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- FROM HEAVEN TO HELL -

Then my heart really started racing. I recalled the first boozy night out we’d had at the hotel, when we’d had a few too many drinks with a really cool French guy called Jacques.

It’s fair to say we got wasted with him. As we shot pool and necked beers, he told us he was a diamond smuggler, and that that was where the really big money was. ‘We’re talking fortunes for that, my friends – £50,000 cash, each, for every run,’ he said. ‘It’s a piece of cake. If you want, I can hook you up with my contact.’

This diamond-running game had sounded better than what we were up to – the cash was loads better. That night, Jacques had won our confidence, and so we’d confided in him about our drug-smuggling run. He’d seemed totally trustworthy, and as he’d told us about his scam first, we’d figured he was safe as houses.

Now my mind whirred: had Jacques been a plant? Had he told us a crock of shit about diamond smuggling to coax our story out of us? Or maybe he’d been busted and thrown our names to the cops to save his own sorry arse?

I was shaken from my panicked thoughts when a cop whacked me in the back with his gun, shoved me to my feet, then handcuffed me.

He frog-marched me and Paul out of the room and into a taxi that was waiting outside the airport. Even that was bizarre. Paul felt it, too, as he said, ‘A taxi? What are we doing in a fucking taxi?’ You’d have thought we’d be in a police car, or even an armoured van, but this was a