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tables had been added a fireside chair and two Windsor Wheelback chairs, to one of which Tanya Paine had been tied. Beyond the door was the kitchen, equipped with microwave, fridge, and cupboards with counters, and beyond that the living area, currently used as the office. With both interior doors shut not much of what was going on in the office could have been heard by a gagged and blindfolded woman shut in the bedroom.
    Vine and Lynn Fancourt looked it over. “Contemporary” as a title for this company was something of a misnomer. The two telephones were the only evidence of modern technology. There was no computer and no safe.
    “We don’t need no safe,” said Samuel. “Twice a day I bank the takings, once at dinnertime and once at three.”
    “So what was in the petty cash box?” asked Vine, holding up an empty tin that long ago had contained cream crackers. He held it in a clean handkerchief between thumb and forefinger, though whatever fingerprints that might have been there had by then been irrevocably smudged by Samuel’s and Tanya Paine’s handling of it.
    “Maybe five quid,” said Samuel, “and that’d be pushing it. I’d got my takings on me and the same would go for Stan and Les. They’d bring them in round about midday and I’d bank the lot.”
    Vine shook his head. It was a long while since he had heard of anything so slapdash. Tanya Paine came out, her hairdo reassembled, her lipstick renewed.
    “I thought you’d want to see me the way they left me,” she explained, “before I repaired the damage. There was three pounds forty-two in that cash box, Pete. I checked it out on account of thinking I’d pop out for a cappuccino and a Mars bar when Stan came back and I’d not got no change myself. Three pounds forty-two exactly.”
    They had taken it. But had they been looking for something else? A drawer had been pulled out from under the counter where the phones were. A book of receipt stubs was on the floor. The VAT book had been opened and left face downward. But policemen get to know when a place has been ransacked or, conversely, made to look as if it has been ransacked. This effort to deceive had not even been wholehearted. The two masked men had come for something Contemporary Cars had, but, as Vine said to Lynn on the way back to the police station, itwasn’t three pounds forty-two and it wasn’t some vital document among the VAT inputs.
    “What were they doing then for what she calls a long time after they’d left her tied up in there?”
    “I don’t know,” said Vine. “The chances are, though, that it wasn’t the long time she says. She was scared, understandably so, and it seemed like a long time. It was probably a couple of minutes.”
    “So they tied her up, shut the two doors on her, took the petty cash, and dropped a few things on the floor to make it look like a search? And they had a
gun
?”
    “That’ll have been a toy or a replica. No one was hurt, it’s a small sum that’s missing, there was no damage—and we’re never going to find those two, you know that.”
    “That’s a bit of a defeatist attitude, Sergeant Vine,” said Lynn, who was twenty-four, new from her training, and ardent.
    “You watch it, young Lynn. I don’t mean we’re not going to check the place over and see if the prints are those of any villain known to us. We shall observe the usual routine, but there’s been rather a lot of this sort of thing lately, though I’ll admit the masks and the gun are novelties.”
    When Burden heard of it he immediately seized on the fact that one of Contemporary Cars’ drivers was Stanley Trotter. One of the two intruders could even have been Stanley Trotter.
    “Tanya Paine would have recognized him,” said Vine. “Anyway, why would he need that? He was on the spot or could be. He could look for whatever it was without tying the girl up.”
    “Where is he now?”
    “Down there, I reckon. They all come in at midday with their takings. They’re