If the chapter name has you scratching your head, look up the Caddyshack 'Doodie in the pool' scene.
Anyone easily offended should probably skip everything after Lemony Warning. It's just winding up the Dursley arc, but I went further into shutting the book on them than I was planning.
For that matter, this is pretty much a filler chapter as I'm making sure a few worthless characters don't come back into the story, so you can probably skip the whole thing without having too much effect on your following the story… Unless you want to know what happened to Gran and the Dursleys.
Refer Chapter 1 for disclaimers.
Augusta Longbottom née Smith's third strike came soon after her son, Earl Francis Longbottom the Second, Lord and Head of the House and Clan of Longbottom, finished his NEWT year at Hogwarts in June 1976… Not that she had any idea what Frank was talking about when he said that, because she would never have listened to anyone trying to explain the Mundane concept of 'three strikes and you're out' to her… But she got the gist of it well enough as her angry son was detailing her three 'strikes'…
"Your First strike was at the start of the Yule Holiday in Nineteen Seventy Four… When you tried to forbid me from performing the formal Intendeds' ritual with Alice, on the grounds that it wasn't proper for me, as the Heir Secondary to the Most Noble and Most Ancient House and Clan of Longbottom, to perform the ritual with someone from impure bloodlines who was nothing but the daughter of the hired help… Even though Granddad and Grandma, as Earl and Countess Longbottom, Lord and Head of the House of Longbottom and his Consort, and Dad, as Baron Longbottom, Heir Primary to the House of Longbottom… All thoroughly approved of Alice becoming my Intended and had been encouraging us to do it for a while… Not to mention the fact that Alice's father Laird MacDonald, whom you so dismissively referred to as the 'hired help', is in fact the Head of the Ancient Minor House and Clan of MacDonald and the Manager of the House of Longbottom's primary business interests, and has held the positions of both Steward and Wizengamot Proxy Holder for the House of Longbottom since Dad first took up his position in the Department of International Magical Cooperation, which was before Dad married you…"
"Your Second strike came when you finally gave up trying to drink your sorrows about losing your chance of ever becoming the Lady Longbottom, because Dad never recovered enough to be accepted to the title of Lord Longbottom before he died, so the title was passed straight from Granddad to me, away... And you and Uncle Algernon tried to force me to give the two of you full control of the House of Longbottom and its fortune… I thought that you would have gotten the message not to try to interfere with Longbottom House business after I formally reaffirmed Laird MacDonald's positions as Steward and Wizengamot Proxy Holder for the House of Longbottom in the Wizengamot… And then publicly severed any and all connections between Uncle Algernon and the House of Longbottom, formally reclaiming Aunt Enid's Barony, dowry and everything else rightfully belonging to the House of Longbottom from him… I should have done the same thing with you back then, but I stupidly convinced myself that my poor widowed mother couldn't be so much of a money grubbing whore that she'd try to steal her own son's inheritance from him… That you must have still been so overcome with grief that you were just saying what he told you to… Obviously I was wrong, because you are..."
"But the measures I took back then were apparently far too subtle for someone from magically pure bloodlines to understand, because I've hardly had time to pack away my school things and go over the Longbottom House business with Laird MacDonald and here you are, demanding that I 'stop this Clan nonsense and follow my father into the Ministry as he would have wanted'… Is everyone from magically pure families this stupid, or is it just those from the House of Smith… Sorry, New Blood Family of Smith?"
"If you ever bothered talking to Dad's magical portrait that Granddad got painted for him when he reach his age of maturity, as the Clans strongly recommend that Houses and Clans get done for all their Heirs, you would have known that Dad never wanted to work for the Ministry… He was just following the Clans' tradition of having their Heirs do a stint in the Ministry to get a better understanding of how the mechanisms of Magical Britain operate before they take up their duties as Head of the House and Clan… And by the way, Dad got the legal qualifications to perform his service to Magical Britain through the very 'Clan nonsense' that you are currently deriding… But in case you have forgotten Mother, given that Granddad and Dad are both dead due to the cowardly attack that your family took part in, I am already Lord and Head of the House and Clan of Longbottom and therefore have had to take up my duties as Head of the House and Clan, so I won't be doing my service to Magical Britain…"
"So as I said, that is 'three strikes and you're out' Mother… James and the others will surely laugh at me for doing this, and I'm not at all sure that they're wrong in that, but as you are my mother... I will make some minor concessions to you after I have cast you out of the House of Longbottom, severing all ties between you and the House of Longbottom, including our name, and reclaiming the Longbottom Family Magic and anything and everything rightfully belonging to the House of Longbottom that you have in your possession… These being that I will grant you the use of one of our smaller cottages in Kent, the services of the Longbottom Elf Tilly, who for some reason has apparently developed some form of attachment to you over the thirty or so years that you were married to my Dad and a modest stipend, enough to provide you with a comfortable but not lavish standard of living for the rest of your life… And before you try saying that you deserve much more than that and demanding that I give it to you, know that if you say one word, when you are thrown out of the House of Longbottom, you will be sent back to your family with nothing!"
Augusta's mouth closed with a snap, because she could see that the young Lord she had given birth to would not hesitate to do this. In the thirty years she was married to Neville, his father, the only time she'd ever seen him be this grim and unbending was when he came back from the War. She blamed Lord Peverell for this, she knew that his being named the boy's Godfather over her own brother would lead to trouble, but not this much… She also knew that if she was sent back to her family without a big enough nest-egg to cover all her costs and give them a large payment to take her in, she'd be out on the streets in less than half an hour, less than ten minutes if they just cut to the chase and demanded to know how much gold she had brought with her…
Because the fortunes of the Smith family had fallen considerably in the last thirty years or so… Two hundred years ago, their wealth began to blossom because they were one of the twelve Traditional families who took control of St Mungo's and used their family members in the Ministry shut down every other hospital in Magical Britain, so that anyone with any serious ailments or injuries had to come to St Mungo's to be treated, and there was nothing to stop them charging as much as they wanted… Then, about a hundred years ago, someone who had fled to the Americas to escape a family feud introduced them to the Muggle concepts of Public Opinion and Creative Accounting as a way of buying their way back into Magical Britain.
So they got control of the Prophet and had all competing newspapers shut down, and if any of the other families baulked or wanted details of what the money was being spent on when they demanded donations to help cover the rising costs of St Mungo's, they'd publish scathing articles about them being too greedy to donate even a tiny part of their vast fortunes to help ensure that the people of Magical Britain could get the Healers services they needed. No-one outside the families who controlled St Mungo's ever got to see that the vast majority of those donations were funnelled into their family members 'working' at St Mungo's generous salaries (very generous, they were paid more than anyone else in Magical Britain), and their family vaults.
