The Money Star Read online

  T H E

  M O N E Y

  S T A R

  © Jon Lymon 2012

  Cover art © Graham Smith

  This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be lent,

  resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the author’s consent.

  Ten years from now.

  And apart from the

  usual technological

  advances, nothing

  much has changed…

  1

  What the diamond robbers lacked in equipment and experience, they made up for with their desperation and determination.

  Simon Remnant was not one of them. But he was acutely aware of their fumbling presence in the jewellers next door to the café outside of which he was toying with a late fried breakfast, feeling every one of his forty-six years following another evening wasted getting wasted.

  He had been sitting at the table for nearly two hours, catching the autumnal sun rays that managed to beam between some of central London’s lowest high rises. During that time, he’d been forced to shoot several smiles at the little girl sitting with legs swinging at the next table. She was determined not to take her eyes off him, staring like he was an outcast here in his own neighbourhood. Trying to figure him out. Who was he? What was with his old face and his streaky grey hair? Where were all his friends and why was he pushing his food around his plate like her mother told her not to?

  In between glances down Greville Street to the junction with Hatton Garden, Remnant demonstrated his disappearing napkin trick, much to the girl’s fascination and her mother’s consternation. It was a trick he’d perfected while trying to entertain his own little girl some twenty years before.

  After another performance, he looked down at a sheet of paper that had held his attention periodically for the past week. ‘What to say, what to say about her?’ ‘This is the proudest day of my life.’ That was a good start, but was that a word, proudest? Edgar would know.

  He looked up to see the girl’s mother pointing out the bits of blueberry muffin her daughter should be eating while berating an absent father on her mobile phone.

  A yell from within the jewellers and the sprinkle of a necklace falling on concrete diverted Remnant’s fragile attention. His first thoughts were for the audacity of the raid. Straight in the front door, bold as brass bracelets, middle of the day. They had to be amateurs.

  Remnant had a few plans of his own tucked away in a drawer in his council flat over the road. Plans he’d developed over the years. Most men who lived round here had something similar. The ultimate ‘job’ on a jewellers. Nothing serious. Nothing they’d ever carry out. Merely something to pass the time and dream and chat about in between gulps down The Old Mitre.

  The sound of smashing glass in the jewellers was Remnant’s cue to grab his fork and leap to his feet, deliberately scraping his chair on the pavement as he stood to attract the mother’s attention.

  “Get inside the café, love,” he said. She resented the interruption, pointing to her phone. Remnant pointed to a warty-faced, green-skinned, one-eyed alien clutching a holdall (that wasn’t quite holding all the gems he wished to steal) emerging steel toe-capped boot first from the jewellery store. The mother grabbed her protesting daughter and dashed inside the café, which the proprietor swiftly declared ‘Closed’ with the deft flick of a wrist on the door sign.

  Like a one man wall, Remnant stood in the path of the confused alien in the jeweller’s doorway. The robber shouted expletives in an unexceptional south London accent that didn’t suit his face.

  Remnant spat out the sausage he’d been nervously chewing on for too long like a cowboy might spit out a wad of tobacco. He heard shouting inside the jewellers, and out of the corner of his eye he spied an arm with a black, leather gloved hand at its end sweeping a shelf clear of shiny stuff.

  He gripped his fork, a better weapon than a knife when it came to cutlery, his broad expanse of hangover and greasy spoon filling the doorway.

  “Give it here, mate,” he said to the alien, more calmly than he felt as he held out his hand for the holdall. It was soon withdrawn as the butt of a shotgun held by the second thief (a pirate) crashed down on his right shoulder. Remnant went down, his left hand both protecting and inspecting the damaged area, checking to see if his shoulder was still at right-angles to his neck, not shattered and dispersing shards of bone around his upper torso. Satisfied he wasn’t badly injured, he struggled to his feet and ran after the thieves who were already on their way down Leather Lane.

