keep the regulation distance between the van and the motorcyclists. He
had nearly taken the young swine by the throat, though, when he had
said, “Me and Judy thought we might live together, like, for a while,
see how it goes, see?” It had been as casual as if he were proposing to
take her to a matinee. The man was twenty-two years of age, five years
older than Judy–thank God she was still a minor, obliged to obey her
father. The boyfriend–his name was Lou–had sat in the parlor, looking
nervous, in a nondescript shirt, grubby jeans held up with an elaborate
leather belt like some medieval instrument of torture, and open sandals
which showed his itchy dirty feet. When Ron asked what he did for a
living, he said he was an unemployed poet, and Ron suspected the lad was
taking the mickey.
After the remark about living together, Ron threw him out. The rows had
been going on ever since.
First, he had explained to Judy that she must not live with Lou because
she ought to save herself for her husband; whereupon she laughed in his
face and said she had already slept with him at least a dozen times,
when she was supposed to be spending the night with a girlfriend in
Finchley.
He said he supposed she was going to say she was in the pudding club;
and she said he should not be so stupid, she had been on the pill since
her sixteenth birthday, when her mother had taken her up to the family
planning clinic. That was when Ron came near to hitting his wife for the
first time in twenty years of marriage.
Ron got a pal in the police force to check out Louis Thurley, aged
twenty-two, unemployed, of Barracks Road, Harringey. The Criminal
Records Office had turned up two convictions: one for possession of
cannabis resin at the Reading pop festival, and one for stealing food
from Tesco’s in Muswell Hill. That information should have finished it.
It did convince Ron’s wife, but Judy just said that she knew all about
both incidents. Pot shouldn’t be an offense, she declared, and as far as
the theft was concerned, Ron and his friends had simply sat on the
supermarket floor eating pork pies off the shelf until they got
arrested.
They had done it because they believed food should be free, and because
they were hungry and broke.
She seemed to. think their attitude was totally reasonable.
Unable to make her see sense, Ron had finally forbidden her to go out in
the evening. She had taken it calmly. She would do as he said, and in
four months’ time, when she was eighteen, she would move into Lou’s
studio apartment with his three mates and the girl they all shared.
Ron was defeated. He had been obsessed by the problem for eight days,
and still he could see no way to rescue his daughter from a life of
misery–for that was what it meant, without a shadow of doubt. Ron had
seen it happen. A young girl marries a wrong ‘. She goes out to work
while he sits at home watching the racing on television. He does a bit
of villainy from time to time to keep himself in beer and smokes.
She has a few babies, he gets nicked and goes inside for a stretch, and
suddenly the poor girl is trying to bring up a family on the Assistance
with no husband.
He would give his life for Judy–he had given her eighteen years of
it–and all she wanted to do was throw away everything Ron stood for and
spit in his eye. He would have wept, if he could remember how.
He could not get it out of his mind, so he was still thinking about it
at 10:16 A.M. this day. That was why he did not notice the ambush
sooner.
But his lack of concentration made little difference to what happened in
the next few seconds.
He turned under a railway arch into a long, curving road which had the
river on its left-hand side and a scrap yard on the right. It was a