Make Death Love Me (14 page)

When they had settled down for the night and the boys were asleep, Marty snoring more loudly than her father did – Joyce had formerly thought young people never snored – she got up off the sofa and tip-toed into the kitchen. Earlier in the day she had found a ball-point pen while scraping out thick greasy dirt from under the sink, and she had left it on the draining board, not supposing then that she would have any use for it. She hadn't much faith in this pen which had probably been there for years, perhaps before the time of the present tenant. But once she had wiped the tip of it carefully on the now clean dishcloth and scribbled a bit on the edge of a matchbox to make the ink flow, she found it wrote quite satisfactorily. Enough light came in from outside to make writing, if not reading, possible. Like Alan Groombridge, Joyce found the constant blaze of light shining in from street lamps throughout the night very strange, but it had its uses. She sat at the table and wrote on a smoothed-out piece of the paper bag in which the sandals had been:

They have killed Mr Groombridge. They are keeping me in a room in London.
She crossed out
London
and wrote
in this street. I do not know the name of the street or the number of the house. There are two of them. They are young, about 20. One of them is little and dark. The first finger on his right hand has been injured. The nail is twisted. The other one is tall and fair. Please get me out. They are dangerous. They have a gun. Signed, Joyce Marilyn Culver.

Joyce thought she would wrap her message round the piece of pumice stone from the draining board and drop it out of the window. But she couldn't open the window, though neither of the boys seemed to hear her struggling with it. Never mind, the lavatory window opened and she would throw it out of there in the morning. So for the time being she put the note in that traditional repository favoured by all heroines in distress, her bosom. She put it into the cleft between her breasts, and went back to the sofa. But first she favoured her captors with a look of contempt. If she had been in their place, she thought, she would have insisted on staying awake while her partner slept, and only sleeping while he stayed awake to watch. Look where getting drunk and passing out had got them! But in the yellow light the string with the key on it showed round the dark one's neck, and the black barrel of the gun gleamed dully against the fair one's slack hand.

At nine she was up and washed and dressed and shaking Marty who woke with a blinding headache and much hung over.

‘Go away. Leave me alone,' said Marty, and he buried his face in the dirty pillow.

‘If you don't get up and take me to the toilet I'll bang and bang at that door with a chair. I'll break the window.'

‘Do that and you're dead,' said Nigel, elbowing Marty out of the way and fishing out the gun. He had gone to bed fully clothed, and it was out of distaste for the smell of him that Joyce looked in the other direction. Nigel took her out on to the landing and leaned against the wall, seeing stars and feeling as if an army of goblins in hobnailed boots were forming fours inside his head. He mustn't drink like that again, it was crazy. He wasn't hooked on the stuff like that little brain, was he? He didn't even really like it.

Joyce had her message wrapped round the pumice stone. She stood on the lavatory seat, wishing she could see something of what lay outside and below the window, but it was only a frosted fanlight that opened and this above her head, though not above the reach of her hand. The pumice dropped, and she trembled lest it make a bang which the fair one might hear when it touched the ground. She pulled the flush hard to drown any other sound.

The other one glowered at her when they were back in the room. ‘What d'you think you're doing, wearing my tee-shirt?'

‘I've got to change my clothes, haven't I? I'm not going to stay in the same thing day after day like you lot. I was brought up to keep myself nice. You want to take all that lot round the launderette. What's the good of me cleaning the place up when it just pongs of dirty clothes?'

Neither of them answered her. Marty took the radio to the lavatory with him, but he couldn't get anything out of it except pop music. Then he went off shopping without waiting for Nigel's command. The open air comforted him. He was a country boy and used to spending most of his time outside; all his jobs but the parcel-packing one had been outdoor jobs, and even when living on the dole he had spent hours wandering about London each day and walking on Hampstead Heath. He couldn't stand being shut up, scared as he was each time he saw a policeman or a police car. Nigel, on the other hand, liked being indoors, he didn't suffer from claustrophobia. He liked dirty little rooms with shut windows where he could loaf about and dream grandiose Nietzschian dreams of himself as the Superman with many little brains and stupid women to cringe and do his bidding. The stupid woman was cleaning again, the living room this time. Let her get on with it if that was all she was fit for.

