Make Death Love Me (13 page)

He could go on living, he supposed, at the Maharajah. But could he? At four pounds fifty a night, that little hole with its sink and its gas ring was going to cost him as much as one of the flats he had seen on offer in the agency window. He couldn't go on staying there, yet he wouldn't be able to find anywhere else because it was ‘usual' to ask for a bank reference.

Occasionally in the past he had received letters asking for such a reference, and his replies had been discreet, in accordance with the bank's policy of never divulging to any outsider the state of a customer's account. He had merely written that, yes, so-and-so banked at his branch of the Anglian-Victoria, and that apparently had been satisfactory. He felt sick at the thought of where his own account was – with the Childon sub-branch and in a name that today was familiar to every newspaper reader.

An idea came to him of returning home. It wasn't too late to go back if he really wanted to. He could say they had taken him and had let him go. He had been blindfolded all the time, so he hadn't seen their faces or where they had taken him. The shock had been so great that he couldn't remember much, only that he had saved some of the bank's money which he had deposited in a safe place. Perhaps it would be better not to mention the money at all. Why should they suspect him if he gave himself up now?

It was a quarter past three. It was not on his watch but on a clock on a wall ahead of him that he saw the time. And beside the clock, on a sheet of frosted glass, were etched the A and the V, the vine leaves and the crown, that were the emblems of the Anglian-Victoria Bank. The Anglian-Victoria, Paddington Station Branch. Alan stood outside, wondering what would happen if he went in and told the manager who he was.

He went into the bank. Customers were waiting in a queue behind a railing until a green light came on to tell them a till was free. A tremendous impulse took hold of him to announce that he was Alan Groombridge. If he did that now, in a few days' time he would be back behind his own till, driving his car, listening to Pam talking about the cost of living, to Pop quarrelling with Christopher, reading in the evenings in his own warm house. He set his teeth and clenched his hands to stop himself yielding to that impulse, though he still stood there at the end of the queue.

Steadily the green lights came on, and one customer moved to a till, then another. Alan stayed in the queue and shifted with it as it passed a row of tables spread with green blotters. A man was sitting at one of the tables, making an entry in his paying-in book. Alan watched him, envying him his legitimate possession of it.

The time was half-past three, and the security man moved to the door to prevent any late-comer from entering. Alan began framing words in his mind, how he had lost his memory, how the sight of that emblem had recalled to him who he was. But his clothes? How could he explain his new clothes?

Looking down at those jeans brought his eyes again to the man at the table. The paying-in book was open for anyone to see that two hundred and fifty pounds was about to be paid in, though Paul Browning hadn't been so imprudent as actually to place notes or cheques on it. Alan knew he was called Paul Browning because that was the name he had just written on a cheque book request form. And now he added under it, in the same block capitals, his address: 15 Exmoor Gardens, London NW2.

As a green light came up for the woman immediately in front of Alan in the queue, Paul Browning joined it to stand behind him. With a muttered ‘Excuse me', Alan turned and made for the door.

He had found a bank reference and an identity, and with the discovery he burned the last fragile boat that could have taken him back. The security man let him out politely.

Joyce woke up first. With sleep, her confidence and her courage had come back. The fact that the others – those two pigs, as she called them to herself – still slept on, made her despise more than fear them. Fancy sleeping like that when you'd done a bank robbery and kidnapped someone! They must want their heads tested. But while she despised them, she also felt easier with them than she would have done had they been forty or fifty. Disgusting and low as they were, they were nevertheless young, they belonged with her in the great universal club of youth.

She got up and put on her clothes. She went into the kitchen and washed her hands and face under the cold tap, a good cold splash like she always had in the mornings, though she usually had a bath first. Pity she couldn't clean her teeth. What was there to eat? No good waiting for those pigs to provide something. Like the low people they were, they had no fridge, but there was an unopened packet of back bacon on a shelf of that bookcase thing, and some eggs in a box and lots of tins of baked beans. Joyce had a good look at the bacon packet. It might be a year old, for all she knew, you never could tell with people like that. But, no.
Sell by March 15,
it said. She put the kettle on, and Flora margarine into a frying pan, and lit all the other gas burners and the oven to warm herself up.