But in 1943, at the end of the War with Grindelwald, that suddenly changed, because the Druid Clans banded together and used how much starting their preparatory schools was costing as an excuse to cut their donations to St Mungo's to a fraction of what they'd been up until then… And the articles about them refusing to share their vast wealth stopped working, because they just demanded to see details of what everyone was donating and what, specifically, all that money was being spent on, citing the fact that some families seemed to be doing better for themselves than anyone else, so if anyone should be donating more money, it should be them…
And that was where the Twelve Families came undone, because the 'second set of books' they'd been maintaining to cover up where all the money was coming from and going to didn't provide any detail, it just showed lump sums of money coming and going, and showing the books which did provide those details would have buried them… So they had to stop the articles and demanding more money, because even the reduced donations still made up the vast majority of the money coming in… And then in Seventy Two, the donations stopped altogether as a result of her Cousin Ezekiel's stupidity over that matter with Minerva McGonagall. The families had struggled to keep St Mungo's open for six months and then gave up, because with the ones working there refusing to take a pay cut, even shutting down over three quarters of the hospital didn't reduce the operating costs enough to make it profitable… And the final blow was the failure of their plan to wipe out all the leaders of the Clans at the end of 1974, because the House of Smith had been one of the ones who were eradicated and forced to forfeit everything to the families and Clans who had lost the most in the attack, as they called it...
But the main reason her family blamed her for all their misfortunes was the fact that the common factor in all three of these events had been Francis' Godfather, Lord Henry Peverell… So she shut her mouth and took what Francis was offering, because that was by far the best option available to her…
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Lemony Warning ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Harry had had Dobby and the other Elves keeping an eye on Number 4 for him, so he knew that the Dursleys arrived in Privet Drive over two years ahead of schedule this time around. He had to laugh when he went to have a look because Dobby came to him in June 1975 to tell him that they had arrived, but they looked different… Because Petunia was trying to pull off the same look she'd gone for before, but a teenager who looked like a stripper with obviously dyed hair and oversized fake boobs trying to pull off her idea of a respectable businessman's wife was just ridiculous. Petunia's new look made Harry fairly sure that they'd gone back to making porn after they left Worksop, and the fact that there was a Triumph 2.5 PI and Daimler Sovereign in the drive seemed to support that theory, as they'd never had the money for expensive motors like that in the 'old' timeline... Vernon also looked rather different, he was starting to go to seed but he was a long way short of the obese tub of lard he'd been in the other timeline, and he'd dyed his hair and moustache dark brown, but at least he managed to pull off the look of an up and coming young businessman…
It didn't feel right to dump them in it without checking to see whether they were growing into something better than the last time around, so Harry went to introduce himself to the young couple and used Legilimency on them to get the answers. Afterwards, he removed their memories of him being there, but he was almost wishing that someone would do the same to him, because while they were definitely different from what they'd been, he wasn't sure he'd call it better...
For a start, they had continued making porn up until Petunia lost her baby, but Vernon and Petunia at least had stopped for something like six months after that to let her get over it… and Marge had been the one pushing for then to start again, in fact she was the one who made them start making porn in the first place… By blackmailing them when she caught them in bed together. They'd gotten married in Scotland in early June Seventy Three, after holidaying up there for three and a half weeks since Petunia turned sixteen to meet the Scottish residency requirements, in some kind of attempt to make their relationship appear legitimate. Vernon hadn't been willing to risk fiddling Petunia's age to get married earlier like he had to get her her learners permits in Seventy One so that she could use his old Triumph Tiger Cub to get around on (she'd been riding it since she was ten)… Because while it had been easy to get the one he had in his pocket in the local DOT office to 'mislay' her DOT file to cover up the dodgy dates, he needed their marriage to be able to hold up in court if and when they got caught, so he waited until she was sixteen and they got married using their real names, not the fake identities they'd been using in Birmingham…
It had taken Vernon four years to complete an Associate Diploma in Business Management at night (as himself), because they were spending a lot of money trying to keep up with the changes in video camera and recording equipment technology among other things…. So between his day job as a car salesman and all his other enterprises, he was working full time to pay the bills and fund his wheeling and dealing, which included the insurance scam/chop shop operation he was running in cities and towns all over the Midlands and Yorkshire… Where he got repairable cars written off by the insurers and bought them cheap, then shipped them to another city or town and had the lads patch them up and mix and match frames and engines to create motors that could be re-registered without setting off alarms at the DOT.
In late Seventy Three, Vernon had used the chop shop operation to get the remains of a mostly sound 1971 Jaguar XJ6 2.8 written off for minor front end damage… Plus a badly rear ended 1974 year model top of the line Daimler Sovereign 4.2 Series II and the manual overdrive drive train out of a 1970 Jaguar 420G combined to make him a very tidy 1974 Series II Daimler Sovereign 4.2 which was fast as a Double Six… Because quite aside from wanting to have a nice motor, the upmarket image that came with driving a Sovereign would make it much easier to work the 'upper classes'. Vernon had passed the 2.5 PI on to Petunia when he upgraded to the Sovereign, because it was much too good a machine to let go, and this way they could show off by having two nice motors parked out front…
Everyone involved was making money from the chop shop operation, especially Vernon, but he'd needed more money to fund the deals he was making, like buying lorry loads of illicit goods and using the transport network he'd established to move them to other cities or towns to be resold, so he'd been working two or three jobs to keep things going… Harry had to grudgingly admit to being impressed by the scope of the enterprise that Vernon had managed to build out of nothing after he left school in early Sixty Five with Petunia's help… They'd even taken over Marge's amateur porn business after she blackmailed them into working with her and made it into a much more profitable operation, with most of the money going into their pockets, of course…
Much to Marge's disapproval, at Petunia's suggestion Vernon played Football up until he finished his Diploma to keep in shape, because they'd gone back to making porn about six months after Petunia lost the baby, though thankfully Marge had given in to their ultimatum and stopped making porn herself when Vernon and Petunia restarted… Because as bad as the sight of Dudley De Diddler getting it on with Little Pammy and Titillating Tanya was (Petunia had been talked into getting her boob job by Marge when she was sixteen in an attempt to make her stand out, so to speak, after the little girl look stopped working for her)… Harry really wanted to scrub the memory of what that fat cow looked like naked right out of his head, and what she did as Bessy Brittania with her pal Ripper (the First Ripper, apparently the one she set on Harry was at least the Third or Fourth Ripper) in the porn she made was just wrong!
Between their making less and less money from the porn as more players joined the business, Vernon coming up with a new scheme which he was sure would make them more money with less risk… And Vernon finding out through a mate that Marge was making Videocassette copies of their early productions where he and Pet hadn't been hiding their faces and were called by their real names, and flogging them all over Birmingham… Vernon and Petunia decided that they needed to put their current identities behind them and start over somewhere well away from Birmingham, without Marge being around to ruin things for them again, so as soon as Vernon got his Diploma in Seventy Four, they packed up and moved to London to do just that…
This time they made sure that Marge couldn't follow them though... She had what was officially written up as an unfortunate accident with the gas stove in her closed up flat not shutting off properly just before they left Birmingham because on top of everything else, Vernon had found out that she'd been the one who tipped off the Police in Worksop about his being responsible for Petunia's underage pregnancy... Just because she was pissed off that both he and their father had flash new motors, but she was stuck driving their father's old base model '64 Cortina Estate that he gave her, so she and Ripper II would be staying in Birmingham... Permanently... Vernon made sure to destroy all the porn material Marge had been keeping after he cleared everything that could be incriminating or useful out of her flat, trying to ensure that it wouldn't come back to bite him and Pet again…
They had never been a close or happy family but he couldn't believe that that bitch had been flogging tapes that showed their faces and who they were in the city where they were trying to make new lives for themselves… She wasn't flogging any of her old stuff, just theirs, and she bloody well knew what that would probably do to them because she'd gone to great lengths to try and ensure that they didn't find out what she was doing... He was just lucky that he found out before it went too far because Silly Eddie had thought it was a laugh that while the actors in the old porn tape he was given were called Studley Vernon and his Pet, they looked like him and Petunia so he started calling him 'Studley Vernon'.
