A Second Chance Ch. 02

The cost of putting up his taxi drivers in the cheap houses he had to rent was digging into his profits, and the yard where he parked his cars was starting to get really overcrowded.

Following a chance visit to Diana's place in Cromwell Road for an electrical fault, he decided he'd found AaaDeeGee cars new HQ. The sheer space the place had and its central location was ideal and it would be great new base for his taxi company. He also knew he could get it much cheaper than the B&B's he had no control over and had to pay for.

He spoke to Petra who started the process to remove the woman and her children that lived there, using threats and bullshit letters to get her out; she eventually left and the taxis move in.

The other residents in the quite prestigious and sought-after street suddenly had to get used to the comings and goings and the noise, as Gregg leased more cars and developed his own livery.

His vociferous local councillor started to make some noise, so rather than Gregg, Kenny or Ronnie threatening him, Petra did some work.

An older and time-served councillor, Kenneth Arthur Swift was a retired insurance salesman, a hard-faced liberal that wrote extensively about his political views, and a member of the local golf club, and Gregg was convinced to splash some money to a friend, buy some clubs and join it.

Introduced to Swift by that friend at a club social, Gregg bought lots of booze and grumbled loudly about 'the council'. Swift was intrigued and asked for more details.

Working from the script Petra had taught him, he grumbled on how it was so hard for small businessmen like him to fight through the restrictive red-tape so beloved of municipal bureaucrats, specifically the licensing, public health and housing officers giving him a hard time.

Swift commiserated with him and gave him his card, and two days later they met and Swift was bought a very expensive lunch, bait really, and he took it, so Gregg started to reel him in, slowly.

He started to find reasons to 'be at the club' when Swift was, driving past his house and checking if his car was on the drive, then to the golf club. More lunches were bought, they played often, and Gregg always lost to him, especially when there was money on each hole, with Gregg asking his advice on business and council matters.

This moved into the clubhouse and buttering him up with booze and lunches, praise about his skill as a golfer, his knowledge of business, and municipal rules and regulations, and Councillor Swift lapped it up. Swift did him a few favours and for that was given a card that meant free taxi rides whenever he wanted them; all completely against the rules of course.

Councillor Swift became a willing participant, so confident in his guaranteed re-election in his safe seat, and using the authority he learned from his 'old school' political mentors fifteen years before, he started to throw his weight around some more on behalf of David Gregg.

Already a high-flyer in his own party and their deputy chief, his rather punchy attitude and threats to budgets and staffing levels had some of the older and less aggressive managers kowtowing to the kind of town hall thuggish mandarins that they'd thought had disappeared in the nineties.

True to his party policy, he extolled the virtues of good business, the power of the spirited, driven, free-thinking individual liberal and the need to cut divisive red-tape. David Gregg was a businessman, cut from the same cloth as Trump, Musk, Bezos, Branson, especially Tim Martin his personal favourite; and the district didn't have enough of them.

Gregg was invited to the right events, the right parties, then into the Freemasonry, he even had his name on the list to be a councillor.

Complaints from local residents to the council about Cromwell Road started to be NFA'd very quickly and quite regularly, just like mine had been initially with Cairngorm. The senior councillor and his senior manager both letting staff know that they would be extremely disappointed if anyone disobeyed their very specific instructions and took any kind of interest; several written warnings were issued to more junior staff to get the message across to the entire organisation.

'David Gregg,' it had been explained to the management team, 'is an amazingly hard-working entrepreneur, a 'local boy' that kept dozens of other local people in work'.

(He only employed two people actually, the rest were far from formally employed, far from home and far from well paid.)

'He maintains lots of great local houses for lots of local landlords at a highly competitive rate'.

(He did things 'on the cheap', but that was based on the fact that he rarely did any work, and then only based on the number of complaints he had from the ACTUAL landlord; his business partner Petra took the majority of complaints from the renters, and then ignored them.)

'David Gregg is a self-made man, very well off, but modestly so, who gives generously to charity'.

(Only he didn't.)

Yes, he gave a few thousand to the mayor's charity during the year and made lots of noise about not wanting it publicised as soon as anyone forgot.

