A pair of young brothers, Colin and Charlie Webster, were watching the car lot. They were armed with baseball bats and handguns. They both sat in the Rolls-Royce Corniche, happy to be doing their little job, even happier to be doing it inside such a nice motor. They were aged twenty and twenty-one respectively. Colin was talking about his girlfriend Lila, a pretty half-caste girl from Notting Hill.

‘I tell you, Charlie, the bird’s phenomenal. I’m bringing her round to meet the old woman this week.’

Charlie, the elder of the two, laughed. ‘Love at first fright, was it?’

Colin grinned in the dimness of the car. ‘You could say that.’ He picked up a half-smoked joint from the ashtray and lit it with a bright green clipper lighter. Taking a heavy hit on it, he held the smoke in his lungs for a while before expelling it slowly. ‘Lovely puff this, where’d you get it?’

Charlie took the proffered joint and sucked on it, blowing on the end as he expelled the smoke, lighting up his face with the embers. ‘Up on the Railton Road, there’s this Rasta who sells home-grown. Brixton, home of marijuana. ’

Both boys laughed as if this was really funny. They finished the joint and Colin began to build another, his fingers rolling the three cigarette papers expertly. As he licked along the side to seal it, they were both aware of a set of headlights coming up the road. The vehicle stopped outside the forecourt and both boys were shocked into silence.

The vehicle was a Range-Rover, but the grille at the front had two large pieces of metal butting out of it.

The Range-Rover mounted the pavement and crashed into a G-reg, top-of-the-range Mercedes, sending it crashing into the BMW beside it. The cars were then pushed along, the screeching noise deafening as metal scraped metal. The Mercedes was now on its side, looking like something prehistoric in the dim moonlight.

Colin and Charlie, grabbing their scattered wits, jumped from the Rolls-Royce Corniche. Both unused to handguns, they immediately forgot them in the heat of the moment. They stood, Colin with the half-built joint still in his fingers, as the Range-Rover smashed up the cars in front of them. The car lot was a wasteground in five minutes and the Range-Rover, used previously for ram raiding, drove sedately along the road, the occupants giving the boys a two-fingered salute as they passed them.

Five more minutes went by and the police arrived, alerted by a woman in the flats along from the car lot who could hear eight car alarms going off at once. Colin and Charlie were already gone.

Paddy heard the news fifteen minutes after it happened and blew what was known in the building trade as a gasket.