Vernon also grabbed the Cortina Estate their old man had given Marge in 1970 to make sure that he cleared everything that could be incriminating or useful out of it too… Then he did much the same as he had with her Anglia Estate, had it stripped right down, tidied up and repainted inside and out to get rid of the smell and damage from Marge and her dogs and had a 1600E engine and Lotus Cortina trim and interior fitted before he sold it to get more money for it.
Going by his memories, Vernon had done quite well for himself, between the money they'd salted away while they were in Birmingham, what he was getting from his various enterprises and occasionally using his obviously teenage wife and their camera gear to blackmail clients into agreeing to his terms on major corporate sales, well enough to buy 4 Privet Drive outright anyway… But Harry put a stop to all that when he called in an anonymous tip to the Police, telling them where they could find Vernon Dursley and his teenage kidnap victim, as being dragged out of bed by the Police early one morning effectively put an end to their dreams of a life filled with wealth and posterity.
To add insult to injury, even though they would never know who did it, Harry had compelled Vernon to sign over the Verona Development Company, which he used as a holding company to own his businesses, 4 Privet Drive, their seven motors and everything else, to him... He conceded that strictly speaking, doing that was illegal by Magical Britain's laws, but he was able to justify it to himself at least as compensation for everything Vernon had done to him and taken from him in the other timeline…
The motors were a bit of a surprise though, because while Harry had been expecting the 1971 Triumph 2.5 PI MK2 Saloon and 1974 Daimler Sovereign 4.2 Series II… And Vernon's old Tiger Cub, which he seemed to have hung onto for sentimental reasons… He wasn't expecting the two Triumph 2500 Estates and what were listed as two 1963 and one 1964 Bond Equipe GT Shooting Brakes stashed away under Vernon's name. According to the DOT records, the 2500s were officially 1970 and '72 2500 MK2 Estates, but they both had Group 3 rally spec 2500 Petrol Injected rally engines, brakes and suspensions and overdrive gearboxes and limited slip diffs… While the Shooting Brakes were effectively petrol injected 1300 engined TR4A Group 3 rally car platforms hidden under modified fibreglass Herald Estate bodies and bonnets... And for some reason they were all white with what appeared to be MGB 14 x 5" steel wheels, including the Shooting Brakes...
When he sorted through Vernon's memories, Harry found that the three 'Shooting Brakes' had been his first vehicles, well first motors if you counted the 1965 Triumph Tiger Cub 20SH that he found in a shed when he was making a delivery in June 1965 and talked the farmer into selling it to him for ten Quid… Which Harry considered to be another black mark against Vernon, because he hadn't hesitated to use the man's anguish about the fact that his son had killed himself on the bike to convince him that the best thing for him and his wife would be to get rid of the reminder of what had happened to their son… So he had used their grief to get a largely undamaged and still quite ride able bike that had cost nearly two hundred pounds a few months before for ten pounds…
That was also how he ended up working for the Standard-Triumph dealership in Worksop actually, because he ducked in there to pick up replacements for a few small parts on the bike which had been broken in the accident and stopped to compare the nice clean working environment in the dealership with the gut busting work of loading and unloading lorries in all weathers… He also looked at the posh salesmen, some of whom he knew had come from his end of town, and quickly came to the conclusion that sticking with the job his old man had forced on him when he pulled him out of school as soon as he turned fifteen was a mug's game… So he used the most useful skill he'd learned from the old bastard he worked for, talking people into giving him what he wanted, and left the dealership with a new job… He would be starting as a general dogs body around the dealership of course, but he was prepared to do whatever it took to climb over anyone in his way and determined to be better placed than half of the mugs in the dealership within a year… Because unlike them, he wouldn't be sitting around just doing what he was told... He was going to make sure he learned how every part of the business worked and get himself noticed!
And he did. Aside from how to talk people into believing that it was their idea to do what he wanted them to, probably the most important thing he'd learned from the bastard his old man basically enslaved him to was the value of finding people in positions of authority who could be bribed or blackmailed into doing or ignoring things that they shouldn't… Like the one in the local DOT office who had marked Vernon's birthday down as being a year earlier so that he could get his motorcycle and vehicle learners permits and ride the old bastard's BSA Bantam D3 over to his place each morning, which let the old bastard stay in bed while Vernon checked out the lorry and got it warmed up and got everything ready to go for the day… And did much of the driving during the day too for that matter... Those skills and the extra cash in hand he forced the old bastard to give him before he'd do anything onerous (Pretty much anything beyond the most basic and easiest of jobs which, as far as he was concerned, was all the ten Bob a day going directly to his father was paying for.) were the reason he was now riding around on his flash new Tiger Cub, and his being willing and able to quickly nip out to pick up small items that were holding up jobs from businesses in nearby towns helped him climb the ladder in the dealership quicker.
There was no way they were going to let a sixteen (as they believed him to be) year old kid become part of the sales team, but by making himself useful and sucking up to the bosses, he got a lot of the more interesting and less arduous jobs that were normally reserved for more senior people assigned to him, and that gave him access to a lot more opportunities to make an extra Quid or two… Which helped keep his plans on track, because he was looking to get enough dosh together to buy himself a motor of some sort as soon as he turned seventeen (according to the dealership and the DOT) and got his driving license in January.
Old Man Murphy (early forties was old to a fifteen year old) who ran the workshop caught him prowling around the wrecked motors in the yard behind the dealership in early December, trying to find something that he could get fixed up to give him a motor, and he gave Vernon the run down on what the best options were out of what was available in the yard... Which for some reason Vernon couldn't fathom was apparently combining the remains of one of four wrecked Herald Saloons and Estates that Murphy had hidden away behind the other wrecks with another motor to make one good motor out of two… But Murphy quickly shut that idea down…
"But there's no way you could afford to do that… How much dosh have you managed to put together since you started here kid, fifty Quid?"
Vernon scowled at him. "What's it to you how much I got?"
"Well I was trying to help you find something you can afford, but if you're going to be an uppity little shite, you can piss off!"
"No! Look, I'm sorry Mister Murphy... I just have trouble trusting people, I expect you'd be the same if you grew up like I did... I actually have nearly two hundred Quid Sir."
