The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 10

STARDUST by Phil Lovesey

SOMEONE – IT DOESN’T matter who – once told me we’re all stardust. Just strange organic composites of the carbon atom; walking, talking, loving, killing. Humanity reduced to powder. Perhaps it was the dull old spud who attempted to teach me science; maybe the warbled lyrics from a prog-rocker; or a TV presenter doing his best to enliven some sort of astrophysics documentary – like I say, it doesn’t matter who – but the words, the concept of it, have remained with me since. Brought me comfort over the years at times, helped me sometimes to zoom out from the chaos, the injustices of life, see myself as merely a cosmic speck at the mercy of the universe and its frequent bitter ironies.

Pretty existential for a petty thief, I guess.

Then again, I have had the occasional six or nine months locked away with my thoughts and battered prison library paperbacks to think some of this stuff through. A not-very-good petty thief, in truth.

Anyway, back to the stardust and ironies…

I’d just finished a short stretch at one of Her Majesty’s less-than-salubrious hotels for the wretched, and had found myself fetched up in front of my new front door as sorted by the dear folk from the Probation Service. A good system this, for the serial offender like myself. Get given nine months, keep the old nose clean for five of them; smile, make the right noises, tell the panel how much you’ve changed, how nights wracked with remorse have brought about a life-changing conversion to go straight… and hey presto, they’re sorting you new digs, clothes and some cash in your pocket to tide you over.

Best bits of thieving I’ve ever done… and all from the taxpayer. Shame on me, you might say. But seriously, in my shoes, you’d do the same. Your dust ain’t no different from my dust.

It’s a horrible door, in a horrible block of flats, in a horrible part of town. The probation guy tries to sell it to me as an “apartment”, as if by his Americanizing the shabby place I’ll not notice the damp, the cracked windowpanes, worn furniture, and bare bulbs. But I smile and thank him anyway. After all, I tell him, home’s what you make it. Or what you take from others. He doesn’t react to the quip. He’s young, this one – would probably refer to himself as a “rookie” – and simply wants to go. I let him, knowing there’s no banter to be had. He’s too desperate to “check in for a burger and fries” somewhere, the perfect twenty-something product of a life made bland by corporate domination.

Like I said, I’ve had a lot of time to read this sort of stuff.

Now, there’s a drill for this sort of place. It goes like this – let them come to you. They always will. For where there’s one shabby Probation Service flat in a block, there’ll be others. And the occupants will soon know when the new bloke hitches up. And then comes sniffing, scratching, seeing what’s to be had. It’s just how it is – I’ve done it myself.

Sure enough, within ten minutes of the College Boy leaving, a bearded, lanky heap of methadone-using stardust is on my doorstep, trying to ingratiate himself, his pink eyes swimming in a pallid head that nods and twitches as he asks me for “a few quid – just for a few days, like”. I invite him in, give him the money in exchange for some essential “local” information.

He’s called Rambling Ian – apparently – and has served the usual amount of time in the past. We talk about various jails, wings, screws – not reminiscing but testing each other for truths, lies, connections, mutual friends and enemies we’ve made along our less-than-merry way. I think he’s probably all right, and he goes on to describe himself as a “standard human road accident on the heroin highway”.

I ask him about others in the block. He tells me we’re the only two “insiders”, the other flats housing the predictable assortment of single mothers, forgotten pensioners, unemployed divorcees, and immigrant workers. No rich pickings to be had here, then. But I’d guessed that already. Rambling Ian follows up with a few possible opportunities for a spot of nocturnal thievery just a few streets away.

“Big places,” he says. “Fancy.”

“And full of alarms,” I reply, knowing where this is heading.

“Maybe, but with the two of us… you know…”

I smile. I’m not about to shatter his illusion that he’s on the verge of hooking up with a latter-day Raffles, because however ridiculous the notion may be, I need him onside for a while; he may have his uses. So I tell him I’ll think it over, and he makes for the door.

“’Course,” he adds on his way out, “there’s always Buzz on the top floor. He’s an odd old geezer.”

“Buzz?”

“As in Lightyear, from the kid’s film. You know, all those toys comin’ to life an’ that?”

I shake my head. Children’s films were never my thing, unless it was to try and pick a few adult pockets or rob a hassled mum’s handbag in the gloom of the cinema. My spoils from the Hollywood film industry.