The misery of Mum and Dad and Stephen she had got into better perspective. She wasn't dead, was she? Stephen would value her all the more when she turned up alive and kicking. They were going to let her go today. She wondered how and where, and she thought it would be rather fun telling it all to the police and maybe the newspapers.

The roaring of the gas woke Marty and he saw Joyce wasn't on the sofa. He called out, ‘Christ!' and Joyce came in to stand insolently in the doorway. There are some people who wake up and orientate themselves very quickly in the mornings, and there are others who droop about, half-asleep, for quite a long time. Joyce belonged in the first category and Marty in the second. He groaned and fumbled for the gun.

‘For all you know,' said Joyce, ‘I might have a couple of detectives out here with me, waiting to arrest you.'

She made a big pot of strong tea and found a packet of extended life milk. Nasty stuff, but better than nothing. She heard Marty starting to get up and she kept her head averted. He might be stark naked for all she could tell, which was all right when it was Stephen or one of her brothers coming out of the bathroom, but not that pig. However, he was wearing blue pants with mauve bindings, and by the time he had come into the kitchen he had pulled on jeans and a shirt.

‘Give us a cup of tea.'

‘Get it yourself,' said Joyce. ‘You can take me to the toilet first.'

She was a full five minutes in there, doing it on purpose, Marty thought. He was on tenterhooks lest Bridey came out or old Green. But there was no one. The lavatory flushed and Joyce walked back, not looking at him. She passed Nigel who was sitting on the mattress with his head in his hands, and went straight to the sink to wash her hands. All the bacon in the pan, two eggs and a saucepanful of baked beans went on to the plate she had heated for herself. She sat down at the kitchen table and began to eat.

Nigel was obliged to pour tea for both of them and start cooking more bacon. He did it clumsily because he too was a slow waker. ‘One of us'll have to go out,' he said, ‘and get a paper and more food.'

‘And some booze, for Christ's sake,' said Marty.

‘How about me going?' said Joyce pertly.

‘Be your age,' said Nigel, and to Marty, ‘You can go. I'll be better keeping an eye on her.'

Joyce ate fastidiously, trying not to show how famished she was. ‘When are you going to let me go?'

‘Tomorrow,' said Marty.

‘You said that yesterday.'

‘Then he shouldn't have,' snapped Nigel. ‘You stay here. Get it? You stay here till I'm good and ready.'

Joyce had believed Marty. She felt a little terrible tremor, but she said with boldness, ‘If he's going out he can get me a pair of shoes.'

‘You what? That'd be marvellous, that would, me getting a pair of girl's shoes when they know you've lost one.'

‘Get her a pair of flip-flops or sandals or something. You can go to Marks in Kilburn. She'll only get a hole in her tights and then we'll have to buy goddamned tights.'

‘And a toothbrush,' said Joyce.

Marty pointed to a pot, encrusted with blackened soap, in which reposed a toothbrush with splayed brown tufts.

‘Me use that?' said Joyce indignantly. She thought of the nastiest infection she could, of one she'd seen written on the wall in the Ladies' on Stantwich Station. ‘I'd get crabs.'

Nigel couldn't help grinning at that. They ate their breakfast and Marty went off, leaving Nigel with the gun.

Joyce wasn't used to being idle, and she had never been in such a nasty dirty place before. She announced, without asking Nigel's permission, that she intended to clean up the kitchen.

Marty would have been quite pleased. He didn't clean the kitchen himself because he was too lazy to do so, not because he disapproved of cleaning. Nigel did. He had left home partly because his parents were always cleaning something. He sat on the mattress and watched Joyce scrubbing away, and for the first time he felt some emotion towards her move in him. Until then he had thought of her as an object or a nuisance. Now what he felt was anger. He was profoundly disturbed by what she was doing, it brought up old half-forgotten feelings and unhappy scenes, and he kept the gun trained on her, although her back was turned and she couldn't see it.

About an hour later Marty tapped at the door, giving the four little raps that was their signal to each other. He threw a pair of rubber-thonged sandals on to the floor and dropped the shopping bag. His face was white and pinched.

