Wensley Clarkson - Sexy Beasts: The True Story of the Diamond Geezers and the Record-Breaking $100 Million Hatton Garden Heist

A yellowy, elderly bald man wearing spectacleswith an over-dyed auburn Paul McCartney-rinse and covered in liver spotspumped away desperately on a cycling machine in his baggy shorts and sleeveless string vest like a sagging tortoise without its shell, seemingly oblivious to all around him.

In another corner of the same gym, a slightly younger, fitter looking man with streaked blonde hair, orange spray-on tan and Rod Stewart mullet danced nonchalantly up and down. He threw a few casual air punches in the direction of a flaccid brown leather punch bag, hanging by a thick link chain from the ceiling. Then he fired up with a surprisingly vicious flurry of left-hand jabs, followed by a straight right, which made the bag swing forward and almost hit him.

That brought a knowing smile to the face of a blubbery giant of an old man with a crew cut and a crumpled triple chin in an orange T-shirt lying flat on his back struggling to perform a bench press. He looked exhausted; as if he might be having second thoughts and was about to collapse on the settee in the far corner of the gym, which had been put there for precisely that purpose.

The man in the orange T-shirt puffed up his cheeks and blew out a big, noisy mouthful of rancid breath, slammed his weights noisily down on the ground, struggled to his feet and stomped out of the gym without saying a word to the others, who looked across at him while rolling their eyes at each other and shaking their heads.

I watched them all from the lobby while waiting to meet that same old boy in the orange T-shirt. Hed contacted me through an armed robber from South East London, whod helped me with another book I wrote a few years back.

My manwell call him Billy in order to protect his identitywas well above average height and now changed out of his gym gear, he wore a black tracksuit with a white stripe down either side of the trouser legs, rounded off with black sneakers. Billy later told me some of his fellow residents complained that this outfit made him look like a cat burglar, which most of them would know all about.

Billy made me promise on my familys life that I would never reveal his true identity because he didnt want anyone to think he was a snitch. For that reason I cant even give away the location of the old folks home where he now lives, except to say it gets less all-year-round sunshine than almost anywhere else in Europe. I heard it was discretely financed by a collective of London gangsters. They wanted a final destination for themselves and exactly the sort of elderly villains who pulled off the Hatton Garden job in such spectaclar fashion in April 2015.