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thought.
    'It's about the paper you put up in the street.'
    'I'm sorry?'
    'Up on the pole. The one about the money you found.'
    'I'm afraid you've lost me. Gene! It must be for you, Gene.'
    Another woman, thought Lance. Probably a couple of lesbians.
But it was a man's voice. 'Eugene Wren. What can I do for you?'
    Lance repeated what he'd said.
    'Ah. You lost some money, did you?'
    'Yeah. That's right.'
    'I'm not going to ask you how much it was. Not now. Perhaps
you'll do me the courtesy of coming here and we'll have a chat
about it. When would suit you? Tomorrow evening about 6.30?'
    Lance agreed. The rest of the empty day stretched before him.
He would have liked to go out somewhere for the evening, pub
first, then maybe a club up West. He'd never been to a club, he
couldn't afford it, he couldn't afford anything. His benefit was
basic. He was a 'Jobseeker' but he didn't know what to say at interviews,
he just sat there in hopeless silence. No one wanted to
employ him and now he had given up trying, though poverty was
a perpetual trial to him. Everything he received went on food to
supplement the very small amounts Uncle Gib made available to
him. If you were rationed to an egg a day, two slices of black
pudding or luncheon meat, four slices of bread, a bun and a small
wedge of processed cheese, you needed a good deal extra. When
he complained, Uncle Gib said that was all he had and people ate
too much. God would have vengeance on them for not thinking
of the starving millions in Africa. Lance bought tins of baked beans
and tins of sliced peaches, pork pies and sausages, king-size bags
of crisps and chocolate bars, and the biggest loaves of sliced white
bread he could find. He also bought quite a lot of booze, Bacardi
breezers, bottles of cider and the cheapest gin as well as wine from
Kurdistan and Bulgaria. All his benefit was gone and he remained
stick-thin.
    He had no faith in securing this 'found' sum of money for
himself but he'd get a look at the place where this Eugene Wren
lived, he'd have an idea of the house and its contents.
Remembering some of the things Uncle Gib had said years ago
in his unregenerate days when Lance was a child, he thought of
the term 'casing the joint', and he thought of observing entrances
and exits, ways of getting in and out. And of course there was
always a chance he'd get the money as well.

CHAPTER FIVE
    In the hospital, when he regained consciousness, they told him
he had had a heart attack and requested his consent to the
operation he should have had a year or two before. Joel asked
to have it done privately, knowing Pa would pay. Pa would pay
anything to keep him out of his way; out, preferably, of Hampstead
Garden Suburb and its environs, out of the whole of north London.
The operation was performed with the frightening (if he had known
about it beforehand) splitting of his breastbone and lifting out of
his heart – and something else.
    His surgeon told him afterwards, 'We nearly lost you. Don't know
why. You seemed OK, thriving no less, and then you arrested. Of
course we brought you back. Don't suppose you remember anything
about it, do you?'
    Joel said he didn't. What had happened to him he intended to
tell no one – not yet, at any rate. If he really tried it might go away.
Concentrate instead on trying to remember exactly what had
happened before he passed out and fell over in the street. His
mother came to see him, unknown to Pa, and he told her where
it was he had had his heart attack.
    'I think I'd drawn some money out of the hole in the wall,' he
said to her. 'I think it was a hundred and forty quid but there was
only twenty-five in my pocket. It's in the drawer in that cabinet now.'
    'You were never any good with money, Joel,' said his mother
mournfully.
    'Someone might have handed it in to the police. It's worth asking.'
    His mother looked doubtful. She said she would enquire and then
she said she wondered if it was 'all those drugs' he had taken in
time gone by that