Damn Car

What the hell was Debbie up to?

How involved was she?

Why the hell should I take the rap for what her and those hoodlums had done? For Christ's sake, she had been fucking one of them behind my back.

I told him everything, finishing with the information about Jimbo's friend in Tottenham, at which point Jenkins smiled broadly.

"Got the bastard!" He exclaimed, and with a word of thanks shot out to the waiting police car and made off with tyres squealing.

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I nearly missed the breaking news on the television. You know those banner things that go along the bottom of the screen and spoil your concentration. I just caught the end of it and had to wait a good ten minutes till it came through again.

'MAJOR DRUGS BUST SHOOT OUT IN NORTH LONDON THREE KILLED'

My heart sank.

Debbie, my Debbie ---- Had she been shot? Was she dead? I no longer knew whether I loved her or hated her, but I didn't want to see her dead.

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I searched half the night, desperate for more information, trawling through the news programs, the internet and God knows how many wasted phone calls, but all to little avail. All I could discover was that the police had raided a house in Tottenham in north London and there'd been a shoot out, and three men had been shot dead and two policemen wounded.

Three men!

Yes men!

By no imaginable mistake could my Debbie be mistaken for a man could she?

Could she?

They got things wrong all the time, the press. But ..... But they couldn't get that wrong, could they?

Shit! Did I really care anyway?

------------

Well of course being the British press, they did get it wrong, though not as far as Debbie was concerned. In fact only two guys were killed, though another was wounded, but my Debbie was arrested and charged. It appeared that they'd been involved in running drugs from Northern Africa, through Spain into France and then on into the UK.

I didn't shed a tear when I discovered that Ted, bless him, was no longer with us and gone to meet his maker up above there somewhere. Some other guy, a Frenchman that I'd never heard of copped his lot as well, and Mike --- You remember Mike? ----- Well he'd been badly wounded and would eventually end up losing his leg.

Jimbo had been arrested at the same time as Debbie, and those two and four or five others were to be put up on trial.

And I'd shopped them.

Did that worry me?

Well not now that half were dead or disabled and the others in jail it didn't.

"I'm so sorry George," Debbie sobbed when I went in to visit her the first time. "I've done such awful things."

We chatted some more about how we were going to afford a decent lawyer to defend her, though from what I heard it seemed to be a cut and dry case. Trouble was that I hated the sight of her, but couldn't stop loving her ----- Not easy.

"Don't sell the Porsche George," she insisted, but when I asked why she simply looked around her, no doubt wondering who might be listening.

It was on my second visit that we were allowed to talk more privately.

"I suppose you've been wondering why Ted bought our Porsche honey," she said, and of course I had. "The gang bought powerful cars that wouldn't attract too much attention to smuggle the drugs in. They cut holes in the wings or whatever, hid the drugs away and then welded the wing back up so nobody would notice."

"You mean they did that with our Porsche?" I asked in astonishment. "There's a secret compartment?"

"I think so."

"But they had their dog all over it Debbie, I informed her. "They didn't detect anything."

"Our Porsche wasn't used for drugs George," Debbie told me in a whisper. "Buy yourself an angle grinder thing and see what you can find."

"Do you know what's in there?" I queried.

"Not sure," she whispered to me. "But it must be worth investigating."

------------------

I went straight home and cleared half the mess out of the garage, enough to make room for that damn Porsche. Having put it in there, I left the bloody thing there, half afraid of what I might find if I started to investigate.

Several months later the trial come to court, and Debbie was sentenced to twelve years in detention, but that meant that with good behaviour she could be out in eight or nine.

Jimbo wasn't so lucky and got a twenty stretch, coupled with a list of other convictions. He wouldn't be out for a long, long time.

Eventually curiosity got the better of me, and I went out to the hardware shop and bought myself an angle grinder, and set to work. Four hours and several cuts and bruises later, the wings of the car were a mess.

But I found it!

I found the hiding place.

My hand shook as I reached inside and extracted the surprisingly big leather bound parcel that was hidden there, and I dropped it on the floor, terrified that it might explode on me or something.

Plucking up the courage to investigate further, I took a knife to the package and slit it open, not knowing what to expect to find inside, and not knowing what the hell I'd do with them if it turned out to be drugs.

What I didn't expect to find was Euros.

Not pounds or dollars but Euros. Bloody thousands of them, all bundled up in tight bundles. Not unnaturally I started to count them, but after ten minutes I lost track of where I was. It was only then that I realised that each bundle had twenty notes in it, so all I had to do was check the denomination, and they were all fifties or hundreds, so that was easy.

Half an hour later and I had the total. Four hundred thousand Euros!

Ok, I may have made a mistake or two, but who was worrying about that?

Four hundred thousand bloody Euros.

At the time that was the equivalent of well over three hundred thousand pounds. It must have been the money they were going to use to pay for the drugs.

Bloody hell! Decision time!

