Nearly half an hour had gone by before he found a Ford Escort that one of his keys would fit. It was a coppery-bronze-coloured car, parked half-way down Brondesbury Villas. Now he had only to get himself on the Harrow Road or the Uxbridge Road for the airport signs to start coming up. The rain was falling steadily, clearing the people off the streets. At first he followed a bus route which he knew quite well, down Kilburn High Road and off to the right past Kilburn Park Station. It was getting on for six-thirty but it might have been midnight for all the people there were about. The traffic was light too. Nigel thought he would get the first flight available. It wouldn’t matter where it was going – Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, from any of those places he could get another to South America. His only worry was the gun. They weren’t going to let him on any aircraft with a gun, not with all these hi-jackings. Did they have left-luggage places at Heathrow? If they did he’d put it in one, and then, some time, when it was safe and he was rich and had all the guns he wanted, he’d come back and get it and keep it as a souvenir, a memento of his first crime. But he wouldn’t go after Marty Foster with it, he wasn’t worth the hassle. Besides, thanks to his skiving off, hadn’t he, Nigel, pulled off the whole coup on his own and got all the loot for himself?

When he got to the end of Cambridge Road, he wasn’t sure whether to go more or less straight on down Walterton Road or to turn left into Shirland Road. Straight on, he thought. So he turned right for the little bit preparatory to taking Walterton Road and pulled up sharply behind a car stopped suddenly on the amber light. Nigel had been sure the driver was going to go on over and not stop, and the front bumper of the Ford Escort was no more than an inch or two from the rear bumper of the other car. Suppose he rolled back when the lights went green?

There was nothing behind him. Nigel shoved the gear into reverse and stamped on the accelerator. The car shot forward with a surprisingly loud crash into the rear of the one in front, and Nigel gave a roar of rage. Once again he had got into the wrong gear by mistake.

In the other car, a lightweight Citroen Diane, were four people, all male and all staring at him out of the rear window and all mouthing things and shaking fists. The driver got out. He was a large heavily built black man of about Nigel’s own age. This time Nigel got the gear successfully into reverse and backed fast. The man caught up with him and banged on the window, but Nigel started forward, nearly running him down, and screamed off in bottom gear across lights that had just turned red again, and straight off along Shirland Road into the hinterland of nowhere.

The Diane was following him. Nigel cursed and turned right and then left into a street of houses waiting to be demolished, their windows boarded up and their doors enclosed by sheets of corrugated iron. Why had he come down here? He must get back fast and try to find Kilburn Lane. The Diane was no longer behind him. He turned left again, and it was waiting for him, slung broadside across the narrow empty street where no one lived and only one lamp was lighted. The driver and the other three stood, making a kind of cordon across the street. Nigel stopped.

The driver came over to him, a white boy with him. Nigel wound down his window, there was nothing else for it.

‘Look, man, you’ve caved my trunk in. How about that?’

‘Yeah, how about that?’ said the other. ‘What’s with you, anyway, getting the hell out? You’ve dropped him right in it, you have. That’s his old man’s vehicle.’

Nigel didn’t say a word. He took the gun out of its holster and levelled it at them.

‘Jesus,’ said the white man.

Nigel burst the car door open and came out at them, stalking them as they retreated. The other two were standing behind the Diane. One of them shouted something and began to run. Nigel panicked. He thought of the money and of help coming and his car trapped by that other car, and he raised the gun and squeezed the trigger. The shot missed the running man and struck the side of the Diane. He fired again, this time into one of the Diane’s rear tyres, but now the trigger wouldn’t move any more. The jacket had gone back, leaving the barrel exposed, and the gun looked empty, must be empty. He stood, his arms spread, a choking feeling in his throat, and then he dropped the gun in the road and wheeled round back to the car.

The four men had all frozen at the sound of the shot and the splintering metal, even the running man. Now he came slowly back, looking at the useless weapon on the wet tarmac, while the others seemed to drop forward, their arms pendulous, like apes. Nigel pulled open the door of the Ford, but they were on him before he could get into it. The driver’s white companion was the first to touch him. He swung his fist and got Nigel under the jaw. Nigel reeled back and slid down the dewed metal of the car, and two of them caught him by the arms.

They dragged him across the pavement and through a cavity in a broken wall where there had once been a gate. There they threw him against the brickwork front of the house and punched his face, and Nigel screamed, ‘Please!’ and ‘Help me!’ and lurched sideways across broken glass and corrugated iron. One of them had a heavy piece of metal in his fist, and Nigel felt it hammering his head as he sagged on to the wet grass and the others kicked his ribs. How long they went on he didn’t know. Perhaps only until he stopped shouting and cursing them, twisting over and over and trying to protect his bruised body in his hugging arms. Perhaps only until he lost consciousness.

When he regained it he was lying up against the wall, and he was one pain from head to foot. But there was another and more dreadful all-conquering pain that made his head and his neck red-hot. He moved a bruised cut hand to his neck and felt there, embedded in his flesh, a long stiletto of glass. He gave a whimper of horror.

By some gargantuan effort, he staggered to his feet. He had been lying on a mass of splintered glass. His fingers scrabbled at his neck and pulled out the long bloody sliver. It was the sight of the blood all over him, seeping down his jacket and through into his shirt, that felled him again. He felt the blood pumping from the wound where the glass had been, and he tried to cry out, but the sound came in a thin strangled pipe.

Nigel had forgotten the car and the money and escape and South America. He had forgotten the gun. Everything had gone from his mind except the desire to live. He must find the street and lights and help and someone to stop the red stream leaking life out of his neck.

Round and round in feeble circles he crawled, ploughing the earth with his hands. He found himself saying, mumbling, as Marty had said to him, ‘You wouldn’t let me die, you wouldn’t let me die,’ and then, as Joyce had said, ‘Please, please . . .’

His progress, half on his hands and knees, half on his belly, brought him on to concrete. The street. He was on the pavement, he was going to make it. So he crawled on, looking for lights, on, on along the hard wet stone as the rain came down.

The stone ended in grass. He tried to avoid the grass, which shouldn’t be in the street, which was wrong, a delusion or a mirage of touch. His head blundered into a wooden fence, at the foot of which soft cold things clustered. He lay there. The rain poured on him in cataracts, washing him clean.

Much later, in the small hours, a policeman on the beat found the abandoned car and the gun. Everything was still in the car as Nigel had left it, his rucksack and his carrier, his passport and the stolen money – six thousand, seven hundred and seventy-two pounds. The search for Nigel himself didn’t last long, but he was dead before they reached him. He was lying in a back garden, and during that long wet night snails had crept along the strands of his wet golden hair.