“American, he is,” he goes on. “Crazy old fella. Lives on his own at the very top with just a telescope. Never lets anyone through the door. Rumour round here is that he used to be some sort of spaceman or something.”

“Spaceman? As in an old druggie?”

My new “partner” looks a little hurt by this. “No. The real deal. That he went up on one of those Apollo missions back in the seventies. Walked on the moon, drove one of them buggy things, the lot.”

“And, naturally, he ends up living on top of a crummy block of flats in South London.”

“I’m telling you what folk say about him,” he replies. “Never met the fella myself.”

“Yeah,” I say, trying to sound sympathetic. “Well, I reckon there’re a few people pulling your leg, Ian.”

“Ask around if you don’t believe me,” he insists. “They’ll maybe even tell you about the moon rock he keeps up there. Size of your fist, it is, and he brought it back from the moon itself. Smuggles it out of NASA, brought it over here.”

“Be worth an awful lot of loot for a lump of stone?”

“A moon rock,” he replied, wide-eyed, clearly not getting it. “A sacred piece of the heavens.”

“And right now,” I said, closing the door, “I need to get a sacred piece of sleep.”

Rambling Ian was right about one thing: we were the only two “probys” in the block. Indeed, from mostly law-abiding observations over the next few days, I began to realize that of the twenty-six flats, maybe a third of them were empty, boarded and shuttered. One day an Asian family moved out, the next day the boards and shutters appeared. The whole block felt like it was dying – a good thing, probably. I guessed that I was the last “resident” who had been allowed in, and now the powers that be were simply waiting until people moved out, or on to pastures new, in order that it could be pulled down without the cost of rehousing remaining residents. Robbery in its own way, but conveniently legal.

As for me, familiar urges were beginning to return, fuelled by dwindling money, lack of real employment opportunity for someone like me, and just… let’s call it old habits dying way too hard. It’s not excusable what I do, it’s not exciting – or glamorous – it’s just what I do. And like I say, I’m not even that good at it. But just as some are born to be judges, I reckon some are born to be judged. Without us, there’s no them. Universal balance, I guess.

Of course, the eternal problem for the burglar is cash conversion. Finding a trusted fence to whom to pass over your liberated goods in exchange for some of the lovely folding stuff. A dying breed, the local fences, literally. None of the youngsters see the opportunities presented by the profession, preferring the easier, more obvious routes. Granted, there’ll still be a bloke in the local pub who’ll mention that he’ll give you a couple of hundred quid for a wall-mounted plasma television, but honestly, you try getting those things off the damn wall in the first place. I guess you could say I’m part of a dying breed, too. Forty-seven and too old to rob and roll…

So, I’m looking for easier places, easier things to swipe. Never been good with any kind of vehicle, so they’re out. Leaves me with houses – big ones, mostly, for obvious reasons. Not too big, though, as I’ve never had the know-how to bypass alarm systems. However, as most medium-sized places nearly always have unlinked alarms, they don’t present the same problem an engine-disabled Mercedes does. In fact, as any competent housebreaker will tell you (and I do count myself as competent at breaking in, it’s the getting out and away with it that tends to be a little more problematic), the appearance of an alarm box on the side of your home is the finest advertisement for opportunists like me. Forget a blaring siren, just have a recorded message that shouts: Hey! Up here on the wall! Yeah, look at me! Lots of lovely stuff inside, and no one’s going to give a damn if I start screaming! Get in, help yourselves! The same with half-drawn curtains, lights blazing away inside. The genuinely rich got that way by saving money, not wasting it on electricity. Their curtains will be drawn, just one light in the room they’re in. Couple of pointers from the other side for you, that’s all. Happy to oblige.

Anyway, one night I’m returning after a little late-night work a few streets away from the block, not much of a haul, jewellery mostly, but enough to last another week if I can fence the stuff, when I get back to the flat and discover a note has been slid under the door:

You went in the front downstairs window. Used a glass cutter. Turned the lights off once you were inside. You went to the front upstairs bedroom. Again, turned the light off. Then left three minutes later. I may have some work for you. Number 26.

I’d been spotted.

