Circus of Thieves and the Raffle of Doom by William Sutcliffe

the ring, somersaulting slowly as he headed in the vague direction of his alarmingly small catching net.
Nobody noticed that the boom of the cannon was in fact two booms, precisely synchronised with the drowned-out sound of a large and crotchety diesel engine spluttering (and quacking, weirdly) into
action.
    This was Armitage’s burglarising masterstroke. Just as a skilful magician directs the audience’s attention away from the hand which is tricking them, so the sound of Jesse’s
cannon was used in every town to mask the blowing up of a safe. Two bangs sound much like one bang, if they happen at the same time, and this human cannonball/safe-blasting double whammy was a
technique that Armitage had invented and mastered. He was so proud of this ingenious method that it required all his self-control to stop himself showing off about it to everyone he met.
    Even in his most modest moments, Armitage couldn’t help but think of himself as a genius: as the Austen of audacity, the Beethoven of break-ins, the Columbus of crime, the Darwin of
deviousness, the Einstein of expropriation, the Freud of fiendishness, the Galileo of gall, the Homer of house-breaking, the Isambard Kingdom Brunel of ingeniously kitted burglaries, the Jobs of
jobs, the Kafka of kleptomania, the Lennon and McCartney of the light-fingered and mischievous, the Nietzsche of nicking, the Ozu of “Oh, no!”, the Pele of pinching, the Queen Cleopatra
of the quietly clandestine, the Rodin of robbery, the Shakespeare of shake-downs, the Tolstoy of turnovers, the Uccello of the underworld, the Vermeer of venality, the Wilde (or Wilder) of
wildness, the X-ray inventor (Wilhelm Röntgen) of extraordinarily exciting extra-legal extraction, the Yeats of yobbishness, the Zola of zero-hour zip-aways. 33

    Fluffypants McBain woke up. Something was different. No, everything was different.
    The post office had been blown up.
    Two men were stuffing the contents of the safe into a huge bag, then running out of the door. And worst of all, despite his extensive efforts, Fluffypants McBain’s left ear was dirtier
than ever.
    He yawned. He stretched. And he began to wash.

    ‘First gear!’ said Billy.
    ‘I thought I was just doing the steering,’ said Hannah, more than a little panicked. She’d never used a gearstick before.
    ‘I can’t reach! Just put it into gear.’
    ‘Which one?’
    ‘First!’
    ‘Er . . .’
    ‘Up and to the left.’
    ‘OK. I’ll try.’ Hannah grabbed the long wobbly stick, moved it to the left, then shoved it upwards. Something crunched.
    ‘I’m letting the clutch out now. Have you got the wheel?’
    ‘The wheel? Yes, the wheel.’
    Billy released the clutch with his left hand and pressed the accelerator with his right. The engine spluttered, growled, and lurched.

    ‘OH, MY GOD!’ yelled Hannah. ‘WE’RE MOVING!’
    ‘That’s the whole idea,’ said Billy.
    Of course it was. Of course it was. Hannah had chosen the steering mainly because it sounded like the easier of the two options (and also because she had no idea which pedal was which, and what
they were used for), but now, sitting in the driver’s seat of an enormous articulated lorry which was moving forwards with alarming purposefulness, she realised something that ought to have
been obvious to her some time ago. Steering a lorry is serious. If you get it wrong, you crash. If you get it very wrong, you knock down a house.
    Hannah gripped the wheel as tightly as she could. It shuddered in her hands. She could feel the power of the engine pulsing through her entire body.
    There was a tree in front of her. If she didn’t turn the wheel at the right time, in the right direction, the lorry and tree would have a noisy, dangerous and expensive meeting. With every
second she thought about it, the tree got closer.
    ‘Are you OK?’ said Billy.
    ‘No!’ replied Hannah.
    ‘Are you going where we agreed?’
    ‘I think so.’
    ‘Are you steering?’
    ‘I think