  The two thieves turned to see Remnant in a pursuit that none would call hot. Although he looked thin for his age and level of alcohol consumption, his internal organs were far from in good working order. The strains, stresses and a diet stunted by slashed benefits were to blame for his lack of shape, his physical condition a sign of these difficult times.

  The two thieves’ getaway vehicle was an inadequate and illegally parked white moped. It took two kicks before the engine emulated the sound of suburban Sunday lawnmowers, enough time for Remnant to close in and fire off shouted threats about police action and harsh sentences.

  “Get a fucking move on, I think he’s gone mad,” the alien shouted to the pirate.

  As Remnant reached within spitting distance of the moped, the overloaded vehicle slowly pulled off.

  Still gaining but struggling for oxygen, Remnant was regretting the fifth, sixth and seventh pints of Gates lager he’d sunk the night before as the escapees raised the speed and volume and hung a right into St. Cross Street. Remnant rounded the corner in time to catch them discarding their respective masks and leaning a left up Hatton Garden and away towards Clerkenwell Road.

  Remnant’s breathless arrival back at the crime scene barely registered with the two smartly dressed, sweating jewellers, still dazed and tense in the robbery’s aftermath. They had been joined by two Polish security guards who were rubbing brows in tandem as one of the jewellers berated them.

  “Your job is to protect us from people like them.”

  They nodded in unison.

  “So where were you?”

  The fresh steaming polystyrene coffee cups they held answered that question.

  “They went that way,” Remnant told the guards between pants, pointing up Hatton Garden. The two guards looked at each other, threw their coffees into the gutter and ran.

  The elder of the two jewellers who Remnant recognised as the shop’s Nigerian owner, DT, asked him if he’d seen the robbers’ real faces. Remnant shook his head and rubbed his shoulder.

  DT looked for something to kick and found nothing but a tree stump which was soon on the receiving end of his aggression. Remnant looked at DT, who was all clammy hands, pacing the pavement, criticising the failure of his expensive alarm system, (installed by Edgar, Remnant seemed to remember) questioning the whereabouts of the police, and wondering why no journalists were on the scene.

  Remnant waited expectantly. Some kind of reward from DT was surely in order. A thanks for the effort, maybe one of those gems the thieves dropped, or at the very least a fiver for a pint. A gem would be the most suitable though, Remnant concluded. DT could claim it on his insurance. ‘Wrap it as a present for your little girl’s wedding. You deserve it,’ he’d say.

  But DT’s mind was obsessed with his loss, and the absence of a publicity-generating police and press presence.

  “You’re just like all the rest,” Remnant shouted at DT as the jeweller trudged away from the scene. “In it for yourself.”

  DT stopped, turned and looked in no mood for criticism. “What have I done now? Do not be having a go at
me when I have just been robbed.”

  “Yeah, and I tried to catch them for you.”

  “But you didn’t catch them, did you? They got away. And I wouldn’t be surprised if you let them. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if you were in on it, part of the gang.”

  Remnant shook his head in disbelief. Ten, five, maybe even just a year ago, his next move would have been a violent one. But he’d learned to turn the other cheek, and he walked away down Greville Street towards The Old Mitre, desperately fighting the urge to turn back. To shove the words right back down the throat from whence they came. Teach him a lesson. Talking to me like that, blaming me, for what?

  He needed a Gates, a golden Gates lager that would ‘take him to the promised land’ as the old adverts used to say, before saying stuff like that about alcohol was made illegal. After a few more steps, he felt a tug on his sleeve and turned and looked down to see the little girl holding up a toy.

  “For me?” he asked.

  She nodded five times. He took the toy and examined it. It was a small, plastic man with a slightly scratched yellow hard hat. He couldn’t stop himself breaking into a smile.

  “Thank you, darlin’.” He patted the little girl on the head before her scowling mother (still on the phone) pulled her away and walked in the direction of Chancery Lane tube station, reprimanding her daughter for talking to strange men.