It was an impressive telescope. Very impressive. Not that I’m the least au fait with optical devices, but this was impressive because it didn’t even look like a telescope. Not the normal kind, anyway, the type you might see jammed over a pirate’s eye in a swashbuckling yarn. No, this was something you’d expect from a fifties sci-fi B-movie, a great white barrel of a thing, with pipes, meters, and humming electronic devices secured to it, mounted on a sturdy tripod. And, at this precise moment – pointing from its vantage point right at the house I’d just broken into.

I had my eye pressed to an insignificant-looking tube at its side, but the image was crystal clear. Made more impressive by the green night-vision.

By my side, the elderly American fiddled with a few switches. The image zoomed out a little, then flipped to a series of bodies and cars passing by in variegated red-and-orange tones.

“Thermal imaging,” he said. “I followed your every move, then switched to night vision when you were inside. It’s a good view from here, the house is nicely exposed.”

I stepped back. “I guess I was, too. Exposed, I mean.”

He nodded as I tried to decide his age – late sixties, early seventies? Small, compact, still reasonably fit. “You said you might have some work for me?” No point in beating about the bush.

Another nod as he moved a pile of papers so he could sit in a tattered old armchair, and they joined one of the many other piles on the floor. I guess that was what made the ’scope all the more impressive, a gleaming technical artefact in the obvious shambles of such a chaotic flat. Half-finished meals and abandoned coffee cups lay amongst the detritus. He offered me another chair, which even I refrained from sitting on. And as a bloke who’s shared a cell with three other lags for twenty-three hours a day, that was really saying something.

“People round here,” he began, “call me The Astronaut.”

I shrugged, unimpressed. “I heard it was Buzz.”

He smiled. “After Aldrin?”

“Lightyear,” I corrected him. “Some character from a kids’ film.”

The smile wavered as he caught my eye-line wandering back to the ’scope. “If you’re thinking of stealing it, I guess you should know it weighs close on a quarter of a ton. They winched it up the side of the building to get it in. And, in case you’re wondering, it’s worth well over a hundred thousand of your Brit pounds.”

My Brit pounds. The old guy was obviously still smarting from the Buzz Lightyear thing. Granted, he sounded a bit American, but only in that sort of clichéd way anyone would if they tried to put on an accent. I probably do a more convincing effort after watching a couple of old Star Trek reruns.

I looked round briefly, tried to get some sort of picture of the bloke. Too much contradictory information. An old guy living in a dump like some sort of tramp (no doubt he’d have said “hobo” to try and add extra authenticity to the Yank thing), yet clearly able to afford the sort of sky-gazing kit Greenwich Observatory would have been proud of.

Other signs. No trace of a woman’s touch, so presumably he lived alone. No evidence of any help from the Social Services – God, it’d have taken a crack team of their best cleaners even to begin to sort the place out. So – weird old recluse with access to expensive technology living in some sort of delusional fantasy world in which he once strolled about on the moon? Yeah, I know – it’s where the word “lunatic” derives from.

And yet, something else about Buzz that Rambling Ian had told me stuck in my mind – Lives at the very top with a telescope. Never lets anyone through the door. But here I was, forty minutes after illegally entering one locked premises, and I’d seemingly gained effortless entry into another.

“Another great feature of my ’scope,” he began, “is that it…”

“Takes photographs?” I finished for him, already ahead. Not much of a leap to make, he’d been so keen to show me the means of my “capture”, in all its technological excesses, it seemed logical Mr Spaceman would also have photographic evidence of my evening’s work with which to blackmail me.

He nodded, a little too smugly for my liking. “I love this block,” he went on. “Love living here – on top. I guess you could say that when you’ve been to the places I’ve been to, seen the things I have, it becomes very difficult for your feet ever to really touch the ground.”

I ignored this, didn’t want to be drawn into the fantasy. Point was, however odd, eccentric, or plain insane the man was, he had pictures that could stick me straight back inside. “You mentioned you may have some work for me?”

He smiled, and I knew that he knew he had me. Whatever was going to be played out, it would be at his pace, not mine. “I’ve lived here since ’eighty-three. Right here, on the top. ’Course, it was in better repair way back then. And I’ve loved it ever since. It gives me… anonymity. Leaves me free just to watch.”

“The moon, presumably,” I replied, trying to hurry him along.

“No,” he replied. “Seen enough of the moon in my time. Far too much.”

