye to Caesar, for they would be gone on the five-thirty out of Paddington before he came home on the following day.

‘Send me a card,’ said Caesar. ‘I’ll have one with Dartmoor Prison on it. I went and had a look at it once, poor devils working the fields. D’you know what it says over the doors? Parcere Subjectis. Spare the captives.’

That made Alan feel they were really going, that and the tickets Una had got. He wished now that he had arranged with the Irish girl to be let into the house in the morning instead of the afternoon, but it was too late to alter it now. And in a way the arrangement was the best possible he could have made, for it meant that he could make his phone call and immediately afterwards leave London. The police would trace the call to a London call box, but by then he would be on his way to Devon. That is, of course, if he made the call at all, if it didn’t turn out to be a false trail and Marty Foster quite innocent.

Sitting in his room that night, he told Una that he didn’t intend to divorce his wife. He told her because it was true. A dead man cannot divorce. He wanted no more lies, no more leading her into false beliefs.

‘I’m still married to Stewart,’ she said.

‘I shall never be able to divorce her, Una.’

She didn’t ask him why not. She said quaintly and very practically, as if she were talking of the relative merits of travelling, say, train or air, first class or second class, ‘It’s just that if we had children, I should like to be married.’

‘You’d like to have children?’ he said wonderingly, and then at last, in so many words, she told him about Lucy. In doing so she gave him the ultimate of herself while he, he thought, had given her nothing.

The dream was the first he had had for several nights. He was in a train with two men and each of his hands was manacled to one of theirs. They were Dick Heysham and Ambrose Engstrand. Neither of them spoke to him and he didn’t know where they were taking him, but the train dissolved and they were on a bleak and desolate moorland before stone pillars which supported gates, and over the gates was the inscription: Parcere Subjectis. The gates opened and they led him in, and a woman came out to receive him. At first he couldn’t see her face, but he sensed who she was as one does sense such things in dreams. She was Pam and Jillian and in a way she was Annie too. Until he saw her face. And when he did he saw that she was none of them. She was Joyce, and blood flowed down her body from an open wound in her head.

He struggled out of the dream to find Una gone from his side. He put out his hands, speaking her name, and woke fully to see her standing at the tallboy, opening and emptying the drawers.

It was a reflex to shout. He shouted at her without thinking.

‘What are you doing? Why are you going through my things?’

The colour left her face.

‘You mustn’t touch those things. What are you doing?’

‘I was packing for you,’ she faltered.

She hadn’t reached the drawer where the money was. He sighed, closing his eyes, wondering how long he could keep the money concealed from her when they were living together and had all things in common. She had let the clothes fall from her hands and stood, lost and suffering. He went up to her, held her face, lifting it to his.

‘I’m sorry. I was dreaming and I didn’t know what I said.’

She clung to him. ‘You’ve never been angry with me before.’

‘I’m not angry with you.’

She came back into bed with him and he held her in his arms, knowing that she expected him to make love to her. But he felt restless and rather excited, though not sexually excited, more as if the deed he was set on accomplishing that day would set him free to love Una fully and on every level. And now he saw clearly that if he could show the two men to be the same and act on it, he would undo all the wrong he had done Joyce and himself on the day of the robbery. Ahead of him, once this hurdle was surmounted, seemed to stretch a life of total peace and joy with Una, in which such apparent obstacles as namelessness, joblessness and fast decreasing capital were insignificant pin-pricks.

Nigel and Joyce finished the loaf up on Friday morning. It was another grey day, but this time made gloomy by fog. Nigel wondered if he could get old Green to do more shopping for them – not more bread, certainly. Even a deaf old cretin like him would begin to have his doubts about a sick man on his own, a man with flu, eating a whole large white loaf in a day. He heard Mr Green’s kettle and then his footsteps crossing to the lavatory, but he didn’t go to the door.

The first thing he had done on getting up was look out of the window for the watcher of the day before. But there was no one there. And Nigel told himself he was getting crazy, hysterical, imagining the police would act like that. The police wouldn’t hang about outside, they’d come in. They would have firearms issued. They would evacuate the surrounding houses and call out to him on a loud hailer to throw down his gun and send Joyce out.

The street looked as if it could never be the backdrop to such a drama. Respectable, shabby, London-suburban, it was deserted but for a woman pushing a pram past the church. The man he had seen outside yesterday, Nigel decided, was no more likely to be the police than that woman. As for whoever kept ringing the bell, that could be the electricity meter man. The meter was probably due to be read. But, for all these reassurances, he knew he had to get out. There was no explaining away the evidence of the newspaper. Nigel thought how helpful his parents would be to the police once they’d been located via the Boltons. They’d shop him without thinking of anything but being what they called good citizens, rack their brains to think where he might be, sift their memories for the names of any friends he had ever had.

‘Just keep quiet for twelve hours,’ he said to Joyce, ‘then you can phone the bank’s head office and tell them all you want about me and this place, and hand over the money.’ He added, appalled at the thought of it, the waste, ‘Jesus!’

Joyce said nothing. She was thinking, as she had been thinking for most of the night, if she could do that with honour. Nigel thought she was being defiant again. Get some food inside her and all the old obstinancy came back.

‘I can kill you, you know,’ he said. ‘Might be simpler when all’s said and done. That way I get to like keep all the bread myself.’ He showed her the gun, holding it out on his left palm.