Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCPS2YWCH3X677DHJFQCPXC

The van smelled of stale crisps and ambition. Molly had backed it into the alley behind the leisure centre, wedged between a skip and a wall of graffiti that read BRENDAN WAS HERE, which struck her as an unusually humble boast. Bill unrolled the blueprints across the dashboard. They were not, strictly speaking, blueprints. They were the back of a takeaway menu upon which he had drawn a rectangle, several arrows, and a small dog. "That's the venue," he said, tapping the rectangle. "What's the dog?" "That's a dog. There might be a dog." Molly took the menu from him and turned it ninety degrees, as though a new angle might reveal competence. The party was scheduled for two o'clock: Tabitha Wentworth-Hyde, seventh birthday, forty-five guests, bouncy castle, and — according to the invitation Bill had steamed open at the sorting office where he did not work — a present table. Forty-five children. Forty-five sets of parents who had all, in the arms race of suburban gifting, spent well beyond their means. "iPads," Bill said reverently. "Scooters. Those little robot dinosaurs that cost more than my car." "Your car is a bicycle." "That's the point I'm making." The plan, such as it was, hinged on the arrival of a man named Sparkles the Magnificent, who had been booked for a forty-minute magic show and who was, at that very moment, sitting in a Wetherspoons three miles away believing he had won a competition. Bill had made the certificate himself. It had a seal on it. The seal was a sticker from a banana. "We go in at ten past," Molly said. "The parents will be watching us, not the table." "Us. Right. Because I'm the magician." "You're the magician." "And you're the—" "Assistant." Bill considered this. He was wearing a cape he had bought from a shop that sold both fancy dress and vapes, and it clung to his shoulders with the desperate optimism of polyester. Molly had a top hat. The top hat had a false bottom, and the false bottom had a bin liner in it, and the bin liner was, in essence, the entire criminal enterprise. "Forty minutes," she said. "You keep them looking at the ceiling. I do three trips to the van." "What if a child follows you?" "Then you make a balloon animal." "I can't make balloon animals." "Then make a balloon shape and say it's abstract." They sat in silence for a moment, listening to a distant inflatable groan under the weight of the sugar-mad. Somewhere a mother shouted a hyphenated name with real venom. It was, Molly thought, a beautiful day for theft. Bill checked himself in the wing mirror and adjusted his moustache, which was not his. "Molly." "Mm." "Is this wrong? Morally. Robbing children." She thought about it properly, which was more than he'd expected. "We're teaching them about impermanence," she said. "It's practically Buddhist." Bill nodded slowly, satisfied, and swept out of the van with a flourish that caught the door handle and nearly removed his cape entirely.