He did make a shitload of money though and, according to the councillor, paid lots of it into a charity that sent money back to Eastern Europe, the same streets he employed his 'local' drivers from.

His 'charity' had only ever paid out 'expenses' to three 'executive directors'; you've guessed it, Councillor Swift, Penny Gabriel and Gregg's long-term partner Petra Parsons.

They all had trips out to some of the harsher and less well-developed parts of eastern Europe, but were soon on trains or cheap internal flights to far nicer and more glamourous hotels on the Baltic coast or the Black Sea, or on city breaks to Warsaw, Prague, Innsbruck, once even to Rome.

When the HMRC specialists seized all of Gregg's and Ms Parsons paperwork and electronic files, it turned out the taxi company was his own private goldmine. When his house was searched, plastic carrier bags full of cash were found in his office, his loft, a spare bedroom and hidden under blankets filling every empty space of his old fixer-upper Morris Traveller in his garage.

The police believed that cash was being smuggled out and laundered, with a view to buying holiday rental properties rather than homeless shelters and dog pounds.

While he was the founder of the feast, he was also its downfall. As the money rolled in, he just got braver, and his old work tendencies started to surface, and when the option to make easy money from fear rather than hard work crept in again, he took it.

In the case of single females, he would completely take the piss, settling first on the family at Cromwell Road, then on the freshly separated NHS worker and her daughter in the recently emptied and still damp Cairngorm Avenue, taking her for £300 a month over what her predecessor had paid to Diana, plus another two women in other clients properties, moving out their tenants and moving in his own via an unnoticed sublet through his girlfriend's company-the one my sister had signed up to, thanks to recommendations from a couple of investor clients.

As with Cairngorm Avenue, botched repairs were carried out on other houses and the owners, including Diana, were billed two or three times the actual cost but never informed. If complaints reached the council, thanks to Councillor Swift's assertions and occasional threats, they were put into a file to be monitored, sometimes even marked 'vexatious'.

If locals told Councillor Swift, had told them there was nothing that could be done; after all, had he not figuratively tied the council staffs hands himself?

"Come on now," said the now popular, self-confident prospective Council Chairman, "Dave Gregg is trying to run a bloody business."

A saved email from him to a senior housing officer referred to 'That whiney, woke bitch Sinclair from Cairngorm Avenue' several times, suggesting she should learn that 'everything in life isn't pink and pretty and she should get used to it, then "praps her husband wouldn't have dumped her. She needs to learn the hard way that sometimes, rented houses didn't have roses growing around the door." (Even though that house had; I remembered them being planted. Petra Parsons had visited the house and seen them, instructing Gregg to take the wicker frame covered in roses and both pots Diana had planted them in, to install them at her own house.)

As with all things, the increasing levels of shit ran downhill.

Senior Council Manager Penny Gabriel was tired, cynical and angry that her career had stalled before she reached CEO, and had secretly agreed with her sometimes tempestuous, sometimes charming political lead.

Seeing a like mind, he had promised her early retirement with redundancy, and a safe council seat like his two districts over where she lived, seeing as they were both 'singing from the same hymn sheet'.

With either idiot self-belief or educated naivety, she claimed that she had done nothing legally wrong, and was following corporate guidance and diktats from a very senior politician.

Questioned on the 'no further action' response to anything relating to Petra Parsons Ltd, 'DG Property Services' or 'AaaDeeGee Cars', she insisted that her orders 'came from above', despite recorded complaints from her own senior officers that those orders were morally wrong if not actually unlawful.

As the shit hit the fan, she was sat down with the elected Chairman and the Chief Executive and asked just what the hell had she did she think she'd been doing. She angrily refused to 'resign and take her name and her pension', instead choosing to emulate Swift and 'come out fighting'.

She was duly sacked for gross misconduct, the three-day disciplinary hearing lasting just one when almost her entire staff, (bar her loyal personal assistant) spoke out against her, displaying the emails they had sent to her explaining how Mr Gregg was not only displaying some very sharp practice, he was also in some cases actually breaking the law and listing them in great detail, and those officers would not be party to it and they wanted that fact on record.