Old man Murphy actually looked impressed. "You've been doing better for yourself than I thought then lad but… Look, I'll give this to you straight, I've been watching you so I know that you've got grand plans, and I'm prepared to help you get to where you want to be, if you give something back to me… While you don't know your arse from your elbow when it comes to doing anything with your hands, you do seem to have the gift of the gab and are damned good at getting people to give you what you want, especially those bastards upstairs, and those happen to be two skills that I don't have… The toffs who run this place would get rid of me today if they could, because they don't like having to put up with an uppity Mick who doesn't know his place, but they know that the workshop side of the business would fall apart without me and Triumph's Competition Department would give them Hell if they did, so they leave me be as long as I keep things running smoothly down there, but that's as much as I can get out of them…"
"And that's where you come in lad… I meant what I said before, combining any of these motors with others to get the rest of the parts will make what's by far the best option of anything in this dealership, in fact I've been keeping everyone else away from them to do exactly that myself when I can organise it… But with the way the bastards here overprice everything it's probably going to cost at least one or two hundred more than you have so far to get any of these built up... However I will let you have any of them, for that matter, if we can establish a workable arrangement I'd probably let you have all but one of them... And build up good motors from them for you if you do your part…"
"Like I said, the bastards upstairs wouldn't give me the time of day if they could avoid it, but there's a fair bit of dosh to be made from making working motors out of what's out here and selling them, and that's where you come in… While they won't let me buy any of the wrecked motors to do them up so I can make myself a bit of extra money, I can tell you what motors and parts to get so that you can buy them... Your part of this will be putting up half of the money, talking them upstairs into selling you the motors and parts and helping me get them built up. You don't have any mechanical skills to speak of, but quite often all that's needed to get the job done is a bit of extra muscle or an extra pair of hands here and there, and you can manage that well enough. You'll also be doing all the talking to sell the motors once they're finished… You can consider that part as training for that sales job you're angling to get here. We'll split the money we make from selling the motors when they're done down the middle and we should make at least fifty percent profit each time, but a fair bit of that money will be going back into getting the makings for the next ones we build up… If you put a proper effort into doing your part and get enough money together by the time you get your driving license, I'll build one of these up for you, and I'll wager that you'll be right pleased with what you get..."
He laughed at Vernon's dumbstruck expression… "I told you I've been keeping an eye on you lad! You may have most people around here fooled, but you have to get up pretty early in the day to put one over Liam Murphy… It's pretty damned obvious that you're determined to get yourself a job in sales, and I know what your birthday is according to your paperwork… And what it really is from people who know your family… Don't worry, I'm not going to grass on you, because quite aside from the fact that that would just be cutting my nose off to spite my face, I think it's grand that you've managed to fool those toffs upstairs who think they're so smart… And from what I hear, your old man's as much of a bastard as mine was, so I'm willing to help you get one over him for free… Because I did grow up like you did lad... But if you commit to doing this with me, you'll do your part properly or else."
Vernon had to laugh at that, as he realised that… Liam… Was right, he could pull the wool over most people's eyes but there'd always be some who were sharp enough to see through his act. It didn't take long for him to decide that the deal Liam was offering him was the best he could hope to get at his age, so he and Liam started working together to build up and sell motors from the wrecks out the back… After he got an answer to a very important question.
"So what's so important about these wrecks then?"
Liam laughed again and explained that they had all been factory team Group 3 rally cars up until they were written off by Triumph about six weeks ago. He waved a hand at the 'Heralds' and said that according to the dealership's paperwork, they were a 1963 and '64 Herald Saloon and '62 and '63 Herald Estate which had been written off because fixing the damage would have cost more than they were worth…. But while the bodies and bonnets had indeed come from the listed Heralds, what they were covering was something rather different… Underneath they were actually the rolling chassis of two 1963 and two 1964 rather modified Bond Equipe GTs with Herald styled Shooting Brake bodies that Triumph and SAH had been developing into their secret weapon for next year's Monte Carlo Rally, up until six weeks ago when some old fool high up in Leyland ordered Triumph's rally program scrapped because he'd decided that it wasn't showing any results. The young up and coming tosser who had been put in charge of Triumph's rally program took that order very literally when they crashed in testing as they were being pushed to their limits, because he immediately had them all written off and dumped in the nearest Triumph wrecking yard, along with any parts that had been specifically made for them and orders that the lot were to be scrapped… Even though they could have easily had all the damaged parts replaced in an hour or two.
As luck would have it, Liam had been working with the Monte Carlo Project team when this occurred... So he grabbed a few of the other mechanics who had been press ganged from dealerships and two of the trucks and went to dump the so-called wrecks at the 'nearest Triumph wrecking yard', which just happened to be their dealership's yard, along with all the parts that had been 'specifically made for them', like the bulkheads, fibreglass doors, hatches, floors, roofs and other fibreglass body parts that had originally been created for Triumph's Herald and Vitesse rally cars with acrylic glass windows and Equipe GT competition bonnets, the rally spec 1300 engines with petrol injection and racing exhausts and the alloy housing TR4A gearboxes, overdrives, diffs and suspensions, improved braking systems and 14 x 5" TR race wheels that were made for them, the different road testing and competition interiors... And the extra lightweight fibreglass Herald Estate styled bodies and bonnets that they'd had made up to be swapped onto the 'Equipes' modified TR4A frames to let them do extended road tests without attracting too much attention...
Liam explained that the reason he was involved with this project was that it had been based on his ideas, because when Triumph's Competition Department were trying to come up with a way to make a good showing in the Monte Carlo Rally so they could stop Leyland shutting their rally program down... One of their senior mechanics had reminded them about the Vanguard LWB 2-Door Estates and Renown 4-Door Estates and Van he'd created, and pointed out that his TR Herald Estate was basically what they were looking for here...
Up until 1948, Liam had used the Forward Control SWB 4WD box van lorry he'd built on the rolling chassis of a Guy Armoured Car he'd acquired as part of the war surplus package deal he was offererd at the end of the War as his primary transport, because it was handier and cheaper to run than a large motor and a lot more practical... It wasn't as fast, flash or comfortable as a big motor, but he wasn't worried about those things... But in Forty Eight, he was press ganged into working with Standard-Triumph's Competition Department to support its rapidly expanding factory rally team, and needed to be able to travel faster and more comfortably... So he essentially combined a written off Jaguar MK5 Drophead, Gardner 4LK engine and epicyclic gearbox, (moved as far forward as possible to lengthen the cabin) and an aluminium reinforced fibreglass van body, with the dash and seats from the MK5 and windows and a folding bench seat behind the front seats to create a 2 Door Estate that looked like a rather stretched Vanguard Van...
Liam created the Renown Estate in Fifty Four, using the remains of a written off Jaguar MK7 with a mostly intact rolling chassis. The MK7 rolling chassis was fitted with a Gardner 4LK engine, epicyclic gearbox and overdrive like the 2-Door Estate's and he used the full scale mock-up of the next generation Renown Limousine (which had been rejected because the styling of the upcoming Vanguard Phase III it was based on was deemed too plain for the company's flagship product), with the wheelbase stretched to ten feet, and the roof and rear doors of the 2-Door Estate as the basis for the upgraded fibreglass body panel moulds, and built and mounted the new aluminium reinforced fibreglass body on the MK7 rolling chassis to create the 'Renown 4-Door Estate'. The 4-Door Estate was much more comfortable to travel in than the 2-Door Estate, especially for the rear seat passengers, so Liam built another '4-Door Estate' body and used it to update and upgrade the 2-Door Estate... Over the next four years, he built up another dozen 'Renown 4-Door Estates' from written off Jag MK5s, 7s and 8s and sold them to other rally support crews in Standard-Triumph's Competition Department and used the Competition Department's leftover parts bins and written off Jag MK7s and MK8s to keep his own two Estates as close to the works rally cars' performance as possible (their custom 2.4L turbo diesel engines and lightweight fibreglass bodies were helping achieve that), so that he could get his crew, tools and spare parts to wherever the team's broken down or damaged rally cars were and fix them ASAP...
