Dennis Loftus

Dennis Loftus is 31 and for fourteen months has been a morning-shift guard, the youngest on the team. Born in Slough, the son of a school cleaner and a father who left home early, he went through three counter jobs and an electrician's course he dropped halfway before accepting the gray uniform. He says he likes the warehouse because here everything is predictable, and because nobody asks what he did before.

He has a room in a house in Hayes, with a narrow bed, a gas heater that smells of burning and a cassette player on the dresser, where he repeats the same rock tape all morning. There are football posters, a bicycle leaning against the wall and a tin lunchbox on the windowsill. He eats standing up, sleeps with the window ajar and takes pride that in fourteen months he has never missed a day or come in late.

He is thin and narrow-shouldered, with a pale, freckled face, restless eyes and brown hair with long bangs and sideburns. He wears the gray uniform clean and dry, with the tie always a little crooked, and carries on his wrist a faint bruise, where his hands were tied. He is friendly, helpful, speaks fast and jokes to seem relaxed, and has a habit of looking twice at whoever enters the room.

About the morning of the crime, he says a hood was put on him and his hands tied, like everyone, and that he heard the chief shout with the lit match: it was the worst day of his life. He says he passed through the warehouse on Friday, at 11 p.m., to get his lunchbox, and saw the manager's office light on and her speaking low on the phone, hanging up the moment she saw him in the window. About the gold, he knows only what the thieves took.

Dennis knows the guard who arrived last, for the first time in fourteen months, is the one asked how the door was opened. When the detective says he opened it for the thieves, he rubs his bruised wrist and answers that he was tied on the floor like the others, and that he will only speak in front of the union lawyer. The fright of a young man treated as an accomplice, or a joke to buy time: the rubbed wrist serves both.