Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCREH3C4WM34KR5D530TXGW

The van smelled of cold sausage rolls and ambition. Molly had parked it beneath a drooping sycamore two streets from the Hendersons' house, close enough to hear the bouncy castle's generator wheezing, far enough that nobody would connect a rusted Transit to the crime of the century. "Right," she said, unfolding a hand-drawn map across the steering wheel. "Present table. North wall of the marquee. Guarded." "Guarded by what?" "Grandmothers." Bill sank lower in his seat. "How many?" "Four confirmed. Possibly a fifth, unverified, believed to be in the kitchen making sandwiches nobody asked for." "Molly, I want it on the record that I said no to this." "You said no to the swimming pool job and that worked out beautifully." "I broke my coccyx." "You broke it *heroically*." She tapped the map. "Focus. Party starts at two. Pass the parcel at two-thirty, which is when the adults form a perimeter and start filming. Dead zone is the cake." "The cake?" "Cake's at three-fifteen. Lights go off, candles come out, everybody sings, everybody looks at the child. Forty seconds of total blindness. That's our window." Bill chewed a thumbnail. "Forty seconds to move forty presents." "Thirty-one presents. I counted the RSVPs on the fridge through the window with binoculars, which I'd like acknowledged." "You're a monster." "I'm *thorough*." She handed him a folded bundle of blue fabric. "Costume." He held it up. It unrolled into a full-body dinosaur, sagging and slightly damp, with a zip that ended somewhere around the tail. "Absolutely not." "You're the entertainment. Danny the Dino. I rang the mother from a phone box and told her the original entertainer had gout." "Do dinosaurs get gout?" "Entertainers get gout, Bill, keep up." Molly checked her watch. "You go in the front. Big energy. Roar a bit, do the thing with the arms, get them all screaming and chasing you into the garden. I come through the side gate with the laundry hamper." "And if someone asks why the laundry hamper?" "I say I'm the mother's sister." "You look nothing like her." "That's a family tragedy, not a security flaw." Bill stared at the dinosaur head in his lap. It had one eye. "What if a kid pulls my tail?" "Then you improvise. You've done improv." "I did one night of improv and a woman cried." "She was moved." "She was *frightened*, Molly." Molly leaned over and zipped him halfway in with the brisk cruelty of a mother on a school morning. "Here's what you're forgetting. Thirty-one presents. Average value fifteen quid, but at least three of them will be that big plastic castle from the advert, and there's a rumour going round the estate that Auntie Pauline gives cash." Bill went still inside his costume. "Cash?" "Cash in cards. Cards in envelopes. Envelopes on the present table." "How much cash?" "Enough to fix the coccyx." There was a long pause, filled only with the distant, doomed honking of the bouncy castle generator. "Fine," Bill said, muffled, pulling the one-eyed head down over his face. "But if there's a magician, we abort. Magicians notice things." "Agreed." Molly started the engine. "Roar for me." He roared. It was, she thought, genuinely quite good.