I don’t want to be involved said Jim, to the three teenagers who surrounded him on the high street. ‘It’s to late you were the  driver and you mounted the pavement, knocking the camera out of our friends hand. It is going to cost you one way or another’. Jim knew that the bus had not touched the camera, however a black mark against his driving could see him stopped from driving the neighbourhood bus; and the lads knew it. Blackmail that what it was, pure and simple blackmail.

They had obtained or more likely pinched a DSLR camera, then finding it broken had smashed it. Now they wanted cash and he would have to pay up. Jim’s passengers had felt him clip the pavement but they knew he had not touched the lads, however no one dare speak up against the gang, even if he asked them to.

Jim loved talking and meeting people, that’s all he lived for these days since Florie had died. Being a bus driver was all he knew and at the age of sixty-nine he was not going to get another job or even the opportunity to drive again. Jim coughed up the five hundred pounds, and so worked for nothing for the next two and a half weeks. At least he could continue driving and enjoy a social life until next time the gang targeted him.