The menu lists an £11.50 avo ’n’ cream cheese bagel. He chose the place – an earnestly ironic American-style diner in Covent Garden. The first time I meet Spencer, he sits across from me, his elbows propped against the dull aluminium top of our outdoor dining table. ‘I want my life back!’ he complains, bitterly. Indeed as the legal owner of the farm, he thinks of little else. Richard Spencer has not forgotten the events of that night. ‘Of course I want it back – it’s my gold.’ The missing gold bar is a connecting node – between an amoral banker, an iconoclastic columnist and a radical anarchist movement. Yet unravelling the events leading to this strange and unsettling night is well worth the trouble a modern parable lies beneath, exposing the fraying fabric of British society, worn thin by late capitalism’s relentless abrasion. The story was soon forgotten, however, and national focus remained on the Covid-19 pandemic and the government’s strategy heading into the challenging winter months. In the weeks following Jake’s disappearance, the Queensbury and Bradford local papers reported on the events of that night: an illegal rave, the resulting three hospitalisations, significant property damage and an ongoing police investigation. The motionless body lying at his feet.Īt some point that night, or perhaps as daylight crept in at the edge of the horizon, Jake managed to stop looking and start thinking. He couldn’t stop himself from staring at the proof. But it had happened, hadn’t it? Yes, it had happened. Until his target had finally stopped moving. An obscene concept Jake couldn’t quite believe it was possible to hold so much ‘value’ within his two hands. The bar in Jake’s possession was a ‘London Good Delivery’ – literally the gold standard of gold bullion – worth over half a million dollars. He wasn’t even looking at the gold, not really. Jake didn’t look back towards the noise pumping from the farmhouse where he’d spent most of his fraught 2020. Behind him, from the main building of a Queensbury farm, music and coloured lights throbbed against the night sky – a so-called illegal rave, roughly one hundred youngsters partying in defiance of the UK government’s lockdown restrictions. Holding one such bar on a chilly September evening last year, thirty-year-old Jake marvelled at its density how the unyielding sides and edges felt awkward, yet somehow natural, in his hands.
Four hundred troy ounces, about 12.5 kg, of ultra-high-purity gold formed into an ingot – a sort of slender brick crossed with a pyramid.
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