The hypothetical couple of villains John had referred to had been facing him across the table.

Marty Foster also was the son of an agricultural labourer. For a year after he left school he worked in a paintbrush factory. Then his mother left his father and went off with a lorry driver. Things got so uncomfortable at home that Marty too moved out and got a room in Stantwich. He got a job driving a van for a cut-price electrical goods shop and then a job trundling trolleys full of peat and pot plants about in a garden centre. It was the same one that supplied Fitton’s Piece with its pampas grass. When he was sacked from that for telling a customer who complained because the garden centre wouldn’t deliver horse manure, that if he wanted his shit he could fetch it himself, he moved up to London and into a squat in Kilburn Park. While employed in packing up parcels for an Oxford Street store, he met Nigel Thaxby. By then he was renting a room with a kitchen in a back street in Cricklewood, his aim being to stop working and go on the Social Security.

Nigel Thaxby, like Marty, was twenty-one. He was the son and only child of a doctor who was in general practice in Elstree. Nigel had been to a very minor public school because his father wanted him brought up as a gentleman but didn’t want to pay high fees. The staff had third-class honours or pass degrees and generally no teachers’ training certificates, and the classroom furniture was blackened and broken and, in fact, straight Dotheboys Hall. In spite of living from term to term on scrag-end stew and rotten potatoes and mushed peas and white bread, Nigel grew up tall and handsome. By the time excessive cramming and his father’s threats and his mother’s tears had squeezed him into the University of Kent, he was over six feet tall with blond hair and blue eyes and the features of Michelangelo’s David. At Canterbury something snapped in Nigel. He did no work. He got it into his head that if he did do any work and eventually got a degree, the chances were he wouldn’t get a job. And if he did get one all that would come out of it was a house like his parents’ and a marriage like his parents’ and a new car every four years and maybe a child to cram full of useless knowledge and pointless aspirations. So he walked out of the university before the authorities could ask his father to take him away.

Nigel came to London and lived in a sort of commune. The house had some years before been allocated by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea to a quartet of young people on the grounds that it was being used as a centre for group therapy. So it had been for some time, but the young people quarrelled with each other and split up, leaving behind various hangers-on who took the padding off the walls of the therapy room and gave up the vegetarian regime, and brought in boy friends and girl friends and sometimes children they had had by previous marriages or liaisons. There was continuous coming and going, people drifted in for a week or a month and out again, contributing to the rent or not, as the case might be. Nigel got in on it because he knew someone who lived there and who was also a reject of the University of Kent.

At first he wasn’t well up in the workings of the Social Security system and he thought he had to have a job. So he also packed up parcels. Marty Foster put him wise to a lot of useful things, though Nigel knew he was cleverer than Marty. One of the things Marty put him wise to was that it was foolish to pack up parcels when one could get one’s rent paid and a bit left over for doing nothing. At the time they met John Purford in Neasden, Marty was living in Cricklewood and Nigel was sometimes living in Cricklewood with Marty and sometimes in the Kensington commune, and they were both vaguely and sporadically considering a life of crime.

‘Like your friend said, it wouldn’t be worth the hassle,’ said Nigel. ‘Not for seven grand.’

‘Yeah, but look at it this way, you’ve got to begin on a small scale,’ said Marty. ‘It’d be a sort of way of learning. All we got to do is rip off a vehicle. I can do that easy. I got keys that’ll fit any Ford Escort, you know that.’

Nigel thought about it.

‘Can you get a shooter?’ he said.

‘I got one.’ Marty enjoyed the expression of astonishment on Nigel’s face. It was seldom that he could impress him. But he was shrewd enough to put prudence before vanity, and he said carefully, ‘Even an expert wouldn’t know the difference.’

‘You mean it’s not for real?’

‘A gun’s a gun, isn’t it?’ And Marty added with, for him, rare philosophical insight, ‘It’s not what it does, it’s what people’ll think it’ll do that matters.’

Slowly Nigel nodded his head. ‘It can’t be bad. Look, if you’re really into this, there’s no grief in going up this Childon dump tomorrow and casing the joint.’

Nigel had a curious manner of speech. It was the result of careful study in an attempt to be different. His accent was mid-Atlantic, rather like that of a commercial radio announcer. People who didn’t know any better sometimes took him for an American. He had rejected, when he remembered to do so, the cultured English of his youth and adopted speech patterns which were a mixture of the slang spoken by the superannuated hippies, now hopelessly out of date, in the commune, and catch phrases picked up from old films seen on TV. Nigel wasn’t at all sophisticated really, though Marty thought he was. Marty’s father talked Suffolk, but his mother had been a cockney. Mostly he talked cockney himself, with the flat vowels of East Anglia creeping in, and sometimes he had that distinctive Suffolk habit of using the demonstrative pronoun ‘that’ for ‘it’.

Seeing that Marty was serious or ‘really into’ an attempt on the Childon bank, Nigel went off to Elstree, making sure to choose a time when his father was in his surgery, and got a loan of twenty pounds off his mother. Mrs Thaxby cried and said he was breaking his parents’ hearts, but he persuaded her into the belief that the money was for his train fare to Newcastle where he had a job in line. An hour later – it was Thursday and the last day of February – he and Marty caught the train to Stantwich and then the bus to Childon which got them there by noon.

They began their survey by walking along the lane at the back of the Anglian-Victoria sub-branch. They saw the gap in the flint walls that led to the little yard, and in the yard they saw Alan Groombridge’s car. One one side of the yard was what looked like a disused barn and on the other a small apple orchard. Marty, on his own, walked round to the front. The nearest of the twelve shops was a good hundred yards away. Opposite the bank was a Methodist chapel and next to that nothing but fields. Marty went into the bank.

The girl at the till labelled Miss J. M. Culver was weighing coin into little plastic bags and chatting to the customer about what lovely weather they were having. The other till was opened and marked Mr A. J. Groombridge, and though there was no one behind it, Marty went and stood there, looking at the little office an open door disclosed. In that office a man was bending over the desk. Marty wondered where the safe was. Through that office, presumably, behind that other, closed, door. There was no upstairs. Once there had been, but the original ceiling had been removed and now the inside of the steeply sloping roof could be seen, painted white and with its beams exposed and stripped. Marty decided he had seen as much as he was likely to and was about to turn away, when the man in the office seemed at last to be aware of him. He straightened up, turned round, came out to the metal grille, and he did this without really looking at Marty at all. Nor did he look at him when he murmured a good morning, but kept his eyes on the counter top. Marty had to think of something to say so he asked for twenty five-pence pieces for a pound note, wanted them for parking meters, he said, and Groombridge counted them out, first pushing them across the counter in two stacks, then thinking better of this and slipping them into a little bag like the ones the girl had been using. Marty said thanks and took the bag of coins and left.