Somehow, they never did make it to the official record, after all Councillor Swift had told Mrs Gabriel 'we don't need to keep any of that shit, trust me'.

Being sensible professionals though, her staff had kept their own copies, either emailing them home, or printing paper copies, despite a suggestion that the 'loyal personal assistant' regularly spent long evening searching her colleagues' desks and the corporate electronic files for such, including one a few nights before her hearing.

Her subsequent appeal to an industrial tribunal was kicked out after the council's barrister showed papers from the dismissal, including Facebook photos of her and her husband in the Spa of a Budapest hotel, drinking champagne with two fraudsters, one of whom was still remanded in custody for holding a young Mum hostage at gunpoint, and one disgraced politician that was shouting about the things some of his councillor colleagues had gotten up to after they suspended him.

It was then pointed out that the Spa was five hundred miles from where the proposed homeless hostel and/or dog rescue centre was, allegedly, due be built by the extremely rich charity that only paid out 'fees'.

Added to that were my photos of the damp, mould and holes in the roof at Cairngorm Avenue and the bills that had been paid to repair them from months before, the cars in Cromwell Road and lots of others, equally damning to the very well-paid senior manager that had actively denied their existence and disciplined those that argued with her.

Her solicitor tried to complain that disciplinary hearing had been procedurally flawed, but the council barrister laughed, offering to re-do the hearing right there and then and let the tribunal decide.

"She was following instructions!" whined her brief.

"If she'd been a road sweeper, I'd have accepted that argument," said the chairwoman of the tribunal calling the room to order, "but she was the boss, she was where the buck stopped."

Petra Parsons, the brains of the operation, pleaded guilty to all but three of the cases against her, getting a reduced sentence for her sudden honesty. She explained what she had done, what loopholes she'd used to not pass through the very limited supervision of their income streams and where she'd put the money. The charity had been her idea and way to launder, spend and hide lots of her lover's cash, taken abroad in suitcases and rucksacks to buy holiday homes.

Ronnie and Kenny were no more builders than Gregg; like him they were both hard-nosed thugs that would occasionally use a paint brush, but more often than not would argue with, then threaten those not paying their bills until work had been carried out on their substandard houses.

After the police stormed my house, Kenny was charged with possession of an offence weapon, namely a blackjack in his sock and possession of a firearm, a small Tokarev pistol from Russia. Ronnie was charged with assault, assault on a police officer, unlawful imprisonment, and possession of shotgun without a licence.

Gregg was charged with the fucking lot.

The ridiculous six were pictured in local and a few national newspapers, with the whole setup spread across several centre pages, the journo delighting in the whole 'how the mighty have fallen' aspect of the bent business partners, the corrupt politician and his managerial stooge.

The investigation of the running of AaaDeeGee cars was used as a final year degree thesis by an officer from Border Force on the 'hiding in plain sight' modern slavery scam Gregg had run, as it was so well done and had only been brought crashing down after a year and the making of absolutely TRUCKLOADS of money, and he'd bought cars, half a dozen houses he either owned or part-owned, including one he'd started to buy in Croatia.

With Gregg's successful prosecution, I and the other landlords had access to most of that money under the Proceeds of Crime Act, and I had the same builders go to Cromwell Road and redecorate it almost back to how Di had it, the solicitors keeping the balance that would be charged to the accounts of DG Property Services and AaaDeeGee Cars once a final cost was reached.

With repairs to some of the many other houses in the DGPS sphere, all of Gregg's dirty money was gone, the sale at auction of the three houses he'd bought, clearing all his debts but for three hundred quid. I even recovered Di's 'roses round the door'.

I was a few pounds out of pocket, but I had a beautiful woman that lived with me, along with her darling daughter.

Nanny Judy came and visited us a week after that Friday evening, having seen the press coverage and phoning Callie.

Once she saw we were all OK, Judy could not hide her delight in our new closeness, and the new sleeping arrangements when Callie finally came clean.

