Chapter 15

Half a world away, there was no partying going on, just a watching brief. He knew it would take time and he had all the time in the world. He had one shot at this. No sense in just getting small fish aplenty when the big game ones were around too. His prisoner, was almost resigned to his fate and wouldn’t cause any troubles as long as things stayed much as they were. He was not about to feed any extra information to prisoner. That was for the movies. This was a deadly and very much for real game that was being played. He had masterminded it, looked for any loophole for nearly a year and then he pounced. The two-prong attack was the signal not to the McAllisters, but to the ones who were the moving pieces in the game and they were doing far better than he expected.

The fact that he knew of the talented team in the Cairns CID was not surprising. Their reputation had spread widely across the state. They should have been poached by cities further south but obstinacy got in the road. Their leader was not about to move and they were not about to desert him. Of all the bad things that had begun this situation, this was the one very fortunate one.

He had no idea about the quality of those in Inverness but the disappearance of both twin brothers at the same time should have been a signal. Those who had done the kidnapping there had placed a very small video camera in the printers’ production area. A similar one, he, himself had placed in the corner of the warehouse in Cairns. He was able to access these through almost untraceable links and he kept a watchful eye on progress in both cities. He watched the Cairns team going back and forth and seemed alarmed at one point that it was only left to one officer. Then strangely enough, the lead Australian detective turned up on video footage at Inverness. He calculated that this would save him a week or so in his open-ended time frame. He was way out with that prediction.

There would come a time when an end play would be enacted. He was confident that the Cairns team would flush out all pathways that led to those involved, before he enacted that endplay. The trouble was he wouldn’t know, but gut feeling had led him to discover the link between that silent isolated layby and the warehouse in Cairns. He had watched and waited for six months after that to see how it functioned illegally. It was by chance and through the use of the Internet that he made the connection between Cairns and Scotland. The beginnings of the trail and the ends of the trail were beyond the capacity of a single person so he devised a plan to use the police force of two countries to do it for him. That was the genius. Not that this was all about praising himself for his tireless work, far from it. He was paying a debt that could never be repaid.

His delight increased markedly when the younger Cairns officer went back to the warehouse and examined one of the cartons very carefully and the packaging on the single bottle left out. The officer had used a sharp bladed knife and as skilfully as a chef gutting and deboning a fish, had removed the plastic tubes. Things indeed had advanced. He watched earnestly at the footage the next day from Scotland. Four officers were there and the taller Australian one was looking at the packaging machine and the various components. The officer then grabbed three sheets of cardboard, one of which was corrugated, one of which had printing on it and placed them at the start of the assembly line and started the machine. The sheets rolled through pausing to be glued, pressed into a foldable shape and then trimmed. Before being automatically turned into a standard carton. The officer looked at one station that seemed to be bypassed and went out of camera range and then returned with some tools. He stripped off the cover of the component, seemed to be tracing the wires to a hidden switch and seemed to smile directly into the camera. However, he put the parts back together, placed another three sheets at the beginning after directing his colleague to put some plastic tubing into a small receptacle. The machine started again, pausing as before at each station but this time at the one that had been bypassed. It slowed and then moved on to be turned into a carton. The camera had not shown what had happened but one female officer checked the receptacle and indicated all tubes had gone. All four officers gathered around the second carton that had been made. For a while they obscured the watcher’s vison. The older male, obviously a fisherman too, pared away the outer layers to reveal the tubes standing upright. The watcher was in awe. He had assumed that placing such items in the boxes has he had found, must have been very labour intensive, but it wasn’t. A simple machine did it. He was even more amazed when the group of four used a second set of machinery also with a hidden switch that made the piped cardboard packaging for individual bottles.

It took an inventive mind to come up with such a proposal. It took an equally inventive mind to track down those who created it. The watcher had always been interested in the human mind. His career had been built around it. That career was long gone and there were pangs at times for the loss. Welcoming bright aspiring minds into his classroom, watching them learn and in turn learning from them. He was no genius he knew from the outset but he applied himself hard to whatever he did, sometimes he ruefully admitted and ultimately regretted at the expense of time spent with his family. They too were gone. His focus remained on only one thing. He had no plans as to what he would do should that one thing be achieved. Still, he admired both the McAllisters and the detectives who had found what he had found; both really for the same reasons but for vastly different motives. He flicked the switch on his laptop, flipped the lid and carried it back to the old two-bedroom apartment he had rented for the past year. He supposed at one time it had a view of the Cairns foreshore, when it was first constructed, but that was now obstructed as developers had secured coveted larger blocks closer to the sea. From the balcony where he had been sitting, his view consisted of the wrong side of a resort hotel where clever architects had placed only service windows facing his way and the guests had a view of the palms that lined the foreshore and not what had become the seedier side of town. That suited him fine. He saw no-one and no-one saw him. He had become used to that and actually revelled in the anonymity.

He laughed to himself as he remembered the first and only time that he had met the tall detective he now had placed a large amount of trust in. It was a brief sixty second interface at the counter of the police station over a speeding fine for a car that he didn’t own, and on a road he had never been on. The problem was resolved almost instantly, but even then, he had seen some special qualities in the young police sergeant. They were the same sort of qualities that he had identified in only a few of his students and seen in a few of the “experts” who had addressed him at teacher conferences. There was an assurance, an awareness of own personal skills and a genuine ability to demand respect from those below and above, whilst returning it in kind. Some people he knew had that aura about them. Some tried to create it in vain with sheer bravado. Those that had it, never flaunted it, never advertised it and often never made the most of it. He cast his mind back to the difference between the man that he had met all those years ago and what he knew of him now and witnessed on his hidden cameras. That young police sergeant, he thought and he smiled again because he knew the word young to be wrong as he was about the same age; was someone who was making the most of those special qualities. As he closed the ill-fitting sliding doors to the balcony, he wondered what had been the catalyst for change in that police sergeant.

South of Cairns, that catalyst, Sarah, was dealing with two children, two tired and cranky children and wishing Sarge would hurry back home from his latest junket. The phone rang and it was Nat. He rang her most days if Sarge was away and his wife Jess, Sarah’s best friend called around frequently. Suddenly all the worry about two children was swept away. She slumped to the floor as Nat relayed the message. Her eldest daughter, Katie found her in tears and tried her best as an eight-year-old to console her mother. The tears were however not ones of great sadness. Katie had no idea why her mother kept saying, “A sporran, a bloody sporran!” But she definitely was going to look it up on her iPad.