  Remnant heard the little girl ask ‘why is he a strange man, mummy?’ before their voices faded into the constant hum of central London.

  2

  Days had been merging into each other latterly in Remnant’s world. There was little to distinguish one from the next. Flat pub flat. Flat pub flat. But this had already been an extraordinary Sunday, and there was still half of it to go.

  He felt the little toy man rub against his chest in his breast pocket as he passed the shuttered shopfronts, the barred doorways, the for sale, to let and up for auction signs so prevalent in central London these days in the wake of the second double dip recession in a century that was only twenty-one years old. A century dying on its feet when it should be coming of age.

  The Polish security guards were back at their post on the junction of Hatton Garden and Greville Street, eyes searching like besuited, crew-cut prostitutes for a fast car pulling over to a yellow-lined kerb, and masked raiders sprinting, breaking, entering and escaping.

  That was the clever bit about the earlier raid. The lack of a discernible, credible getaway vehicle. The more Remnant thought about the plan, the more he was impressed by it. Outwardly amateurish, it had probably been months in the making. Wait until the guards are out of the way, then in the front and out before anyone knows it. Easy as.

  Remnant nodded to the Poles who had both vowed to give up coffee. They eyed him with suspicion but he smiled at them, knowing this dynamic duo were done. There’d be a new double act on the corner this time tomorrow. Same build, same brains, same brief.

  The earlier excitement in the area had given way to the customary Sunday calm, a few muted clubbers from the night before staggered to Chancery Lane tube with ringing multi-ringed ears, still high on what they’d imbibed, the encroaching come-down weighing heavy on their eyelids. Back to reality was fast approaching after a night when they’d forgotten about the state of the world, double whiskeys drowning out the double dip doom and gloom. ‘Can’t get a job. Too expensive to go to university. What else do you expect us to do other than forget about it Friday to Sunday and plan our next Friday to Sunday Monday to Friday?’

  The Hatton Garden they walked through contrasted to the nature of the place during the working week, which was loud with market stall holders from Leather Lane, office workers from High Holborn and lawyers from Holborn Viaduct. Most, save those from the legal firms who rarely saw their expensive homes, didn’t venture into town on a Sunday, leaving the day strictly for locals and lost tourists, none of whom seemed as keen on drinking as Remnant, who took the short alleyway that led from Hatton Garden to The Old Mitre, a path you could easily miss if you didn’t know it was there.

  Gordon, the landlord of The Old Mitre, was still trialling the idea of Sunday opening. Trade on the once holy day had been sluggish, too reliant on unreliable locals. Gordon was as rotund as his pumps permitted him to be. When pouring a pint became too much of a stretch, he’d cut down on the bitter and go for occasional walks to shift a little weight from his midriff. His domain remained the tap side of the bar and the two storey flat above the sixteenth-century pub. The regulars respected his territory as well as his honesty, directness, and the occasional freebie he’d pour them.

  He knew Remnant’s tipple, and a pint of Gates was delivered before Remnant had time to sit on his barstool. He made a big deal of searching for the tatty fiver he knew was warm and flat in his back left pocket, grimacing and rubbing his right shoulder, hoping the delay would give the landlord time to say ‘this one’s on me’.

  It wasn’t to be.

  Remnant handed over the money and asked if the landlord had heard news of the raid.

  “Not another one?”

  “I saw it all. I nearly stopped them getting away as well, but they were too young. Too fast.”

  It was then that Edgar entered, looking as bad around the eyes and in the hair as Remnant hoped he might. At forty-eight, Edgar was two years Remnant’s senior, but a life of opportunity and hope and money meant the elder looked the younger by at least a decade. Edgar’s bitter (he was not a Gates man) was frothing dangerously close to Remnant’s elbow by the time he had removed and hung his jacket and glared at the quiz machine.