On her knees, washing the skirting board, Joyce said, ‘Have you thought yet? Have you thought when I'm going to get out of here?'

‘Look,' said Nigel, ‘we're looking after you OK, aren't we? You're getting your nosh, aren't you? And you can drink as much liquor as you want, only you don't want. I know this pad isn't amazing, but it's not that bad. You aren't getting ill-treated.'

‘You must be joking. When are you going to let me go?'

‘Can't you say anything else but when are you going to get out of here?'

‘Yes,' said Joyce. ‘What's your name?'

‘Robert Redford,' said Nigel, who had been told he resembled this actor in his earliest films.

‘When am I going to get out of here, Robert?'

‘When I'm ready, Joyce. When my friend and I see our opportunity to get ourselves safely out of the country and don't have to worry about you giving the police a lot of damaging information.'

Joyce stood up. ‘Why don't you talk like that all the time?' she said with an ingenuous look. ‘It sounds ever so nice. You could have a really posh accent if you liked.'

‘Oh, piss off, will you?' said Nigel, losing his temper. ‘Just piss off and give me a bit of hush.'

Joyce smiled. She had never read Dr Edith Bone's account of how, when condemned in Hungary to seven years' solitary confinement, she never missed a chance to needle and provoke her guards, while never in the slightest degree co-operating with them. She had not read it, but she was employing the same tactics herself.

The police were told of a silver-blue Ford Escort seen on the evening of Monday, 4 March, in the Epping New Road. Their informant was one of the gang of gasmen who had been working on a faulty main outside Dr Bolton's house, and the car he had seen had in fact been Mrs Beech's car and its driver Nigel Thaxby. But when the police had searched Epping Forest for the car and dragged one of the gravel pit ponds, they abandoned that line of enquiry in favour of a more hopeful one involving the departure of a silver-blue Escort from Dover by the ferry to Calais on Monday night. This car, according to witnesses, had been driven by a middle-aged man with a younger man beside him and a man and a girl in the back. The man in the back seemed to have been asleep, but might have been unconscious or drugged. No one had observed the registration plates.

Alan Groombridge's car was found in the car park in Colchester. His fingerprints were on its interior and so were those of his wife. There were several other sets of fingerprints, and these came from the hands of a Stoke Mill farm worker to whom Alan had given a lift home on the previous Tuesday. But the police didn't know this, and it didn't occur to the farm worker to tell them. By that time they had questioned Christopher and Jillian Groombridge about their friends and anyone to whom they might have talked and given information about the Childon branch of the Anglian-Victoria Bank.

At first it seemed likely that the leak had come from Christopher, he being male and the elder. But it was soon clear that Christopher had never shown the slightest interest in any of the bank's arrangements, was ignorant as to how much was kept in the safe, and hadn't those sort of friends anyway. All his friends were just like himself, law-abiding, prosperous, salesmen or belonging to fringe professions like his own, well-dressed, affluent, living at home in order the better to live it up. They regarded crime as not so much immoral as ‘a mug's game'. As for Jillian, she made an impression on them of naïve innocence. All her time away from home, she said, had been spent with Sharon and Bridget, and Sharon and Bridget backed her up. They wouldn't, in any case, have been able to give the name of John Purford because they didn't know it. Perhaps there had been no leak, for nothing need have been divulged which local men couldn't have found out for themselves. On the other hand, the mini-van, located soon after Mrs Beech's complaint, had been hired in Croydon by a man with a big black beard who spoke, according to the Relyacar Rentals girl, with a north country accent. So the police, having turned Stantwich and Colchester and quite a large area of south London upside down, turned their attention towards Humberside and Cleveland.