‘Where's Joyce?'

‘That's her name, is it? In the kitchen, spring-cleaning. What's freaking you?'

Marty began taking a newspaper folded small out of his jacket pocket. ‘No,' said Nigel. ‘Outside.' They went out on to the landing and Nigel locked the door behind them. He spread out a copy of the same newspaper Alan Groombridge had read some hours before. ‘I don't get it,' he said. ‘What does it mean? We never even saw the guy.'

‘D'you reckon it's some sort of trick?'

‘I don't know. What would be the point? And why do they say seven thousand when there was only four?'

Marty shook his head. ‘Maybe the guy did see us and got scared and went off somewhere and lost his memory.' He voiced a fear that had been tormenting him. ‘Look, what you said to the girl about killing him – that wasn't true, was it?'

Nigel looked hard at him and then at the gun. ‘How could it be?' he said slowly. ‘The trigger doesn't even move.'

‘Yeah, I meant – well, you could have hit him over the head, I don't know.'

‘I never saw him, he wasn't there. Now you tear up that paper and put the bits down the bog. She's got to go on thinking we've killed Groombridge and we've got to get out of here and get her out. Right?'

‘Right,' said Marty.

Joyce finished cleaning the kitchen and then she cleaned her teeth with the toothbrush Marty had bought. She had to use soap for this, and she had heard that cleaning your teeth with soap turned them yellow, but perhaps that was only if you went on doing it for a long time. And she wasn't going to be there for a long time because tomorrow they were going to let her go.

Nigel sharply refused to allow her to go down to the bathroom, so she washed herself in the kitchen with a chair pushed hard against the door. Her mother used to make a joke about this fashion of getting oneself clean, saying that one washed down as far as possible and up as far as possible, but what happened to poor possible? Thinking of Mum brought tears to Joyce's eyes, but she scrubbed them away and scrubbed poor possible so hard that it gave her a reason for crying. After that she washed for herself to wear tomorrow the least disreputable of Marty's tee-shirts from the pile on the bed. She wasn't going to confront the police and be reunited with her family in a dirty dishevelled state, not she.

Marty went out again at seven and came back with whisky and wine and Chinese takeaway for the three of them. Joyce ate hers in the kitchen, at the table. The boys had theirs sitting on the living room floor. The place was close and fuggy and smelly from the oil heater and the oven which had been on all day, and condensation trickled down the inside of the windows. When she had finished eating, Joyce walked in and looked at Nigel and Marty. The gun was on the floor beside the plastic pack with chow mein in it. They didn't use plates, pigs that they were, thought Joyce.

She had never been the sort of person who avoids issues because it is better not to know for certain. She would rather know.

‘You're going to let me go tomorrow,' she said.

‘Who said?' Nigel put his hand over the gun. He forgot to be a mid-Atlantic-cum-sixties-hippy-drop-out and spoke, to Marty's reluctant admiration, in the authoritative public school tone of his forbears. ‘There's no question of your leaving here tomorrow. You'd go straight to the police and describe us and describe this place. We took you with us to avoid that happening and the situation hasn't changed.' He remembered then and added, with a nasal intonation, ‘No way.'

‘But the situation won't change,' said Joyce.

‘I could kill you, couldn't I? Couldn't I?' He watched her stiffen and then very slightly recoil. It pleased him. ‘You be a good girl,' he said, ‘and do what we say and stop asking goddamned silly questions, and I'll think of a way to work it for the lot of us. I just need a bit of hush. Right?'

‘Have a drop of Scotch,' said Marty who was cheered and made affable by about a quarter of a pint of it. Joyce wouldn't. Nor would she accept any of the Yugoslav Riesling that Nigel was drinking. If the situation hadn't changed and wasn't going to change, she would have to think of ways to change it. The first duty of a prisoner is to escape. Her uncle who had been a prisoner of war always said that, though he had never succeeded in escaping from the
Stalag Luft
in which for four years he had been incarcerated. She had never thought of escaping before because she had believed they would release her, but she thought about it now.