Then in Fifty Eight, while a group of Standard-Triumph's Competition Department mechanics were having a few at the pub, one of the specialist race track mechanics was going on about what the papers were saying about the get away motor used in a recent bank job being 'a big van that was as fast as a sports car' being utter rubbish, because it just wasn't possible to make anything that big and ungainly go that fast. Liam couldn't stand the mouthy git because he always thought he knew more than everyone else and talked shite about everything, so he decided to prove him wrong by doing exactly that... He pulled the cab and cargo box off the box van lorry he'd spent the last year or so sorting out as he tried to come up with a viable higher capacity replacement for the Estates... The box van rolling chassis was made up of a Guy Otter SWB drop-frame trambus chassis, differential, 14" drum brakes and reverse mounted 16" wheels, the suspension and steering from a totalled Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith and a Gardner 4LK engine which he'd turbocharged, made up a new exhaust and recalibrated the fuel injection system for to get it to work properly then matched up to the highest geared bus drive train that would work with it. Then he built a new fibreglass box van body for it, using modified versions of his Guy box van body moulds to incorporate the Renown MK3 styling, fitting it out with a Jaguar MK8 dash, three Triumph TR3A front seats, and windows and a folding rear bench behind the front seats. About a month after the incident at the pub, the 'new' van was ready to go, the exercise had produced a box van that was styled like his Renown 4-Door Estate, but nearly two feet longer, wider and higher... As big as it was, with its turbocharged 3.8L diesel, higher gearing and better suspension and brakes, it could outrun and outhandle most cars on the road, including that git's prized Vanguard Sportsman, so he greatly enjoyed making him eat humble pie in front of everyone... While the 'Renown Van' could carry and pull far more than the Estates though, the 4-Door Estates were a fair bit lighter and a lot more aerodynamic, so they were still quicker than the van, and the was rather more comfortable to ride in, especially for the rear seat passengers, so the 'Renown Van' was added to the two 'Renown 4-Door Estates' in his rally support fleet.
While quite a few people in Standard-Triumph's Competition Department had known about his Renown Estates and Van though, because he'd done some of the work and testing in the Competition Department's facilities... Not many knew that he'd also successfully mated the body of a written off 1961 Herald Estate to the rolling chassis of a wrecked TR4 in Sixty Three, doing much of the work at the dealership where he worked... But the Herald had required far less work than the Atlas Renown because the TR4 and Herald's tracks were the same, their wheelbases were only three inches different and he had no need to make major changes to the rolling chassis... This meant that he didn't need to make significant body changes or mechanical modifications to make it work, and using existing fibreglass body parts he was making for the factory team's Herald and Vitesse rally cars and 14 x 5" TR race wheels had reduced the necessary modifications even more. So the mechanic pointed out that if Liam could manage to create a high performance estate which worked quite well using equipment he could find in an ordinary dealership workshop, surely they could take his ideas and create a winning Monte Carlo Rally platform with all the resources available to them...
So they got him to bring his TR Herald in to look it over and discuss what they wanted to do... He laughed when he said that they hadn't been too impressed when he pointed out that they were completely ignoring a lot of valuable resources, like Bond having their fibreglass bodied Equipe GT built on the Herald platform, and that he'd been making fibreglass body parts for the factory team's Herald and Vitesse rally cars for years... And that they were developling a lot of improved components for the Spitfire rally cars... The TR4A obviously had more power and better suspension and brakes than the Spitfires, but it was too heavy, especially in the GTR4A form that they'd want to use for something like Monte Carlo... But if they built up fibreglass bodies from the Herald, Vitesse and Equipe body parts and bonnets that Bond was already making and mounted them on TR4A frames that were modified to take them, along with the lighter 1300 rally engines and light alloy housing gearboxes they were developing for the Spitfire rally cars to get the weight down even further, they should get a platform which had the power, handling and light weight needed to give them a good chance of winning at Monte Carlo... So they decided to adopt his methods and ideas and that's how the Monte Carlo Project came into being. When one of the others suggested getting Bond to add the 'Shooting Brake' Herald Hatchback body with raked windscreens and simpler rear wing styling that he'd created for the Monte Carlo cars to the Equipe options list so they could enter them as Bond Equipe GT Shooting Brakes rather than official Triumph entries to keep their plan under wraps, they did that too... They spent the next six months getting the Equipes ready for Monte Carlo, only to have a couple of idiots in management scrap the entire rally program a couple of months before they could use them.
He went on to say that they had dropped the spare mechanical and body parts off at the disused workshop with street access at the end of the rail yard that he was renting on the sly as a cheap storage space for his military surplus lorries, trailers and equipment and other things he wanted to keep hidden, then he let them into the dealership so they could use the workshop there to strip the engines, gearboxes, overdrives, interiors, wheels and other key parts from the rally cars, switch the bodies and bonnets between the Equipes and the Heralds, fit 13" Triumph 2000 wheels to the Equipes and hide the four disguised rally cars behind the other wrecks. Then they quickly bolted old Spitfire manifolds onto the engines and dashes and seats into the Equipe bodies that were being scrapped, cut the roofs off the Equipe bodies so they could be stacked on the scrap metal lorry easier, cutting the roofs off four more written off motors as well to make it look like the rally cars had just been added to an organised load, and piled the lot up in the yard with some more 'dead' Spitfire engines and parts to be scrapped and took off... Dropping everything they'd pulled out the rally cars off at the workshop at the rail yard before they left town.
A couple of days later, the dealership was surprised to have a scrap metal lorry turn up to pick up a load of scrap, but when they tried to say that this hadn't been organised, the lorry driver showed them the paperwork to say that it was. (He was a mate of Liam's and Liam had dropped the paperwork around to him the night everything happened, telling him that the load of eight cars and parts had to be picked up within the next few days.) They went to the office to prove him wrong, only to find the matching paperwork for the eight scrapped motors and a pile of parts which had supposedly been updated by Liam to include the four rally cars and associated parts the night they were dropped off, because he'd already organised a scrap metal pick up for that week just before he was called away, so they let them take the load.
Liam laughed again when he said that the shite really hit the fan a couple of weeks later when the Competition Department officially posted the figures for how much money had been invested in the four rally cars that they had been ordered to scrap by the rally program manager... But when Triumph sent people to retrieve the Equipe GTs from the Triumph wrecking yard where the records said that they'd been dumped, the only sign of them they found was the paperwork indicating that they'd all been scrapped a couple of days after the rally program manager ordered it... A quick check of the motors in the yard against the dealership's records confirmed that they weren't anywhere in the yard and the four rally cars coming in and eight cars being sent to be scrapped had been the only changes made in the last two weeks, while the lorry crew and people who processed the load at the scrap yard all reported that that load had definitely included four motors with non metal bodies and Spitfire seats and bits ... So according to everything they could find, the four rally cars were gone. They tried to blame Liam for what happened of course, but he just waved the orders explicitly stating that everything to do with those four cars was to be scrapped at them, along with the paperwork showing that there had already been a scrap metal pickup organised for that week, so he'd just gotten the lads to help him prepare the four rally cars to be scrapped when they dropped them off and added them to the paperwork.