Wilfred Summitt and Mrs Elizabeth Culver appeared on television, but neither put up satisfactory performances. Mrs Culver broke down and cried as soon as the first question was put to her, and Pop, seeing this as an opportunity to air his new dogmas, launched into a manifesto which opened with an appeal for mass public executions. He went on talking for a while after he had been cut off in mid-sentence, not realizing he was no longer on view.

Looking for somewhere to live, Alan left the suitcase in a locker at Paddington Station. At the theatre he had put it under his seat where it annoyed no one because he was sitting in the front row. He had enjoyed
Faustus,
identifying with its protagonist. He too had sold his soul for the kingdoms of the earth – and, incidentally, for three thousand pounds. See, see where Christ's blood streams in the firmament! He had felt a bit like that himself, looking at the sunset while earlier he was walking in Kensington Gardens. Would he also find his Helen to make him immortal with a kiss? At that thought he blushed in the dark theatre, and blushed again, thinking of it, as he walked from Paddington Station down towards the Bayswater Road.

Notting Hill, he had decided, must be his future place of abode, not because he had ever been there or knew anything about it, but because Wilfred Summitt said that wild horses wouldn't drag him to Notting Hill. He hadn't been there either, but he talked about it as a sort of Sodom and Gomorrah. There had been race riots there in the fifties and some more a couple of years back, which was enough to make Pop see it as a sinful slum where everyone was smashed out of their minds on hashish, and black people stuck knives in you. Alan went to two agencies in Notting Hill and was given quite a lot of hopeful-looking addresses. He went to three of them before lunch.

It was an unpleasant shock to discover that London landlords call a room ten feet by twelve with a sink and cooker in one corner, a flatlet. He could hardly believe in the serious, let alone honest, intent behind calling two knives and two forks and two spoons from Woolworth's ‘fully equipped with cutlery' or an old three-piece suite in stretch nylon covers ‘immaculate furnishings'. Having eaten his lunch in a pub – going into pubs was a lovely new experience – he bought an evening paper and a transistor radio, and read the paper sitting on a seat in Kensington Gardens. It told him that the Anglian-Victoria Bank was offering a reward of twenty thousand pounds for information leading to the arrest of the bank robbers and the safe return of himself and Joyce. A girl came and sat beside him and began feeding pigeons and sparrows with bits of stale cake. She was so much like his fantasy girl, with a long slender neck and fine delicate hands and black hair as smooth and straight as a skein of silk, that he couldn't keep from staring at her.

The second time she caught his eye, she smiled and said it was a shame the way the pigeons drove the smaller birds away and got all the best bits, but what could you do? They also had to live.

Her voice was strong and rich and assured. He felt shy of her because of her resemblance to the fantasy girl, and because of that too he was aware of an unfamiliar stirring of desire. Was she his Helen? He answered her hesitantly and then, since she had begun it, she had spoken to him first, and anyway he had a good reason for his question, he asked her if she lived nearby.

‘In Pembroke Villas,' she said. ‘I work in an antique shop, the Pembroke Market.'

He said hastily, not wanting her to get the wrong idea – though would it be the wrong idea? – ‘I asked because I'm looking for a place to live. Just a room.'

She interrupted him before he could explain how disillusioned he had been. ‘It's got much more difficult in the past couple of years. A good way used to be to buy the evening papers as soon as they come on the streets and phone places straightaway.'

‘I haven't tried that,' he said, thinking of how difficult it would be, using pay phones and getting enough change, and more and more nights at the Maharajah, and thinking too how exciting and frightening it would be to live in the same house as she.

‘You sometimes see ads in newsagents' windows,' she said. ‘They have them in the window of the place next to the market.'

Was it an invitation? She had got up and was smiling encouragingly at him. For the first time he noticed how beautifully dressed she was, just the way his private black-haired girl had been dressed in those dreams of his. The cover of
Vogue
, which he had seen in Stantwich paper shops but which Pam couldn't afford to buy – coffee-coloured suede suit, long silk scarf, stitched leather gloves and nut-brown boots as shiny as glass.