“Rumour round here is you walked on it.”

He smiled. “Lots of rumours round here. I use the ’scope to see the truth.” He fixed me with his eyes. “I see a lot of things with the ’scope. Like you, for instance. The day you arrived with the young mutt from the prison services. Yeah, I thought to myself, here comes another one. Then, of course, there’ve been all your – how should I put this – night-time jaunts? Those illegal little excursions into the surrounding backstreets. What else could you be but just another common thief?” He paused, steepled his fingers.

I tried to bow in a slightly patronizing manner, but I think it just came across as a bow. No point in denying it, the man did have an unsettling presence. Would have made a good judge. “You have me at a disadvantage.”

“I know,” he replied.

“You want me to steal something for you.”

He smiled, shook his head slowly. “Not for me. From me.”

He waited for my reaction. After the aborted bow, I gave it a miss.

“There were,” he continued, “several visits by the Apollo space programme to the moon. As is the way, the first is the most widely seared into public consciousness. By the time my mission went up, people were largely bored, and had begun counting the massive cost of the programme. They’d grown tired of watching men bounce on a dark, dusty surface a quarter of a million miles away. The so-called ‘scientific value’ of such missions was openly criticized. In consequence, I was one of the last human beings ever to walk on the surface of the moon.”

“I heard it was just a movie set somewhere out in the desert,” I tried.

“If only it was.” He looked away, lost for a moment. “My life soon disintegrated. My marriage broke down, and I took to the bottle.” He shrugged. “It’s a recognized phenomenon. When you’ve experienced the heavenly beauty of that cold black solace; when you’ve looked back and seen how perfect the Earth really is, how it silently spins – just so magisterially – all else, all human experience, pales. You become… nothing.”

I watched him, sitting there amidst all the rubbish, a lonely old man with nothing but dreams. Delusional – well, he had to be, didn’t he? And yet, something about the way he spoke about it all…

“You still meet up with all your moon buddies?” I knew it was wrong to encourage the fantasy, yet a small part of me wanted to know more… almost, perhaps, wanted to believe. The stardust thing, I guess.

He gave a short, contemptuous laugh. “Losers all,” he said. “Every darn one of them. Opening crummy supermarkets to turn a buck. Jeez, the last thing I did Stateside was a series of commercials.” He pulled a horribly insincere smile. “Say please for Moon Cheese.”

“Can’t say I ever heard of it,” I said.

“So I shipped up and away. Came here. To my tower in the sky. Spend what I can on the ’scope and live very happily.”

“Do you have any friends?” I asked, feeling a little sorry for him. “Relatives? Visitors?”

He turned to me. “What for? I keep my own company.” He pointed to the telescope. “I see all the people, all the things they do. I have no desire for their intrusion. It’s what makes you and me so similar. We both crave the solitude and the darkness. For you, it’s work. For me – personal.”

“What’s your name?”

He waved a hand. “Not necessary. Neither’s yours. But, you know, on reflection, I do quite like the Buzz thing.”

“Why do you want me to steal something from you?”

“Shouldn’t the question be what do you want me to steal?”

I looked round briefly. “Well, Buzz, I’m guessing it won’t be the ’scope. And frankly, I doubt there’s anything else in here that would interest the scabbiest gull on the dump.”

“Incorrect,” he replied, standing and making his way slowly through the paper piles to a small, smothered chest of drawers, and bringing out a small ring box. “I brought something back. When I was there.”

I found myself swallowing as he beckoned me over to a small table. No, I told myself, it couldn’t be, could it? The rumoured moon rock? Here, in a shabby block of South London flats? And yet, the closer I got to the box, the more I wanted to open it.

“Is it…?” I asked.

He nodded, slowly opening the lid to reveal a small grey stone no bigger than the tip of my finger. “Interplanetary contraband. Smuggled just the same way those poor drugs mules do. Mind you, maybe more painfully. You try swallowing a wrapped piece of the moon in a zero-gravity space capsule.”

I smiled at the image. “And they never found out?”

“The folks at mission control?” He shook his head. “Didn’t have a clue. See, after splashdown, each Apollo mission had to spend time in a decompression chamber.”

I nodded, briefly remembering newspaper images of astronauts smiling through thick glass windows.

