Chapter 11

He had scrimped and saved and cashed in everything he could to raise money for this venture. The family home went. He could not bear to enter it again. It was his by rights, but it now held what for him were too many sad memories. It was so difficult to get past it just being a house and not a home, but somehow, he managed and the driving force that now compelled him to get up every morning and face a new day had been the motivation. He would be penniless after all this went down. He would have exacted some sort of revenge but the cost for hm was very severe. He knew that it could be terminal and on really rough days he hoped it would be. The blessed relief of not having to live in an empty world. Not that he was in any way religious but somehow, he hoped that he might meet his family again one day. Religion was a major bugbear but especially now because how could any self-respecting god let things happen to his family the way it did? How could such a god let any of the horrible things that continually happened in the world? There was either no omnipotence, or plain indifference, or this god was a vengeful one and indiscriminately took out his hatred on anyone. At times this very quiet man just shook his head in disbelief that people actually bought what he thought was stuff and nonsense. His family had believed and he hoped for their sake they were right but he missed them and this just confirmed that he was probably right. He was a victim too. He was still alive but barely living. Former friends had been able to do little to stop what they felt was an inexorable decline in his mental health. His doctor had prescribed pills but he didn’t take them, preferring to sell them on the black market and boost his bank balance. In the end he had lost not only his family but his friends, his house, his job and his identity. What he hadn’t lost was his purpose. Just what would happen when he achieved his goal, he was unsure. So much physical, emotional and intellectual energy was going into the task that he had set himself that there would be nothing left at the end, but an empty withered shell of what he once was. Completely spent he would stop and hope that he died. There was more than just those who had died that were victims too.

Two philosophical minds were at work at the same time albeit a day and a bit’s flying time away. Sarge caught his reflection in the window and inwardly there was a deep sigh. He was showing the signs of ageing. Once, he threw his shoulders back proudly and with little effort. Now he walked with a slight stoop and muscles twinged when put his body properly perpendicular. Homo erectus was becoming homo decrepitus. A while ago, he carefully parted his hair down one side. These days, it was so thin and centrally receding that it parted itself in the middle. Another sign of ageing was the way men's pants rode up higher. He was not at the belt just below the nipples stage, but his days of hip-wearing of jeans was long past. He also wondered whether it was normal to sweat more the older you got. Young people could run and walk for kilometres with only a few beads of perspiration showing. Walking any distance and the sweat would pour off him in quantities enough to fill a swimming pool. Luckily, it wasn't hot in Inverness and it was a compact city. Amelia had told tales of winter and snow on the ground. With his perspiration problems, he might become a huge icicle statue in winter and then melt like snowman in summer. Not that the summer weather they were experiencing rose to great heights, temperature wise. They needed the heater on inside the police station he reckoned, but it wasn't on. Fifteen degrees and uniformed police were only in shirts. He had put thermals on before arriving at the police station this morning. He noticed that Liz wore a jacket that was a little bulkier than he remembered. She had something else on obviously under her blouse. It was even colder outside when they walked to the station this morning and so they had covered the distance in double quick time. 

"I can turn the air-conditioner down if it's too warm for you," Donald McPherson offered. 

Sarge wanted the temperature up, not down, but politely said nothing. 

As much as he didn’t want to go out into the bracing murky sunshine, Sarge suggested that perhaps it might be better to split their endeavours. Liz looked at him with barely concealed contempt. She knew what this was about. The McAllister’s were not old school when it came to bookkeeping. The four police officers had been wading through spreadsheet after spreadsheet of Ewan’s end of the business, forensically looking for anomalies. Sarge was really good at that if the spreadsheets were on printed sheets. These weren’t and he was struggling. As soon as he was forced to look at a screen his eyes glazed over almost as if they had their own screensaver in action. To him, a keyboard was an anathema in comparison to a pencil. He felt the same about using a search engine on the internet. He would trot out the old line about you should never believe anything you read on the internet. He would rather find it in a book or ask someone whom he trusted who might know. Computer technology was just one of his many phobias. Liz knew that he couldn’t be seen to be afraid of technology or unable to use it. But he needed to be told in no uncertain terms that she knew.

“What did you have in mind, Sarge?” she asked flicking a pencil across the room at him. “I suppose you are going to leave Amelia and I here to do all the hack work, while you and Donald go swanning off to the pub!”

“Now that’s a good thought,” he said tossing her thinly veiled insult back at her, “But I wonder if Donald doesn’t mind us having a look at the printing works. There’s something fishy about that packaging and printing for the whisky in Cairns. It would take very experienced officers to find it though.”

Liz was about to throw something much heavier at him but saw his quick wink and the mouthed thank you aimed directly at her. Her anger subsided very quickly and she saw there was no rank pulling and smugness that had crept in. It would be a first if it had.

“Obviously Amelia, these two don’t understand that only precise diligent investigation solves cases and not some fanciful hunches. Let’s leave these boys to their Sherlock Holmes fantasies and we’ll soldier on doing real work,” Liz rejoined.

Both Donald and Amelia had stood slack-jawed watching the interplay. Amelia was grinning like a Cheshire cat but Donald looked aghast and seemed to be deciding whether Australians were just really strange, or whether the Australian police force had lost all traces of discipline and dignity. Nevertheless, he pointed the way down the corridor to the back entrance of the complex where the police cars were kept.

The police cars were an eye opener for Sarge. They were obviously necessary for driving through the small narrow streets and one lane country roads. No doubt the engines were modified as well to be high performance, but these cars were not built for a nearly two metre tall solidly built Australian. He hoped that the seats would go back far enough. One bonus was the fact that in Scotland they drove on the correct side of the road. He’d been to Europe and nearly died of fright when cars raced down the opposite side. All the usual mod cons that he was used to were in the car he had barely managed to squeeze into. The layout was similar to the ones he occasionally used and if he was driving, he would have had no difficulty finding the controls for lights and sirens and the radio. He absently wondered if the Navman would speak in almost indecipherable Scottish.

The printing works and adjacent warehouse owned by Ewan McAllister were on the fringes of the city and down near what Donald described as a loch as the drove there. Sarge made a passing reference to the Loch Ness monster as a joke, but Donald pointed out that the loch they were driving next to was indeed Loch Ness and that the ‘monster’ brought in heaps of tourism money into the area. Without there being the myth of the monster, the region would have suffered and perhaps even had to invent a similar myth to survive. This conversation made Sarge confused as to whether the monster was actually there or not. He wasn’t in a position to see the twinkle in Donald McPherson’s eye.