Tuesday 25 June 2013

The Knock


This wasn't any ordinary knock on the door, this spoke of trouble, big trouble. I wearily swung my legs onto the floor but, before I could check my phone to find out the time I was surrounded by uniformed men and women, shouting and screaming and dragging my near naked body out of bed. They pushed me up against the wall and frisked me down which even in my terrified state I remember thinking was rather unnecessary as I was only wearing my boxers.

Everyone was shouting and speaking but as no one spoke English,
I had no idea what was going on. I was aware that people were in my flatmate’s room as well, so he was probably getting the same treatment as me. I was also aware that they were searching but god knows what for.  It wasn’t long before my hands were shackled and I was being led out of the flat down the stairs and being bundled into a waiting police car. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jeff my roomie also being ‘invited’ to sit in the back of a panda.

I’ve never been in a police cell before so I can’t tell you if a Spanish cell is better or worse than a British one. I was just pleased that I was in this bare, depressing room on my own and didn’t have a burly Spanish crim as a cell mate.

They kept me there for about 2 hours, I was hungry, tired and thirsty, my stubble felt like it had grown a couple of millimetres and my brain raced wondering what the hell I had done to end up in a damp, dank police cell. Eventually a police officer came for me and took me to an interrogation room where Spanish man in a grey suit was waiting for me. To my relief he spoke English but his accent was heavy and he spoke with 'a potato in his mouth'. My tired mind struggled to work out what he was saying.
‘Where you hide the drugs?’
‘The drugs?’
‘Yeah drugs, you know weed, hash, Mary Jane.’
‘I'm terribly sorry but I have no idea what you are talking about.’
I don’t know why but I seemed to have morphed into a middle class English Gentleman.
It was beginning to dawn on me what was going on. The lady across the way had been giving us the evil eye ever since Jeff had started smoking weed out of his window. She’d obviously phoned the police reporting the flat as some kind of den of inequity.
I was now faced with a dilemma, did I dob Jeff in and save my own bacon, or just play dumb. It was a no-brainer, I was no hero and as he’d never asked me if I minded him smoking the stuff in the flat in the first place,  I wasn’t going to take the rap for him. So I sang like an X Factor contestant, spilled the beans and told the tales before being led back to the cell.
I was only there for about twenty minutes before the suited Spaniard came to inform me my story had checked out and I was free to go. 
They didn’t keep Jeff there long either, I guess they soon discovered that the old bat across the way had been exaggerating a little with the stories she told. 

We never spoke about the incident so I never told jeff about my little singalong and he never told me if they had told him,  but I think there was a sense of relief all round when I told him two or three days later that I was moving out.

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