“I’d imagine conditions inside were pretty similar to your penal experiences. Three men locked up with just some very crude sanitation facilities. And of course, when you’re back here, gravity suddenly exerts itself very forcefully. Those little bits of rock we’d each swallowed became extremely heavy as they worked their way through.”

I winced slightly.

“All we had to do was keep swallowing the rocks when they… reappeared. That, and pray we could withhold them during the debrief and subsequent release to the waiting world’s press. I finally got this fella to myself two days after I’d made it home.” He took the rock out. “Not many of us can say we’ve had a piece of the universe pass right through us three times. Guess he’s made even more of a journey than me. You want to hold it?”

As an offer, he hadn’t sold it that well. “I’ll pass. No pun intended.”

He snapped the lid shut, slowly scratched the side of his head. “You’re thinking I’m insane, of course. That this is nothing more than some little pebble I picked up from the park.”

“No, I’m thinking you’ve called me up here to do a job. I simply want to know what it is.”

He slipped the ring box into a pocket, navigated his way back to the window, and begun turning wheels on the telescope. I watched as the large white barrel moved slowly to the left, still pointing down towards the darkened town many floors below. Satisfied he’d found the right spot, he beckoned me over. I pressed my eye to the soft rubber eyepiece; saw nothing until he flicked the night-vision switch. A green window glowed. A downstairs room, by the look of it, half-drawn curtains failing to obscure opulent trappings inside. I recognized it immediately, a large house less than fifty yards from the place I’d just relieved of its jewellery. Indeed, I’d been past it several times, had already considered its potential for easy pickings.

“You chose to ignore this place,” I heard him say. “Why?”

I kept my eye tight to the rubber, making out more of the room. “The wall-mounted safe. It’s just about visible from the street, if you know what you’re looking for.”

“A standard three-tumbler dial model,” he said. “Surely not a problem for someone like you? And an indication of lucrative spoils inside?”

“Not this one,” I said, taking a longer look at the small metal box mounted between two gilt-framed pictures. “Open the door on that sucker and all you’ll find is a web camera looking right at you, linked direct to the security company. It’s bait. Before you know it, there’re a dozen police cars waiting outside.” I stepped back from the ’scope. “The whole place stinks of wire-traps and alarms. Whatever they’ve got in there, they want to keep hold of it.”

He nodded.

“But you’re not going to tell me, are you?”

He shook his head.

“You just want me to do whatever it is you want?”

Another nod. It was like talking to a mute.

“You’re going to have to try and help me with some words,” I tried. “Even better an explanation.”

“His name is Saunders.”

“The owner?” I asked.

“And not just of that house, either,” he replied. “He owns this whole place.”

“The block?”

“And all its apartments, land and accesses.”

“These flats, they’re all rented?”

He nodded. “Cheques payable to Mr Mark Saunders.” He slumped back down in the ruined armchair. “His father’s company built the place. Joe Saunders – nice fella. Died last year, left the lot to his son, Mark. His house, its contents, and this block.”

I was beginning to get the picture. “And since then, his son’s let the place go to rack and ruin?”

“’S’about it.”

“Let me guess,” I said, thinking of the boarded-up doors and windows. “Now he’s about to sell? Have the place condemned as a liability, eyesore, whatever; then pocket the loot before the demolition teams arrive?”

Buzz nodded. “It’s part of a so-called urban-renewal scheme. They’ll pay him millions to reduce this place to rubble.”

“And you’ll lose your home in the sky?”

He shuffled through some papers at his feet, threw a letter across at me. “Their latest offer.”

Headed “Dear Occupier”, it was an offer to rehouse the old guy in some new housing development. The words “ground-floor retirement apartment” had been angrily underlined – presumably by Buzz himself.

“I ain’t moving,” he said. “Just ain’t.”

“But if this place isn’t safe…?” My eyes drifted to a paragraph detailing the owner’s concerns about the central lifts, how it might be necessary to close them to residents. “It’s going to make getting out of here pretty tough. You could be stranded.”

He jabbed a finger. “What are you saying? That I’m too old to manage a few flights of lousy stairs if I need to? Jeez, I walked on the moon!”

It was getting out of control. “Show me the pictures,” I said.

“Pictures?”

“The ones you took of me earlier tonight,” I replied, pointing at the telescope, the only part of the situation that didn’t fit my theory that the man was simply a lonely delusionist.

