Joyce said wearily, ‘If I say yes, can we get out of here today?’

The hue and cry for Marty Foster had awakened memories in the mind of a policeman whose beat included Chichele Road. One foggy morning he had found a sick young man crouched on a wall and had helped him into Dr Miskin’s where, as he let go of his arm, the young man had whispered to the receptionist, ‘Name of Foster, M Foster.’ All this came back to him on Friday and he passed it on to his superiors. Dr Miskin directed them to the hospital in Willesden where Marty was in a ward along with a dozen or so other men.

Marty had been feeling a lot better. Apart from being confined within four walls, he rather liked it in hospital. The nurses were very good-looking jolly girls and Marty spent a good part of every day chatting them up. He missed his cigarettes, though, and he dreadfully missed his alcohol. They had told him he mustn’t touch a drop for at least six months.

That he would have a choice about what he did in the next six months Marty was growing confident. He was glad Nige hadn’t come in. He didn’t want to see Nigel or Joyce or, come to that, the money ever again. He felt he was well rid of it, and he felt cleansed of it too by removing himself in this way and voluntarily foregoing his share. Marty really felt he had done that, had done it all off his own bat to put the clock back, alter the past and stay the moving finger.

So it was with sick dismay that after lunch on Friday, when they were all back in their beds for the afternoon rest, he raised his head from the pillow to see two undoubted policemen, though in plain clothes, come marching down the ward, preceded by pretty Sister at whom only five minutes before he had been making sheep’s eyes. She now looked stern and aghast. Marty thought, though not in those words, how the days of wine and roses were over and the chatting up of the girls, and then they were beside his bed and drawing the screens round it.

The first thing he said to them was a lie. He gave them as his address the first one he had had in London, the squat in Kilburn Park. Then he said he had been with his mother on 4 March, hadn’t seen Nigel Thaxby for two months and had never been to Childon in his life. After a while he recanted in part, gave another false address and said that he had lent his flat to Nigel Thaxby who he believed to have perpetrated the robbery and kidnapping in league with the missing bank manager.

Outside the screens the ward was agog, humming with speculation. Marty was put into a dressing gown and taken to a side room where the interrogation began afresh. He told so many lies then and later that neither the police nor his own counsel were ever quite to believe a word he said, and for this reason his counsel dissuaded him from going into the witness box at his trial.

That Friday afternoon he finally disclosed his true address but by then it had also been given to them by the Ministry of Social Security.

The few clothes Alan possessed went into the suitcase, but he didn’t put the money in there. Suppose Una were to ask him at the last moment if he had room in his case for something of hers? Besides, how could he be sure of being alone when he unpacked it? What he should have done was buy a briefcase with a zip-up compartment. He could put the money in the compartment and books and writing paper, that sort of thing, in the main body of the case. For the time being he stuffed the bundles of notes into the pockets of his trousers and his windcheater. It bulged and crackled rather, and when Una, off up the road to fetch Ambrose’s dinner jacket from the cleaners, came up to kiss him – they always kissed on meeting and parting – he didn’t dare hold her close against him as he would

have liked to do.

Her going out solved the problem of how to get out himself. It was almost three. He wrote a note: Una, Something has come up which I must see to. Meet you at Paddington at 5. Love, Paul. This he left on the hall table with the house keys Una had given him three weeks before.

23

Joyce had given him the answer he wanted, but now he had it Nigel couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t trust her. He saw himself at the airport going through the place where they checked you for bombs, reaching the gate itself that led you to the aircraft – and a man stepping out in front of him, another laying a hand on his shoulder. If Joyce was merely going to surrender the money to the bank, there would be no compulsion for her to respect her promise to him. She would break it, he thought, as soon as he was out of sight.

He would kill her when the house was empty.

Nigel didn’t know who lived on the ground floor, certainly people who were out all day. The red-haired girl and her ‘fella’ were out a lot. Bridey didn’t work every day, but she always went out for some part of the day. Nigel thought it possible that Joyce’s body might lie there undiscovered for weeks, but there was a good chance the police would arrive that weekend and break the door down. By then he would be far away, it hardly mattered, and it was good to think of Marty getting the blame and taking the rap, if not for the killing, then for a great deal else.

He listened for Bridey who hadn’t gone to work for the eleven o’clock opening. At three she was still moving about in her room, playing a transistor. Nigel packed his clothes into Samantha’s mother’s rucksack. He put on his cleanest jeans, the pair Marty had taken to the launderette, and his jacket into the pocket of which went his passport. In the kitchen, over the sink, he removed with Marty’s blunt razor the half inch of fuzzy yellow down which had sprouted on his chin and upper lip. Shaved and with his hair combed, he looked quite respectable, the doctor’s son, a nice responsible young man, down from his university for the Easter holiday.

Joyce too had dressed herself for going out in as many warm clothes as she could muster, two tee shirts and a blouse and skirt and pullover. She had put the two thousand pounds along with her knitting into the bag in which Marty had bought the wool for that knitting. She said to Nigel, in a voice and a manner nearer her old voice and manner than he had heard from her for weeks, that she didn’t know what a hotel would think of her, arriving without a coat and with rubber flip-flops on her feet. Nigel didn’t bother to reply. He knew she wasn’t going to get near any hotel. He just wished Bridey would go out.

At three-thirty she did. Nigel heard her go downstairs, and from the window he watched her walk away towards Chichele Road. What about the red-haired girl? He was wondering if he dared take the risk without knowing for sure if the red-haired girl was out of the house, when the phone began to ring. Nigel hated to hear the phone ringing. He always thought it would be the police or his father or Marty to say he was coming home, by ambulance and borne up the stairs on a stretcher by two men.

The phone rang for a long time. No one came up from downstairs to answer it. Nigel felt relieved and free and private. The last peal of the phone bell died away, and as he listened, gratified, to the silence, it was broken by the ringing of the front doorbell.

At Marble Arch Alan had bought a briefcase into which he put the money, having deposited his suitcase in a left-luggage locker at Paddington Station. In the shop window glass he looked with a certain amusement at his own reflection. He had put on his suit because it was easier to wear it than carry it, and his raincoat because it had begun to rain. With the briefcase in his hand, he looked exactly like a bank manager. For a second he felt apprehensive. It would be a fine thing to be recognized now at the eleventh hour. But he knew no one would recognize him. He looked so much younger, happier, more confident. I could be bounded in a nutshell, he quoted to himself, and think myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams . . .