BT or not BT?

The first thing I did when I got back from the Big City was to pick up Islay from her holiday home at the Children's Bookshop. She was a bit stand offish at first - Judith said she'd sulked for the first two days.
Both the shop and house were without a phone connection.
It all started innocently enough when Colin woke up to find workmen in yellow jackets raising the manhole cover in the road outside his bedroom. They had all the cones up and 'men at work' signs, and they even came into the shop.
Then the phones went dead.
One of the neighbours of the Children's Bookshop is sufficiently important to merit an armed response unit if anything untoward happens. Some sort of alarm must have been triggered, because the next thing to happen was the arrival of armed police, who talked to the 'workmen' for a while and then went away again. The 'workmen' packed up rather rapidly, and it was only later that a real BT man arrived to announce that they had stolen the phone cables. Which are now being replaced.
At least the armed police had film of the men and the number plates of their vans.