“Kick those papers out of the way,” he instructed from his chair. “Underneath, there’s a printer. Push the red button on the left.”

I kneeled, did as he said, watching the linked printer come to life, then begin spitting out a series of shots of me about my earlier business. Green, pin-sharp, night-visioned evidence that I was there; outside and inside. Conclusive.

He chuckled softly. “I guess your big mistake was to take the hat and scarf off when you got inside. But I think I managed to get your good side.”

“So the job is?” I asked, wondering if there was any way to rid the ’scope of the pictures. There had to be some sort of memory attached to it, an internal digital camera, perhaps. But where…?

“Your job,” he said, “is to steal my moon rock, then break into Saunders’s house and place it on the cocktail cabinet at the back of the living room, where I can be sure to see it.”

I frowned. “The reason?”

“Because,” he explained, as if talking to a small child, “when I get back from my weekly Astrological Society meeting tomorrow night and discover my apartment has been burgled, I shall be able to point the blame at Saunders.”

“Just because there’s a pebble on his cocktail cabinet?”

“No!” he snapped back. “Because it’s the thing he covets the most. The moon rock!”

“Right,” I announced, mind made up. “I’m going now. I’m sorry you’re going to have to move, but – hey, there it is. But let me tell you this. If you think breaking into people’s houses and leaving stones in their living rooms makes a jot of difference, then you’re very wrong.”

His face began to show panic. “I’ll send the pictures to the police! You’ll be back in the slammer with all the other scum!”

“Don’t you get it?” I tried. “It’s over. This building is falling down. It’s had its time. They’re trying to get you somewhere better, more accessible. You can’t fight for this sort of stuff with bits of goddamned moon, Buzz. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.”

He blinked slowly. “I’ll send the photos to the police.”

“No, you won’t,” I said.

“Try me.”

“I don’t have to.” I shook my head, walked towards the door.

“What makes you so sure, thief?”

I turned, looked at the confused, angry old man sitting in the detritus of his lonely delusions. “Because, Buzz,” I slowly explained, “you’d have to give the police a signed statement. As, indeed, would I, wherein I’d detail exactly what has happened here tonight. There’d most like be some sort of court case. You’d be called as a witness; forced to swear on a Bible as to your name. Then it’d all come out, wouldn’t it, Buzz? That you weren’t who you claimed to be? That you were really an odd little bloke who needed a ground-floor flat and help from the Social Services.”

He stared back, blank-faced.

“Put it this way, Buzz. You shop me, and we’re both going down…”

I got to do a fair bit of reading in the next eight months, spent so much time reading about space and space travel that the other lags on the wing got to calling me Buzz, a name I was happy with, though I never let on precisely why.

The court case lasted for three days, and to be fair, in a slow news week, attracted a few columns in the tabloids. I guess it was simply the absurdity of it all. I’m not going to tell you his real name, but rest assured he wasn’t an astronaut, which came as a bit of a disappointment, in a weird sort of way. His eyes never met mine as he gave evidence, and at no time during the trial did he ever mention any of the crazy moon stuff. He came out as a decent old star-gazing vigilante, photographing misdeeds from up on high – and I came out with eight months.

Rambling Ian came to visit, told me the case had attracted enough attention to warrant Social Services moving in on the old guy and “re-accommodating” him. Apparently a crowd had gathered to see the huge telescope being winched back down the side of the building, clapping and cheering. Buzz, he told me, had simply watched, tears in his eyes.

A few months later, I made the usual right noises to the panel, and left Her Maj’s Pleasure a cosmologically enlightened man. Sure, I was going to be a thief again, always would, we all have to live, don’t we? We’re all stardust, after all.

True to form, the Probation set me up in a cosy little dump just south of the river. Three days later, returning from a midnight sortie, I found a note slipped under the doorway:

You walked south for four minutes. Turned right, stayed outside number 27 for twelve minutes until the owners returned. You hid in a bush as they went inside. I’m just wondering if you needed a former employee of NASA’s mission control to help guide your mission status in a safer and more profitable way? Between us, we could reach for the moon.

Opening the front door, I scanned the horizon, looking past disused warehouses and over the river towards a distant tower block, its top-floor lights blazing.

I nodded, bowed – and I swear something winked back.