So what he was proposing was for Vernon to buy one of the 'Herald's remains and a few Spitfire parts from the dealership at the best price he could manage when he had the money, and then he'd refit the parts they removed, mount a fibreglass Estate body and Equipe GT or Herald bonnet on whatever frame he got, fit out the estate body and get everything properly sorted for him…. They had both the Triumph and Bond body identification plates, so Vernon should be able to register the motor as either a Herald Estate or an Equipe GT Shooting Brake. While the Herald Estate may look like the easy way to go though, he knew from personal experience that it didn't work that way… They all had fibreglass bodies and were sitting on modified TR4A frames with 1300 petrol injected rally engines, alloy housing TR4A all synchro overdrive gearboxes, limited slip diffs and front and rear suspensions and brakes and wider 14" wheels, so if someone looked up the engine numbers and the like down the track, it would be a lot easier to get them accepted as being an Equipe GT with uncommon options because the Equipes were made with Spitfire engines and fibreglass parts… But either way it would go, handle and stop a lot better than any 'proper' Herald ever did.
Vernon liked the sound of that, so that's what they did. His three and Liam's one 'Herald' were all among the first eight motors they worked together to build up after hours in the dealership's workshop and as soon as he'd passed his motor vehicle driving test on his 'seventeenth' birthday, they got them all registered as 1963 or 1964 Bond Equipe GT Shooting Brakes. Vernon was right pleased with his new motors because they were just as good as as Liam said they would be, and they were quite tidy little motors too, even with the Herald bonnets. (Whlle he would have liked to leave the much tidier Equipe GT bonnets on them, he agreed that it would probably be better keeping them looking like mostly standard Triumph Herald Estates, so he swapped over to the Herald bonnets once he got them registered.) Having the estates helped him move further up the ladder at the dealership too... Because most of the bosses saw him building up cheap working motors out of wrecked motors and leftover parts from the dealership yard and selling them to get enough money together to get himself a decent motor and driving one of the built up motors in the meantime as being very resourceful and sensible, especially at his age, and managing to get Liam to help him after hours impressed them even more... And Vernon could carry a lot bigger items with the estates than he could on the Tiger Cub, so his value to the dealership had also increased.
Marge was furious when she saw that Vernon had a better motor than she did (she only saw one), and she tried to get their old man to make him give it to her, but his old man quickly backed off when he found out just how much Vernon had picked up in the time he was working for his mate… He had no doubt that Vernon was quite ready to go through with everything he threatened him with, and if he did, prison would be the least of his worries, because the dodgy people his mate dealt with would be sure to come after him when they found out that he was the reason that the Bobbies had closed down their operations… So he backed down, making a last ditch effort to save face by demanding that Vernon pay an extra fifteen Bob a week for his room and board if he had the dosh to throw away on a tarted up old motor like that. Vernon didn't like the idea of giving the old bastard any more of his hard earned money to piss away at the pub, but decided that it was worth it to shut him up.
Within Six months they'd made over two and a half thousand profit between them in their sideline, but they were running out of viable motors to fix up and sell in their dealership's yard, so they started to look further afield. They moved the operation into the workshop at the rail yards when they started expanding, getting the arrangement there changed so that they were officially renting it as a cheap warehouse, because they couldn't bring in motors from outside and fix them up in the dealership's workshop. While this cost them more, it meant that they could come and go openly, instead of having to sneak in and out.
Having their activities more 'out in the open' also made it easier for them to run Liam's lorries out of the workshop to collect the motors they bought to do up.
(The teenage Liam Murphy's talents had caught the eye of the Lieutenant Colonel who commanded the Territorial Army Light Armoured Battalion he served with in WWII as a mechanic/fitter, so he made him an offer he couldn't refuse to come work for his newly renamed Standard-Triumph/Guy dealership in Worksop after the War. The first thirteen years at the dealership had been good for Liam, as he'd enjoyed tackling the challenges of the Standard, Triumph, Ferguson, Guy and Gardner machinery that came in, and the Colonel let him keep the large collection of military surplus lorries, artillery tractors, armoured cars, trailers and equipment he'd helped him get after the War and work on his 'projects' (for the first few years these were mainly converting over two thirds of the Guy lorries, artillery tractors and armoured cars he'd acquired into commercial vehicles and selling them off to reduce his debt to the Colonel) without interference in the large out-buildings allocated to Guy Motors side of the dealership. All that changed in Fifty Seven when the Colonel died and his son took over. The Colonel's son and the friends he'd installed in all the senior positions at the dealership had always enjoyed a life of privilege and status, and they didn't appreciate the attitude the dirty Mick who ran the workshop gave them, so they decided to get rid of him... Only to be told quite forcefully by Triumph's Competition Department that if they fired Liam Murphy, who had been instrumental in the success of many of their major projects since the late Forties, their dealership would find itself losing its perks and benefits, and without them they'd almost certainly be forced to close down within a year. As they couldn't fire him, they decided to try and make him quit, their first move being to tell Liam that if he didn't have all of his junk out of the dealership within a week, it would all be scrapped. That put Liam in rather a pickle, until a mate who worked at the rail yard told him about a disused workshop there that no-one ever visited and most had forgotten about. After a few favours had been called in, arrangements were made for Liam to rent the workshop on the sly and he quickly moved his lorries, trailers, equipment and everything else into the workshop... Luckily, while he only officially kept three of his lorries road registered, they all ran fine. So he just loaded everything into the lorries and trailers and used the lorries to haul the trailers off to the workshop in the middle of the night... The Colonel's son and his friends were shocked and furious when the lorries and men they'd arranged to cart off all of Liam's stuff arrived, to find the building empty. Liam just smirked at them when they demanded to know where everything was and told them that he had removed all his 'junk' from the dealership's property as ordered, but he had no obligation to tell them anything about where he took it... And provided paperwork to prove to the Police that he was the legal owner of everything he had taken when they tried to get him arrested for stealing the lorries and equipment that had been in the building... They got even angrier when they found out that they now had to pay outside companies, and buy quite a bit more equipment, to do all the work he'd previously been using his lorries, trailers and equipment for... As he'd been doing that to repay the Colonel for what he'd done for him, and for the use of the building, none of which applied any more... The pride of Liam's collection were his dozen Guy 6-Wheel Forward Control lorries... All of which had Otter cabs and epicyclic gearboxes, and were powered by Gardner 4LK, 5LW or 6LW diesel engines. He'd never had any plans to own an entire fleet of lorries, but the Colonel had offered him a deal that he couldn't refuse at the end of the War... A thousand Pounds for their Battalion's dozens of Guy 4 and 6-wheel lorries, artillery tractors and armoured cars along with a couple of dozen trailers and the associated equipment, with seven hundred and fifty of that thousand to come out of his wages over time while he was working for the Colonel's dealership. He gave himself various excuses for hanging onto the dozen assorted 6-wheel lorries and a few of the smaller 4WD lorries over the years, but by the early Fifties they'd proven their usefulness, even more so after he upgraded all of them to copies of the Mk III Otters' new wider fibreglass cabs in the mid-Fifties (which, between buying a cab off Guy and the materials to make them, had cost over a third of what the original package deal had, even with the Colonel getting the original cab for him at a dealer's price)... The Colonel's son and his friends had kept at him since then, doing everything they could to try and make him quit, but Liam was a stubborn little Mick and he just soldiered on, getting a great deal of amusement and satisfaction out of how much his malicious compliance was aggravating them.)
