Chapter 1 - As One Door Closes
Malaga, Costa del Sol, Spain.
A gentle breeze stirred the ashes of a dying Camel in the ashtray, playfully lifting and depositing them across a well-read copy of the previous weeks Sun newspaper and into the tepid coffee beside it.
Alex Longdon stretched muscles stiff from inactivity and looked around him. 3pm, the quietest time in the tourist bar he now called home.
Singer, compare, part time barman, whichever hat they want me to wear,Life is much simpler now
It's a breathing space, a little time to work out the future,
Not so many months before he had been riding the wave of success, on the very crest.
Some called him brilliant, others called him lucky, but without exceptioneveryone called him arrogant.
He could accept that, he had been good at what he did... very good. There had been no clouds on his horizon, nothing but blue skies until that fateful day in January. The day that his world crumbled. The day he lost millions of trusting investor’s dollars.
He tried to convince himself that everyone understood the risks inherent, he could repeat the lines in his sleep. ‘Your investment is not guaranteed, you stand the chance of losing part or all of your hard earned cash’, but this scenario didn’t apply to him, he was blessed, he had the Midas Touch, and he never failed.
January 25th proved he was not infallible, that was the day it all went wrong, the day the offshore fund he had channelled so many millions into crashed, crashed beyond any hope of recovery.
It also became the day that he realised he was finished as a financial advisor.
January 25th became his Albatross, it hung around his neck and followed him wherever he went, his clients disappeared, but not as fast as his friends, theAuthorities where the only people who wanted to know him. His shame was complete as he received a suspended sentence and a fine that emptied his many bank accounts.
He walked from the courts owning little more than the clothes he was wearing.
Alex rinsed his coffee cup in the sink behind the bar and started to put together another Cortado. The coffee seemed to match his feelings, bitter and very dark. Shaking off the black mood that was always lurking ready to engulf him and drag him to wallow in a mire of self-pity he greeted an elderly couple who came in every afternoon for coffee and vodka.
He welcomed a chat, a few minutes of human contact.
“Hi John, the usual?” he called across the bar receiving a weary nod. The long suffering husband was a former banker, aware but not judgemental of Alex’s spectacular fall from grace, the wife, oblivious to everything after her daily hair of the dog at lunch.
“How’s that pretty little wife of yours?” questioned Dorothy as she attacked her first vodka and tonic of the day.
Peninah, the only ray of sunshine in his life, back in the land of her birth, away from the disgrace, free of the stigma.
“She’s flying in from Nairobi next week,” he replied with a smile, “We must go out for a meal and catch up”.
Aware of the impending