  Words didn’t flow easily from Edgar at the best of times, and this clearly wasn’t. Edgar’s thick, rough hands gripped the glass and delivered a few gulps to a mouth whose vocal chords needed oiling, while Remnant filled him in on the morning’s events. Edgar expected and duly received the blame for Remnant’s state of health, and his inability to give chase for more than thirty seconds. He nodded sagely at Remnant’s incredulity over DT’s lack of an offer of a reward, and the accusation that he – Simon Remnant – could have been part of the raiding gang.

  “The truth of the matter is that you didn’t actually do anything that’s deserving of a reward,” Edgar told him. “You didn’t salvage any gems.”

  “But I tried.”

  “And failed. Do you expect him to reward failure? Do you expect anyone to reward failure?”

  “I just wanted a bit of gratitude, really. It’s people like him give people like me a hard time. Putting all those things I can’t afford on display in his shop. He’s a flaunterer, if that’s a word?”

  “It isn’t.”

  “Well, you know what I mean. I could’ve saved him thousands.”

  “And so could I,” said Edgar, preparing a tower of pound coins to do battle with the fiendish quiz machine, “if I hadn’t been flat on my face sleeping off a vicious hangover.”

  Remnant checked the screen of his vibrating phone. It was Chloe. He daren’t risk answering. She’d hear the tinkle of a glass or the hum of a radiator or some other tell-tale pub noise in the background. He let it ring, praying she would hang up before the pain of his neglect intensified.

  When the ignored call had finished, he pulled out the bit of paper that was sharing pocket space with the little toy man.

  “Proudest is a word, isn’t it?”

  “It is.”

  Remnant ticked the page. “Oh, and before I forget, do you reckon you could look at my boiler sometime?”

  As a former engineer, Edgar had grown used to such requests. Tell someone you fix stuff or that you know how machines work and you end up having to take looks at all sorts of their malfunctions. It was the mechanical equivalent of admitting you’re a doctor, with people forever asking you to give them a quick once over. ‘I’ve been having this pain here’ or ‘I think I’ve got a problem down there.’

  Edgar was too kind hearted a man to refuse. He had enough money not to work, though regularly bemoaned the la
ck of returns the interest on his savings was generating. The fact that he had any savings meant he was regarded as something of a novelty by the locals he shared tower blocks with, and the fact that he was the only one to own his flat in his block merely increased his novelty value. He’d been a successful engineer, technically and creatively gifted in equal measure, a heady mix of skills that were much valued in the Thames Valley where he’d lived and worked for twenty-five years. He’d retired at forty-three and toyed with the idea of a retirement in the country, but the Thames Valley had been country enough. He wanted a taste of city life.

  Five and a half years into metropolis living he was still enjoying it, and still looking at temperamental boilers, flickering televisions and unreliable broadband services. He gave his skills freely to the locals on the proviso that whoever benefited from them would never, ever ask him for cash, or an advance or a loan, or help with their bills. He figured that relenting to one would open the floodgates for others, and his savings wouldn’t, couldn’t stretch to that sort of charity.

  It was a system that had, by and large, been immaculately observed. Those who broke it found they neither got the cash they desired, nor the attention their household appliances required.

  Remnant edged his crumpled bit of paper in Edgar’s direction.

  “Any good at wedding speeches?”

  Edgar edged the crumpled bit of paper back and explained as politely as he could that boilers were one thing, performances, speeches and getting all emotional were another. Machines were his thing, and right now there was one in the corner of the bar that was goading him, questioning his intellect, challenging him to a battle of wits. Edgar could resist no more and strode towards his foe, bitter in one hand, a tower of ammunition in the other.

  Remnant knew his presence would not be required, save to answer the occasional shouted American Football question, a sport Edgar had little time for. Gordon watched as Remnant’s attention returned to the sheet of paper. ‘This is the proudest day of my life,’ he read, ‘seeing my little daughter Chloe all grown up and walking down the aisle.’