Free Make Death Love Me by Ruth Rendell Page B

Right?’
    â€˜I’m knackered.’ Marty heaved himself up and pushed a pile of dirty clothes on to the floor. ‘I got to have a drink.’
    â€˜Yeah, right, later, when we’ve got that car off our backs.’
    â€˜Christ,’ said Marty, ‘we’ve got four grand in that bag and I can’t have a fucking drink.’
    Nigel gritted his teeth at that. He couldn’t understand why there hadn’t been seven like that guy Purford said. But he managed, for Jane or Jenny’s benefit, a mid-Atlantic drawl. ‘I’ll drive it. You stay here with her. We’ll tie her up again, put her in the kitchen. You’ll go to sleep, I know you, and if she gets screeching the old git next door’ll freak.’
    â€˜No,’ said Joyce.
    â€˜Was I asking you? You do as you’re told, Janey.’
    They got hold of Joyce and gagged her again and tied her hands behind her and tied her feet. Marty took off her shoe to stop her making noises with her feet and shut the kitchen door on her. She made noises, though not for long.
    The rain had stopped and the slate-grey sky was barred with long streaks of orange. Nigel and Marty got as far away from the kitchen door as they could and talked in fierce whispers. When the traffic slackened Nigel would take the car and dispose of it. They looked longingly at Marty’s radio, but they dared not switch it on.

7
    For a couple of hours the police suspected Alan Groombridge. No one had seen the raiders enter the bank. They set up road blocks just the same and informed the Groombridge and Culver next-of-kin. But they were suspicious. According to his son and his father-in-law, Groombridge never went out for lunch, and the licensee of the Childon Arms told them he had never been in there. At first they played with the possibility that he and the girl were in it together, and had gone off together in his car. The presence of Joyce’s shoe made that unlikely. Besides, this theory presupposed an attachment between them which Joyce’s father and Groombridge’s son derided. Groombridge never went out in the evenings without his wife, and Joyce spent all hers with Stephen Hallam.
    A girl so devoted to her family as Joyce would never have chosen this particular day for such an enterprise. But had Groombridge taken the money, overturned the tills, left the safe open, and abducted the girl by force? These were ideas about which a detective inspector and a sergeant hazily speculated while questioning Childon residents. They were soon to abandon them for the more dismaying truth.
    By five they were back where they had started, back to a raid and a double kidnapping. A lot of things happened at five. Peter Johns, driver of the red Vauxhall, heard about it on the radio and went to the police to describe the white mini-van with which he had nearly collided. Neither he nor his mother could describe the driver or his companion, but Mrs Johns had something to contribute. As the van edged past the Vauxhall, she thought she had heard a sound from the back of the van like someone drumming a heel on the floor. A single clack-clack-clack, Mrs Johns said, as of one shoe drumming, not two.
    The next person to bring them information was the driver of a tractor who remembered meeting a Morris Eleven Hundred. The tractor man, who had a vivid imagination, said the driver had looked terrified and there had certainly been someone sitting beside him, no doubt about it, and his driving had been wild and erratic. There had been three bank robbers then, the police concluded, two to drive the van with Joyce in it, the third in Alan Groombridge’s car, compelling him to drive. The loss of the silver-blue Ford Escort was reported by its owner, a Mrs Beech.
    By then Nigel Thaxby and Marty Foster and Joyce Culver were in Cricklewood and Alan Groombridge was in the Maharajah Hotel in the Shepherd’s Bush Road.
    Literature had taught him that there were all sorts