"Alright, keep your wig on." Said Barry showing no outward signs of being concerned that their nocturnal activities would be spotted by someone. "If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, there is no fucker about!"

"And that is supposed to make me feel better is it?"

"How many more times have I got to tell you? This is going to be a doddle. Far easier in fact than some of the jobs you've planned of late."

"And that's my point. I'm the cracker; I'm the one that selects the safes that I know I can do. Your job is to plan things from then on."

"And I told you this one dropped into my lap by sheer luck and there was no way I was going to start looking a gift nag like that in the gob. There's a lot of dough in that safe up there by all accounts. Enough in fact for us both to retire before our luck runs out. This, as they say, is the big one."

Sean decided it was stupid to carry the argument on at this time but made a mental note to deal with it later, if there was a need later. "Two things I have to say to you," he said, unable to leave things till later after all. "Firstly, I hope you're right about the amount of money that is supposed to be up there and secondly, how many palms did you have to grease for this to 'drop' into your lap?"

Barry moved back to the boot and picked out his bag of tools. "Some," he said heaving the heavy bag over his shoulder and walking with it across to the high wire fence that enclosed the industrial estate where cutting a way in was to be his first task. "A monkey will cover it. Which is no more than you've handed out in the past."

Sean watched Barry stroll away from the car with the same outward casualness as he would have if he was wandering down the Kings Road. He stepped a little closer to the open boot and closed the lid with a gentle 'click'. "I sincerely hope all this front you're putting on isn't just bravado."

For the next few moments Sean listened as his partner snipping away at the chicken wire but after what he considered to be a rather long time he moved closer. "How big do you intend to make this hole?" he said after a moment, "It's only got to be big enough for us you know, unless of course you've got a Centurion tank in you back pocket?"

Barry shook his head, "Don't be ... what's that word?"

"Funny?"

"No! Longer."

"Funny ha ha?"

Barry gave up, "Ah bollocks! Anyway, if I had a tank in my back pocket I wouldn't need to cut a hole would I?"

Barry had long resented Sean's constant goading where his safety measures were concerned, "If we have to get back through here a bit sharpish, I don't intend for either one of us to get hooked up on a stupid piece of wire, Okay?"

"But you keep telling me that this whole job is going to be like taking the whassit from the proverbial. So there shouldn't be any need to have to get back through here on the hurry up is there?"

Barry looked again at his hole and shrugged, "Better to be safe than having to do a ten stretch ain't it?"

Sean clucked his tongue loudly, "I should have listened to your Liz when she told me you was wanker."

"She said that did she? I bet unlike your Helen she didn't mean it literally."

With the wire eventually behind them, the pair made their way across the park to the offices of Nettles Transport and Storage Ltd and once there it was Sean who was once again the lookout while Barry got to work on the two locks.

Taking a moment to select a different pick from his wallet, Barry caught sight of Sean's teeth, white in the darkness. "You'd make a Cheshire cat jealous, just what is it you're grinning at?"

"I was just thinking about what I'm going to do to you if we get up here and we find nothing in that safe except a couple of luncheon vouchers?"

"Not going to happen. I told you, I've done my homework on this one."

"Well I still can't believe you parted with money up front? I've never needed to do that."

Barry sighed heavily, "I told you it was only a monkey so for God's sake stop keeping on about it."

Sean couldn't help chuckling to himself, "You're as soppy as a lorry load of monkeys.

We get through ten years of doing this without once getting our collar's felt and now this! You've got to be the most gullible person on the planet. In future, let's just keep to what we agreed was our own jobs, shall we? You get us in and out and I get the safe open, simple."

As he waited for the door to be opened Sean thought back to a time, twenty years earlier when the pair of them had first set themselves up as locksmiths. They had done so for no other reason than it had occurred to Barry that a tanner a go to get a key cut was a wonderful mark up. Especially when one considered the number of prefabs going up all over the place in which to house the thousands of homeless people created by Herr Hitler's obsession to take a stroll up Whitehall and live in Buck house.

But like all money making scheme's there was a problem, for while this idea did indeed appear to have the potential for making a few bob, there were, and still was for the most part, only two types of business's that cut keys, a locksmiths and a boot menders. And as neither of them had any desire to spend their working day handling the smelly footwear of a very unhygienic public, not to mention the fact that neither of them knew how to mend a shoe anyway, they had decided to plumb for the locksmith's which was the other thing they knew nothing about but it was going to be a lot less smelly once they learned it.

And over the course of time, their business had gone from strength to strength and their little shop that had started with key cutting as its main source of revenue had soon moved on to selling locks and from there they logically progressed into fitting them and eventually, after a consultation with Barry's grandfather who had been in that particular business a few years before, they began to sell and install safes.