working below must have thought the roof was coming in on their heads.
They didn’t need the tools any more, so Marc tipped them out of the sacks and replaced them with the gun sight, magazine and a few other loose pieces. Meantime, PT and Joel strained as they tried lifting the main body of the gun.
‘Christ,’ Joel moaned, as he mopped his sweating brow on to his shirt cuff.
‘Damned sight heavier than I expected,’ PT agreed.
Marc passed the canvas sacks up to Rosie as she leaned out of the office window. When he looked back he saw that the other two were still struggling. They could barely keep the gun off the ground and he jogged back over to help them.
‘I’ll grab the end,’ Marc said.
The boys paused to catch their breath when they finally rested the gun against the side of the office building, with the barrel poking through the window.
‘You OK?’ Rosie asked, as she leaned outside. ‘Somebody walked past the door in here and the doorman’s already spat his gag out twice. We can’t hang around much longer.’
‘This steel’s over an inch thick,’ PT explained. ‘We’ll get it inside, but we’re going to need a trolley or something after that.’
Rosie nodded. ‘I’ll go look.’
The typing pool had three lines of eight small desks, each bearing typewriters with in and out trays stacked alongside. The typist who’d arrived early was a slender, hunched woman with frizzy black hair. She sat behind her typewriter, click-clacking a pair of knitting needles.
Rosie remembered what Henderson had taught her: be confident, put on a front and people will believe what you say.
‘Good morning,’ Rosie said. ‘I’m helping my dad out servicing the gun on the roof and we need to take it downstairs. Is there a trolley or something we can use to wheel it through the office?’
The woman lowered her knitting and looked up. ‘Trolley,’ she said slowly, the pause giving Rosie’s nerves a chance to jangle. ‘I think so.’
The woman dropped her knitting inside a rattan bag, walked to the back of the room and then cut through a swinging door.
The boys whispered curses as the gun passed its centre of gravity. It slid off the windowsill and banged down on the office floor. Rosie wanted to peek inside and see what was going on, but the typist came back with an upright trolley that ran on two sturdy wheels.
‘That looks perfect,’ Rosie gushed. But she cut her smile short, realising that she was acting a little too pleased for someone whose motives were supposed to be mundane.
‘We use it to shift boxes of files,’ the typist explained, as Rosie took the handles. ‘You’ll bring it straight back, won’t you?’
‘Absolutely,’ Rosie lied, as she tilted the trolley and wheeled it into the office.
‘Nice one,’ PT said, when he saw it.
Down at floor level, Rosie saw that the doorman was close to spitting his gag out again. She squatted down and crammed the handkerchiefs back in, then picked the wrench off the top of the desk.
‘One sound out of you,’ Rosie said menacingly, then she banged the wrench into her palm to demonstrate. ‘I’m getting pretty sick of you.’
PT held the trolley as Marc and Joel manoeuvred the gun on to the platform. The barrel was as tall as the fifteen-year-old. It wouldn’t stay balanced so Marc fixed it to the trolley with a length of rope.
‘I’ll get the lift,’ Rosie said, as she hurried out into the hallway.
The arrival bell dinged as she approached the lift. She watched a man and woman going up through the metal grilles. When the lift came back down, the three boys rolled in the trolley.
‘This thing’s so damned heavy,’ PT said quietly. ‘I thought we’d be able to drag it through the fields out back, but we can’t carry it and this trolley will sink into the mud.’
‘What if we brazen it out?’ Marc asked. ‘Try going straight through the front gate?’
‘They search people going out rather than going in,’ Joel said. ‘Four people our age carrying all this junk, they’ll stop us for sure.’
‘I think I saw another gate for the office car park,’ Rosie noted. ‘It’s nearer as well.’
‘We should have put more thought into this,’ Marc said, as the lift stopped at the ground floor.
‘How could I have known this was going to be so heavy?’ PT asked defensively.
The four youngsters emerged into the lobby. A man in a three-piece suit disappeared on to the stairs as PT juddered the trolley