Pizzas galore!

A job of this size, according to police, requires a large network; not just the gangsters, but their informants, suppliers and the middlemen to channel the dirty cash. At least one of these may make a simple, selfish calculation, and opt for the £2 million reward.

Stealing the money may prove to be far easier than spending it. The sheer physical volume of money and sophisticated methods to combat money laundering mean that disposing of hard cash — in this case 2.2 tonnes of paper — has become far harder.

If the criminals are not betrayed by human beings, they may be revealed by their DNA or other scientific clues. The Great Train Robbery gang of 1963 left fingerprints on a Monopoly set. One of the leaders, Jim Hussey, had left a handprint on the train itself.

The raiders of the Northern Bank in 2004 were more careful. They carefully bleached every surface, destroyed the getaway van in a breaker’s yard, smashed their pay-as-you-go mobile telephones and even removed their own urine from the crime scene in bottles.

Detectives will have anticipated that the thieves would burn vehicles to remove the risk of identification from DNA, modern methods of finding prints and shoeprints or fibres.

But DNA testing is now so advanced that a strand can be extracted from skin or even sweat, to be compared against a £300 million national database holding three million identities, including convicted criminals and DNA from 139,000 individuals who left traces at the scenes of crimes but have not been identified. DNA profiles have also been successfully generated from items such as discarded tools, matchsticks, weapon handles and grabbed clothing, while fingerprints can be taken from surfaces such as paper, cloth and even skin.

CCTV now covers almost all town centres and major road networks, and the investigators have set up a team whose sole task is to scour hundreds of hours of footage from the depot and the roads known to have been used by the gang before and after the robbery. At least four gang members were unmasked when they kidnapped Mr Dixon and his family.

Once police have numberplates for the gang’s vehicles they can also check the computerised numberplate recognition system that operates on the motorways through Kent.Detectives will also try to collate mobile phone records for the area. The gang had to liaise and time its movements. Mobile phones on the move constantly “check in” with network aerials and records are kept.

Despite its modern flavour, this crime reflects the old ambivalent British attitude towards large-scale robbery. On Tuesday night, a boy aged 8 was subjected to a six-hour kidnapping ordeal of such violence and horror that he will probably bear the mental scars for life. Yet a day later, a former professional criminal was on BBC Newsnight saying that he hoped some of the gang got away with it. Bank robbers are to British culture what outlaws are to America, the objects of a sneaking admiration, no matter how repellent, violent and greedy they may be in reality. Crime experts this week fell back on the comfortable myths. Former Flying Squad boss John O’Connor declared: “This is the kind of job you graduate to over a long criminal career . . . the big one they always dreamt about to retire in the sun on.”

But it seems just as likely that the perpetrators of “The Kent Job” are of a type, like their crime, that has never been seen before.

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