Vernon was using 'his' corner of the workshop to store his Tiger Cub, along with his other two Shooting Brakes and just about everything else he owned that was worth anything, and the WWII K-35 trailer fitted out as a caravan that Liam was loaning him for when he needed to get away from his family, to keep them safe from his family... He'd actually managed to get the four disguised rally cars and the '63 Vitesse and '64 Herald Saloons, '63 Herald Convertible and '64 Herald Estate and parts that Liam had identified as being the best options for their first build for three hundred and fifty Quid all up, because he caught one of the managers in a compromising position with an important customer's wife... Liam shook his head at him and told him that he was playing a dangerous game, but he wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth so they jumped into getting the Vitesse and Herald Saloons and Herald Convertible and Estate built up and sold as quickly as they could... Making over a thousand pounds profit and getting all four of the Shooting Brakes built up in the first seven weeks. While he warned Vernon not to expect things to go that well often, if ever again though, Liam was quite happy with how their partnership had gotten started... Especially when even leaving out the first batch, Vernon was managing to get the motors and parts for less than expected and get better prices when he sold the completed motors, so they were generally making at least seventy percent profit on every job... All in all, things were looking good.
At the end of Sixty Six, they managed to acquire the remains of a '2000PI' that competed in the British Saloon Car Championship, and while the shell was written off by being severely rear ended in its last race, they got it complete with the race drive train, suspension and brakes. Around the same time, Vernon managed to pick up the remains of a brand new '67 year model 2000 Estate that had been written off after completely destroying its front end in a crash for two hundred Quid, so in their free time, he worked with Liam and the lads in the Rail yard workshop to combine the rear half of the '67 Estate body with the front half of the racing car and fit the '67 interior and everything useful from the racing car car to the 'new' bodyshell… Once they'd repainted the new shell, swapped the Estate's identification plates to it, cleaned everything up and put it back together, Vernon couldn't believe what a tidy motor they'd managed to create out of the two wrecks… And if he'd thought that the Shooting Brakes were quick machines, with its race prepared 2000PI engine, suspension and brakes the '2000 Estate' was a bloody racing car! Given the shite he got from his bloody family when he brought the first Shooting Brake home, he kept the 2000 Estate at the workshop with his other Shooting Brake so that they wouldn't find out about it. He was sure that he'd be able to pass the 2000 Estate off as being a dealership motor if anyone saw him driving it.
By by the time Vernon had to do a runner in late 1970 because Petunia's pregnancy was starting to show and he'd been tipped off that the Bobbies were coming for him, his plain white '2000 Estate' and 'Herald Estates' had proven that they made good getaway cars on a number of occasions, because just about everyone took one look at them and dismissed them as cheap work vehicles… When they actually had far more power, more 'legs' with the overdrives and improved suspension and brakes. Vernon had thought he was done for one time just after he had been forced to do a runner because the Police raided the warehouse where he was in the middle of doing one of his deals, as he saw a Police car coming up the road towards where he'd stopped to get petrol before he ran out… But they just drove straight on past, even though they were presumably on the lookout for the ones who had escaped the Police raid in Sheffield in a fast white motor, as they had obviously done what most people did, dismissed and ignored the plain white 'work vehicle' the moment they saw it because it couldn't be 'fast'…
Vernon had had the 2.5 PI MK2 Saloon created around the same time as he acquired a written off 1970 2500 MK2 Estate and another 2000 MK2 for parts and was having the two combined to create one good motor. The majority of the Saloon came from one of Triumph's 1970 World Cup Rally cars, which Liam had tracked down through his dodgy connections after it disappeared upon its return to England, and Vernon bought it off the ones who'd made off with it for a ridiculously low price. The rest of the motor came from the remains of a brand spanking new 1971 year model manual overdrive 2.5 PI MK2 that had been written off after it was totalled, and Vernon acquired its remains for a fraction of the parts' value. The lads swapped the interior, trim and identification plates from the '71 2.5 PI to the rally car, then tidied it up and Vernon registered it as his new 1971 2.5 PI MK2 Saloon.
Basing it on a complete working motor made the conversion a much simpler job than usual, so a few weeks later Vernon got to drive his nice 'new' 2.5 PI home… Only to walk in to Marge and their father demanding that he give his old estate to Marge because he didn't need it now that he had that flash new motor, and her Anglia Estate was falling apart because he refused to take it to the dealership to get it fixed for her (never mind the fact that Vernon worked for the Triumph dealership, who had an agreement with the Ford dealership not to encroach on each other's territory). Needless to say, they weren't at all pleased when he abruptly told them that that wasn't going to happen because he'd already sold the estate to get the money he needed to buy the 2.5 PI, then stormed out and didn't return until the next night…
Of course, that wasn't the end of it, because Marge started harping on again about how a 'good' brother would have given his old estate to her instead of being a selfish git and selling it to make a Quid every time she saw him, but he managed to hold off on decking the bitch because he had a better way to put both her and his old man in their place… They'd almost gotten the 1970 Triumph 2500 MK2 Estate conversion completed for him, but he already had five motors to cover his getaway needs so he could afford to use this one to make them pay for the shite they'd given him and Pet… It took a few weeks to get the estate finished as a 'plain' 2500 Estate and get everything in place, but he got his Old Man to sign what he told him were the contracts for the 'loan' agreement to purchase a new white 1970 Triumph 2500 MK2 Estate and take delivery before he and Pet had to do a runner.
Two weeks after that he did a runner with Pet, and almost five years later he was still kicking himself for stupidly calling home to get Marge to forward any mail that came to him, because she was waiting for him at the post office where his PO Box was when he went to check his mail a week later… Saying that she'd decided to join them in Birmingham since it was his fault that their father had started demanding that she get a proper job and pay her share of the bills as soon as he stopped getting money from him… And she ruined their lives all over again...