"But you were sleeping together when I was here last time Darlings," she said, after her third glass of celebratory prosecco.

"Well..." pined Callie burying her face in my shoulder.

"Oh, for Christ's sake," said Judy, "it was written all over your faces, and Caroline?" Callie looked at her Mum with a dropped jaw, "Just from listening through my partially open door on a few nights, I knew not only that you two shared a bed, but Craig here is an incredible lover!" She beamed a grin of satisfied triumph, "Salut!" She downed her prosecco.

With a view to the Easter holidays, I dragged both Callie and Emmie into one of those shoe repair shops that do passport photos. Callie sat first, trying not to laugh, while Emmie sat perfectly for the man with the camera. Following that, I dragged my two lovely girls into a café for lunch and insisting that they now arrange passports. Callie was excited and Emmie picked up on it, although she'd never been abroad.

On a lunch hour a couple of days later I called into my favourite travel agent and booked ten days on the continent.

A drive to the channel tunnel, straight through to Disneyland Paris, and four days there, then a slow drive through France, into Germany via the Rhineland, and a slow drive back via Nanny Judy's house and a couple of days there.

Neither Callie or Emmie had travelled on the tunnel before, and it was really exciting for both of them, Emmie's face as the Disneyland Paris signs started to appear was wonderful. I spoiled them both outrageously, and Emmie left with loads of Mickey and Minnie soft toys, two Disney Princess dresses and got to meet all the characters.

I also got to see my gorgeous lover in a bikini in several of the hotel pools. OK, I'd seen her naked many times, but there was something about her perfect body, in that perfect swimsuit that made me just lust after her even more, sadly there was almost nothing we could do, seeing as Emmie was in our room for every night of the holiday.

We had a great time, and I shared my reasonable French and German, even Emmie had a go ordering food and drinks.

On our first night at Judy's farmhouse, she cooked us a special meal. In a room on our own at last, we finally got to make love again after more than a week, and it was amazing; Callie cried as we started to come together.

By the time we got home we'd managed a bit of a tan, and Emmie having memorised some basic French that she could say to her class teacher.

Our life at the Big House just got better, interrupted by a short period when Nanny Judy came to England to babysit while Callie and I stood by for court appearances.

Former Councillor Swift, Penny Gabriel, and Petra Parsons all pleaded guilty of course, with varying degrees of grumbling, whining and blaming other people.

Penny Gabriel put her hand up to 'Misconduct in a public office' and was given a suspended sentence and a fine that took a large lump out of her pension settlement.

Ken Swift was given six months inside seeing as his actions had been rather more insidious and Gabriel was able to show some amount of coercion from the senior politician.

The three thugs were a different story though. I was called to confirm that the three properties were mine and play the recording of David Gregg daring me to contact the council and his 'threat' to me.

Callie's turn came and it was to tell the court of the three thugs knocking the door and barging their way in and threatening her with a sawn-off. This led to Kenny leaving, the other two grumbling about my non-arrival and making her ring me. The CCTV recordings were all played, then the body worn videos of the various police officers as they charged to the rescue.

All found guilty, they were sent to different prisons for different lengths of time, none too short or too shabby.

That summer and with my CCTV switched on in case any of the thugs were given bail, I carried on at work, and flew to a few more European airports, happy that Callie and Emmie were safe and warm at the Big House, and with the App loaded on to her phone she could also watch the CCTV if something went bump in the night when I wasn't there.

During a trip to Dusseldorf, I received a late-night text message from Callie,

"Check the loft landing CCTV, think there's something going on up there you might be interested in..." with a smiley face after.

Sat in my cool hotel room, I checked the App and did as ordered.

At the top of the stairs, I saw a figure stood with a mobile phone.

It was Callie, naked, gorgeous and looking a million dollars as she slowly walked down the steps. I changed to the next camera on the first floor and saw her looking up into it, blowing a kiss, turning and walking down to the ground floor. As if to end the perfect display I followed her on the last camera as she walked into the sitting room, where I'd watched her cuddling Bear all those weeks before, only this time as she bent forward over the arm of the sofa pushing that perfect arse back towards the camera.