Villainy of the Old School

The most likely answer: bury it, quick. But whatever was done with the money, it couldn't have been done in a few minutes, or with only a few people knowing what was up. As the police started to search for the gang, leads came in. Two people were detained the next day on suspicion of involvement in the crime; then a woman was arrested after trying to deposit $10,500 that appeared to have come from the Tonbridge haul at a southeast London bank. By the weekend, all three had been released on bail. But two more were arrested on Saturday, and a number of vehicles thought to have been connected to the raid were detained in Kent. Dixon's Nissan was found at the Cock Horse pub, and a red van that the gang is thought to have used turned up at another inn, the Hook and Hatchet. (We are not making this up.) On Friday, following a tip-off--that big reward talking, maybe--the police picked up yet another van, this one parked at the disappointingly named Ashford International Hotel but with cash inside it.

Two days after the Securitas job, there was a copycat raid in Belfast, where a gang held a bank employee's wife and child hostage while they rifled the safe. But don't expect all this to start a trend. Among villains, bank raids are old hat. The tricky thing about robbing banks is, you have to actually go somewhere (risking witnesses and closed-circuit-television cameras) and steal things that have a real weight and presence, like jewels or money. These days, it's easier and safer by far to sit in some semitropical Margaritaville, fire up the laptop and do a bit of identity theft or credit-card fraud. Banks are for those with eyes bigger than their brains. "Bank robbers," says Robinson, "are basically idiots. They went in, and they found £40 million sitting there, and they got greedy. If they had taken £4 million, they could probably have walked away and disappeared." But who'd write a true-crime novel about a miserable four mil?