Harry acknowledged the fact that he'd probably doomed Dudley to never being born this time around, but the way he saw it, he was probably doing him a favour by saving him from growing up to become what he did… And he was sure he was doing the rest of the world a favour by getting the 'adult' Dursleys put behind bars… Though he had to wonder whether Vernon had been hiding how cunning and persuasive he was the last time around, or he'd been nobbled by Dumbledore, because allowing a Muggle to think for himself could have interfered with Dark Lord Albus' Greater Good? It was possible he and Petunia may have turned out differently this time, but he wasn't going to second guess himself about dropping them in the shite. Because while Vernon appeared to have developed some degree of affection for Petunia in the time they'd been together, he had been having sex with her as a preteen and using her in his porn and blackmail operations since then…
Though to be fair, from Petunia's memories, she was the one who had initiated things between them, going to his room after Marge went to sleep to get him to 'comfort' her because the way his father looked at her sometimes frightened her…. That hadn't altogether been a lie, because the way he looked at her when he came home drunk from the pub (which was most nights) did make her skin crawl, as she'd seen that same look in the eyes of some of the other foster fathers before they started doing things that she didn't like to her… But it was more the fact that after he got confident enough to stand up to his father and shout him down, she began to see that Vernon was going to make something of himself and would be leaving Worksop behind, and she wanted to make sure that he'd take her with him when he did... And she found that she actually liked it when he held her and touched her, and what came further down the track, enough to go to his room most nights as soon as Marge started snoring, spending the night with him and encouraging him… Because Marge and her equally fat cow of a mother always slept in as much as they could, so when Petunia wasn't in her bed when they got up in the morning, they just presumed that she had already gone down to get breakfast started for everyone as she was supposed to… So while she hated Marge for filming it and selling the films to other perverts, she hadn't minded doing that with Vernon, or even the ones she was helping him blackmail… And she quite liked all the things she could get with the money they got from their various enterprises….
And Vernon was obviously treating the rest of his family like he would any other marks...
If Marge and their father had had half a brain between them, they would have known that Vernon was never going to give his 'Herald Estate' to Marge (they never knew that he had more than the one estate)… Because he never passed up a chance to make a Quid, so if he hadn't had plans for the estate, he would have had its sale organised before the 2.5 PI conversion was done... They might have also noticed that when he made Marge sign her 1960 Ford Anglia 105E Estate over to him in part trade for their father's 1970 Triumph 2500 MK2 Estate (Their Old Man was passing his 1964 Cortina MK1 Estate on to her when he upgraded to the 2500 Estate.), its value was recorded as almost nothing, then he had it stripped down, tidied up and repainted inside and out to get rid of the smell and damage from Marge's bad driving and dogs, and had the Anglia Super engine, trim and interior fitted before he sold it…
And between what he got for the tarted up Anglia Estate and the rest of the money he was taking off his father for what he believed were loan repayments for the purchase of his new Triumph Estate. Which he thought he was getting for a very good price because Vernon had taken over a sale that fell through and convinced the dealership that they'd be better off letting it go cheap than have prospective buyers see that people were backing out of their purchases (when in fact they were only lease payments because Vernon had gotten him to sign a five year hire purchase agreement)… He'd have an easier time covering the costs of the deals he had going… He'd be taking every penny his father had to spare for the next five years, and then he'd reclaim the estate and get it cleaned up for Pet… But as he'd been expecting, he got the estate back a lot sooner than that, because thanks to the way his father drank away just about all of the money he got his hands on, he defaulted on the payments in less than six months, so they repossessed it….
Vernon wasn't too happy about needing to get the motor his Old Man had been driving for less than six months completely checked over and repaired and tidied up due to his driving drunk, but he decided that it was worth it to get it upgraded to the '71 2.5 PI's drivetrain and rally parts so that he'd have another capable motor in the fleet... To his mind, the way his father had emotionally and physically abused him and Pet, his mother had deliberately turned a blind eye to all the abuse and his sister had blackmailed the two of them into making porn for her absolved him of any guilt he might have felt for taking every penny they had and leaving them with nothing, because fools like them deserved to be taken… So while there had been some extenuating circumstances, there was no question that Vernon had treated the rest of his family as nothing more that marks… And the way he treated those he saw as marks, and especially how far he was willing to go when he decided that they had become a liability, wasn't something Harry thought he could allow to continue unchallenged.
Not everyone in the the Dursleys' orbit was a write off though, when Harry took over Verona Developments he had a good talk to Liam Murphy and Liam was quite happy to quit his job at the dealership and join Jimmy's team in Cokeworth... Because it turned out that like Jimmy, the 'magic' Liam did with motors actually was magic.
Liam had known about Vernon and Petunia's relationship of course, but while he didn't approve because of her age, he could see that she was the one who instigated it and worked to keep it going, so he held his tongue... Until he found out that she was pregnant, because having sex with a girl that young was something he couldn't accept, even if Vernon was a teenager himself at the time, and hearing about the porn was even worse. That destroyed his personal relationship with Vernon and seriously damaged their professional relationship. The only reason he didn't stop working with Vernon altogether was that Vernon told him that he owned the workshop now, so if he didn't continue their working arrangement he'd lose everything he kept there, his motors, Arab, tools and equipment, WWII lorries, trailers and equipment, the lot...
That was nearly everything Liam had worked for the last thirty years to put together, so after calling Vernon every name under the sun, he begrudingly agreed to hold up his part of their agreement, but stated that he'd have nothing to do with Vernon outside their working arrangement... So when Harry offered to sign the workshop and everything in it over to him free and clear to prevent that happening again to sweeten the deal, he immediately won Liam's trust and loyalty.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Lemon Over, Along With This Chapter ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A/N: I never really liked the way Neville's Gran's character was always putting him down in canon, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to get rid of her… And she did remind me of that argumentative twat Zacharias Smith… But at least I forced myself to forego the pleasure of actually killing her off. ;^)
I'm taking a similar approach to what I did with Dumbledore for Vernon in this one, he's a wrongun for sure, but he's got a bit more depth than the moron with the Pavlovian response to the 'M' word in canon. That was the point of outlining his schemes and the getaway cars, to show that he was successfully running a variety of criminal operations, and he'd mapped out a viable escape plan for himself and Petunia…
Unfortunately for them, they had been laying low and trying to establish themselves in Little Whinging since they purchased 4 Privet Drive, so Vernon had decided to keep their six estates out of sight so that they'd still be able to rely on the surprise factor when they started using them… This meant that his otherwise clever exit plan to leave at least two of the estates somewhere in the neighbourhood that they could get to quickly on foot, in different directions from the house, and the others near wherever he was working, was invalidated by having them stashed away in a storage facility that he was using for some of his operations when the Police came for him.
While Vernon isn't quite the violent caveman he was in canon though, he's still morally bankrupt and irredeemable, and his fat cow of a sister is even worse. The way it played out in the warped chaos of my mind was that Bessy Brittania was just making porn with her little friends at first, but she saw a chance to make a lot more money when she caught her little brother and the girl their family was fostering in bed together and blackmailed them into making porn as well, and then followed them to Birmingham, blackmailed Vernon into supporting her and outed them as players in a kiddy porn racket just to make a few Quid, so Bessy Brittania is quite rightly burning in Hell… And if anyone thinks I'm being unfair to poor Marge, I suggest you re-read the books, because the cow has no redeeming features there either.
Between her and Vernon, Petunia has the only real shot at redemption, but I don't see her going for it because she liked the money and attention too much. She'll be the first and probably only one released from prison, but the question of whether she can put Titillating Tanya behind her and actually make something of herself is up in the air.