Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ9546EWJH075XRWQJ5PVB4

The rain had been falling sideways for forty minutes, which Bill considered a personal insult from the universe. He hunched over the hand-drawn map spread across the dashboard of the van, the paper slowly absorbing the humidity of his breathing and curling at the corners like a sad letter nobody wanted to read. Molly sat beside him eating a bag of crisps with the enthusiasm of someone who had not just spent three hours in a hedge conducting surveillance on a six-year-old's birthday party. Bill tapped the map with a pen that had run out of ink, which made the gesture purely theatrical. The target was a semi-detached house on Primrose Close, currently occupied by approximately fourteen children aged between five and seven, two tired parents, one exhausted grandmother, and a man in a clown costume who had arrived on a bicycle and hadn't seemed terribly happy about it. "The presents are stacked in the hallway," Bill said. "I counted at least twenty. Maybe twenty-five." Molly crunched loudly. "Did you count the clown as a threat or a distraction?" "Both," he said grimly. The plan, as much as it could be called that, involved waiting until the pass-the-parcel portion of the festivities reached its musical climax, at which point the hallway would be entirely unoccupied and the side gate would be accessible through a latch that Bill had already established was broken. He had established this by accidentally walking into it while pretending to be someone who lived on the street, a performance he felt deserved considerably more credit than it received. Molly folded the crisp packet into a neat square and tucked it into her pocket, which was the most organised thing she had done all week. "The wrapping paper alone is worth something," she said. "People go mad for nice wrapping paper." Bill stared at her. "We are not stealing the wrapping paper, Molly." "I'm just saying it was expensive looking." "We are professionals." The word professionals hung between them in the foggy van with considerably less dignity than Bill had intended. They were, by any reasonable assessment, two adults in waterproof jackets planning to rob a child's birthday party in the rain on a Tuesday afternoon. The moral architecture of this particular enterprise was not something Bill allowed himself to examine too closely, on the grounds that close examination had a way of leading to lifestyle changes he wasn't ready for. Through the windscreen, the house glittered with fairy lights. A burst of high-pitched screaming erupted from somewhere inside, followed immediately by the unmistakable sound of a kazoo being played badly. "That'll be pass the parcel starting," Bill said, reaching for the door handle. "Should we feel bad about this?" Molly asked. He paused, hand on the handle, rain drumming on the roof like impatient fingers. "The presents are insured," he said, though he had no possible basis for knowing this. They got out of the van.