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Two minutes to do it, and I can be back in the Rose and Crown by nine-thirty-nine. Twelve minutes away in all. Plenty of people spend longer than that in the bog.’
    â€˜Old Fred in the mornings, for a start,’ said Brian. They both giggled childishly, from nerves.
    â€˜Anyway, it won’t matter if I’m a minute or two over time,’ said Gordon. ‘No one will notice I’m gone.’
    Brian’s face fell. ‘Don’t bank on it,’ he said. ‘Lill noticed, for a start.’
    â€˜What?’ Gordon’s voice suddenly assumed its normal baritone, and they both jumped nervously. But they needn’t have bothered. Lill was in the bathroom, simultaneously cleaning her teeth and gargling her signature tune, and Fred was snoring away in the sleep of the just and stupid.
    â€˜What did she say?’ hissed Gordon.
    â€˜She noticed you weren’t there. When she went out. She asked where you were.’
    â€˜Oh Christ. Drawing the attention of everyone in the bar to the fact that I wasn’t there.’ Brian nodded. ‘What did you say?’
    â€˜Well, I didn’t say you were up in Snoggers timing an attempt to murder her this time next week . . .’ They both sat on their beds, hunched forward in thought. ‘What could I say? I said you’d gone to the bog.’
    Gordon thought and thought, but came up with no very comforting solution. ‘That’s the trouble with Lill,’ he said. ‘You think she’s absolutely predictable, then she springs a nasty surprise on you. We’re going to have to think about this. If we’re not careful we’re going to be shopped, by Lill herself.’

CHAPTER 3
GINGERING THINGS UP
    Sunday was a somnolent day at the Hodsdens’. It always was. Lill didn’t like it, but she recognized there was nothing she could do against the collective lethargies of the other four. Saturday night was always Fred’s big night of the week: darts at the Yachtsman’s took it out of him, and Sundays he crept blearily about the house, all passions spent and considerably in overdraft. Brian and Gordon, as a rule, followed suit, if Gordon had nothing sporting on: they sprawled in armchairs reading the papers, they played cards or they watched television. ‘It’s natural,’ Lill would explain to people, ‘they work and play hard the rest of the week in their different ways—Gordon the physical, Brian more the—’ she shied away from the word mental —‘more the psychological !’ Debbie just took herself off, quite inconspicuously. As usual, thought Lill bitterly, though she would certainly have gone on at her ceaselessly if she for once had been around.
    So Sunday they slept, ate well of Gordon’s birthday dinner of beef, Yorkshire pudding and three veg, followed by tinned peaches, then reread the Sunday Mirror and the Express and watched Bruce Forsyth on the enormous colour television that Lill said (and Fred believed her) shehad picked up for practically nothing from a family going to live abroad. The chocolates, which they opened after tea, turned out to be all soft centres, which Gordon did not like. Still, Lill did, and the evening was punctuated by the sound of Lill’s pudgy hand reaching down into the box and scuffling around in the paper that crackled like money.
    â€˜Come on, Gordon,’ she would say, ‘tuck in. They cost the earth.’
    â€˜I’ve had enough for the moment, Mum.’
    â€˜ “He has a proud stomach, that boy”,’ murmured Brian.
    â€˜There’s nothing wrong with his stomach,’ protested Lill. ‘He’s got a lovely body. Not an ounce of surplus anywhere.’ And she leered at her eldest and reached down again into the chocolate box.
    But the consequence was that Monday morning Lill felt in need of some sort of reviver, a tonic, something to put pep back into the system and get