-------------------

It didn't take me long to decide not to declare the money. It obviously was obtained illegally, but not by me, and the only person still alive or with enough sense to know about it would be Debbie, and even she didn't seem to be too sure. I worked out later putting pieces of information together that Ted's gang drove down to France with money hidden in one car, and swapped it for another identical car that had the drugs hidden in it. Just a matter of changing the plates over and nobody would be any the wiser. That's obviously why they decided to re-use our Porsche, to match the identical one that the French crooks had already.

Maybe my tipping the coppers off that they were on their way to the South of France scuppered the exchange. I didn't really know, but I hoped I'd been responsible in some way.

So, was I going to tell her?

Was I going to tell anyone?

How on earth was I to convert Euros into pounds?

Well I did tell her on my next visit, but claimed that there was only twenty thousand euros hidden away, and that I'd keep it to help her when she eventually got out. She seemed surprised that the sum was so low, but if Debbie suspected me of lying, then she never mentioned it. She had enough problems of her own by then.

Next to get rid of the car.

How do you get rid of a car with lumps cut out of the wing? Not easy!

Eventually I patched it up as well as I could and drove it over to the Porsche guy we'd talked to before, giving him some story that it had been vandalised. Not sure if he believed me, but the first thing he did was to open the engine compartment. That's in the back by the way, for those who don't know about Porsches.

"It's got a replacement gearbox," I told him.

"It's got a new engine and gearbox," he informed me to my surprise.

Anyway, we struck a deal and I walked out with a cheque for nine thousand quid, which was a lot more than I'd been expecting considering the mess I'd made of the thing.

As you can imagine, I was pleased to see the back of the damn car.

I quite deliberately didn't change my lifestyle so as not to attract attention, though I did buy myself a few new things at Marks and Spencers, where they accept Euros. I put our house on the market at a very reasonable price. It was attractive to first time buyers and the market had risen since Debbie and I had bought it, so four months later I left the solicitors office with another cheque for forty-two grand.

Nor bad eh?

Not only did I have money, but I then had an excuse to spend some of it. The cheated husband making the most of what he had left from his messed up marriage.

A trip down to the Casino in France more or less solved all my problems of making the euros legal, when I left the place after a hectic weekend with a certified legal cheque for three hundred and forty seven thousand, six hundred and twelve euros. My winnings!

I guess somewhere if someone searched deep enough, then they could have discovered the three hundred and ninety two thousand that I'd invested in order to walk out with that cheque. Ok, so I'd lost forty odd grand, but what the hell. The Casino covered the cost of my hotel stay for the weekend, and whatever the beautiful nineteen-year-old French blonde cost who kept me company. She could do things with her ..... Well, that's another story.

----------------

Well, what else?

The Porsche was gone and the Volkswagen soon followed it. I thought about getting myself a new Porsche, but simply could face it, my dream of owning a Porsche, long since spoiled.

Didn't stop me getting an Aston Martin though did it?

Not the top of the range model, the Vantage being sufficient for a simple guy like me, and I lorded it around town showing it off to all and sundry, never actually going back to teach at my old school.

----------------

"Hi," said the pretty little dark haired beauty with the big tits as I parked my Aston outside a restaurant one evening shortly after buying it.

"Hi gorgeous," I threw back at her, by then getting into the swing of attractive women of all ages taking more interest in me since I'd bought the Aston.

"It's Mr Adams isn't it?" The lovely thing asked me to my surprise.

"Yes," I replied, wondering what she was after.

"Don't you recognise me sir," the girl grinned at me.

Sir? Sir?

It had been quite a few months since anyone had called me sir.

"Mandy Davis Sir," she carried on. "I was in the fifth form when you first started teaching at our school."

Oh yes!

Oh boy yes!

The sexy little schoolgirl that all the male teachers lusted over but never dared do anything about.

Mandy Davis ----- Crikey, was she a cracker. I did a quick mental calculation as to how old she would be by then, and decided that perhaps with a bit of luck, that thirty might well go into twenty-one, whatever her last maths teacher might have said.

It did!

We did!

The pair of us ended up shacked up with one another in a swish apartment in La Rochelle on the South West coast of France, and when we started to look for something other than bonking one another all day and all night, we bought a boat. There are lots of them in La Rochelle, and we ended up with a three-year-old forty footer that we rented out to rich Europeans during the summer, with me as skipper (OK, I had to do several courses to qualify), and Mandy as the cook come hostess.

It was great. No, really it was for nearly two years, till the hostess side of Mandy's job became more important then the cooking part, and I walked in on her 'entertaining' one of our male guests, a guy who had more money in his piggy bank than I had in the world.

We parted friends, me having got together by then with a billionaire's discarded trophy wife, an ex model, Russian girl not much older than Mandy, who was paid off several million to release her previous husband.

Will it last?

No bloody idea, but I just think it might.

----------------

Ok, so what about Debbie, you're thinking.

Still loved the girl in my way, but there was a lot of water under the bridge since then. She's due out in less than two years now, and probably thinks I'm still waiting for her.

Maybe I am?

Then again, maybe I'm not, and if you saw Elka, my beautiful, Russian companion, then you'd understand why.

Now by chance, just like the French girl at the Casino, Elka could do things with her...... No never mind. I won't bore you with little details like that.