The Moses Stone

17

The two men in the scruffy white Ford Transit looked pretty much like delivery men anywhere. They were casually dressed in jeans, T-shirts and leather jackets, with grubby trainers on their feet, and they both looked fit and quite strong. In fact, they actually were delivery men for a small Kent company, but they had a second line of employment that provided the bulk of their income.

In front of the driver, a satnav unit was attached to the windscreen with a sucker, which made the town plan that the man in the passenger seat was studying largely redundant. But while their first job was finding the right address in Canterbury, they also needed to identify their best route out of the housing estate and back on to a main road, and both men preferred to see the layout of the roads on a map rather than rely only on the satnav's small colour screen.

'That's it,' the passenger said, pointing. 'The one on the left, with the Golf parked outside.'

The driver pulled the van in to the side of the road and stopped about a hundred yards short of the property. 'Call the number again,' he instructed.

The passenger pulled out a mobile phone, keyed a number and pressed a button. He listened for perhaps twenty seconds, then ended the call. 'Still no answer,' he said.

'Right. We'll do it now.'

The driver slipped the van into gear and pulled away from the kerb. A few seconds later, he stopped directly outside the semi-detached house on the left and switched off the Ford's engine. The two men pulled on baseball caps, walked round to the back of the vehicle, opened the doors and picked up a large cardboard box from inside.

They carried it between them up the path, past the Volkswagen in the drive, to the back door, and lowered it to the ground. Although a casual observer would have assumed the box was heavy, it was actually completely empty.

The two men looked back towards the road, then glanced all round them. There was no bell, so the driver rapped on the glass panel in the back door. As he expected, there was no sound from inside the house, just as there'd been no response to their telephone call a couple of minutes earlier. After a moment he slipped a jemmy out of his jacket pocket, inserted the point between the door and the jamb beside the lock and levered firmly. With a sharp cracking sound, the lock gave and the door swung open.

They picked up the cardboard box and stepped inside, then immediately split up, the driver going up the stairs while the other man began searching through the groundfloor rooms.

'Up here. Give me a hand.'

The second man ran up the stairs as his companion walked out of the study carrying the system unit of a desktop computer. 'Get the screen and keyboard and stuff,' the driver instructed.

They placed the computer in the cardboard box, then trashed the place, ripping the covers off the beds, emptying all the wardrobes and drawers, and generally wrecking the house.

'That should do it,' the driver said, looking around the chaos of the lounge.

The two men walked back down the driveway to the road, again carrying the large cardboard box between them. They slid it into the load compartment of the Transit and climbed back into the cab. They'd just earned a total of five hundred pounds. Not bad for less than ten minutes' work, thought the driver as he turned the key in the ignition.

Not bad at all.