Chapter 16

The two McAllister twins were thinking similar thoughts. They always did when it came to business. It was why they had done so well since taking over their father’s business which was lying almost in ruin. It was their inheritance they were told and both were smart enough to know that their father’s grand plan was outmoded and hadn’t matured like fine old whisky. They could have just walked away when their father died but instead took a mortgage out on the warehouse in Inverness to buy the printing works adjacent to it. These two were known for their shrewdness and also their ability to slip in and outside the law as teenagers. They took their warnings and soon were seen to be law abiding citizens. They weren’t. They were just smarter at not getting caught. They knew the ins and outs and the supply and demand of the increasing drug culture in Inverness. No-one suspected anything. Least of all the main money men who had thought that Inverness was a pretty safe place as long as you relied on thuggery to keep the pushers and other dealers in line. The McAllister brothers were new school and they quietly and relatively quickly subsumed all competitors. Pushers found themselves dealing with complex cut-out mechanisms that separated them from their new bosses. They had to use them or find themselves short of money or a source for their own consumption. The brothers also were able to improve the observable drug presence in Inverness while at the same time actually increasing the market. The method of transition was all to do with profit margins. They simply sold purer stuff at lower prices. The thugs couldn’t match them and despite threats to pushers and consumers who had no idea where the source of the better stuff was, all that achieved was to raise their own profile amongst the local police. One or two got banged up in prison and the others lit out for greener pastures. If coup d’états were managed that easily in some countries, transitions would be bloodless.

The real target for the brothers was not the low-level drug takers, but the big money earners who liked their special treats served with panache. That market was even easier to break into because this clientele had no qualms about paying for quality and the McAllisters only supplied the best.

The delivery method was Ewan’s idea. He had looked at the old machinery in the printing works and looked at a special presentation bottle of scotch specially packaged by a local distillery in honour of his father. As he sucked on his trademark small lollipop on its thin hollow stick, a number of ideas all came together. The high-end delivery market issue was solved and the clients were very happy to receive a bottle of scotch to go with their new found habit.

Things changed dramatically when Camden was diagnosed with an adult dose of asthma and he left the cold wet air of Inverness and headed to the warm sunshine of Australia. Within a month he knew the criminal landscape pretty well. Larger cities were off the agenda as there were rival groups always at war with each other over territory. There was often little subtlety involved and the Victorian gangland killings were ample evidence of this. The model of a remote place where there was a mix of ultra-rich and basic journeymen had worked for them in Inverness. It was one he was very familiar with. After six more months of searching, he had settled on Cairns. There was not even any need to set up a supplier for the drugs nor even a mechanism for distributing them. All he had to do was cultivate a market for “sales”, undercut the current network and take over under the guise of a legitimate business model. The importation of whisky that was being delivered around Scotland and Northern England with additives attached was his supply chain. Cartons would come packed and bonded from Scotland, land in Brisbane and be transported to Cairns. With the prosperity of places north of Cairns for the super-rich, there was money to be made. Australians weren’t that different to anywhere else. The good stuff demanded top dollar and people were willing to pay for it. That was the real money-making part. The stuff that could be sold on the street kept the warehouse in business. Within two years, a legitimate liquor importing and distribution business became the main supplier of a range of drugs from amphetamines through to high end cocaine. No-one knew. No-one suspected. The McAllister boys may not have done well at school and been a little wild in their youth but they were very fast learners.

This was their first major mistake each of them knew. Twenty-five years of plying their trade and nearly everything had gone without a glitch. The use of cut-outs, drops and cells had made this business quite unique. Two people alone knew the whole workings of the business. Even the seller of the powder didn’t know who his clients really were and as the same clients were paying over the top prices, any further investigation was not necessarily a good business move. There were no backhanders going to police. That was the undoing of many would be illegitimate entrepreneurs. Vans travelling back and forth with bonded liquor or printing supplies were part and parcel of the way the legitimate business ran around Inverness. Even the occasional search revealed nothing. Small containers of powdered coloured dyes were never suspected of being anything else. Most of them were dyes but the occasional secretly marked ones were the weak link, but in twenty-five years none had been seized. The drop in amphetamine and other drug use around Inverness over the years, was seen as a sign that the standard of living was much improved around Inverness. It wasn’t. It was actually the stringent controls that the McAllisters had put on the distribution around Inverness. These stringent controls were also in place in Cairns which had a low crime rate in most areas and virtually no visible drug scene amongst those who could actually afford it.

It wasn’t such a strange thing that twins thought alike, but what were the odds that these two at this time, caught in similar circumstances half a world away were? Each was trying to come up with a fault in their own supply and delivery chain. Neither could find any and immediately began blaming the other.

Had the person who had organised the separate kidnapping of them known of their pondering, he would have taken some solace in their anxiety. They would pay a much higher price very shortly, but it was good that they should suffer along the way to that end. He had watched the workplace where the instigator of the incident that had changed his life had frequented. He was a very patient man and a very good photographer with a great telephoto lens. His patience had been rewarded when another worker had left some incriminating evidence behind. It was a strange plastic tube filled with a light-coloured powder. It was not very long and the contents all but completely gone. That had been the first physical clue. On his close-up shots of the worker, there was one which showed the man sniffing the contents from the tube. He kept the tube and one of two others that were around, although from what he could tell from the images, most workers disposed of the tubes far more secretively, crushing them into small shards and grinding them to dust.

That first clue and the minute amount of powder led him to wonder where these strange tubes came from and he backtracked as best he could gathering photographic evidence as he went. Outsiders, had they known, would have said he had OCD the way he operated, but he was just really focused on something that was very important to him. He found the pushers, the dealers and eventually the supplier in Cairns. His diligence paid off when he found the link back to Inverness. One careless disposal of a thin tube was going to wreak havoc in Far North Queensland and in Far North Scotland.

What he had was circumstantial and he knew was incomplete. Did he take action himself and just have those he knew get dealt with by the courts? Would they be dealt with appropriately? Did he take direct action himself? Both courses may have given him some satisfaction but may not stop future things happening as he wasn’t sure that he would capture the all the important ones in his very narrow net. So, he backed away and concocted his plan that was working to perfection so far. The first time that he had seen the tube and the photo of its use, it reminded him of something from his youth.

Sarge was just walking down the corridor of the Inverness police station when the cogs went clunk in his mind and pieces of images fell into place. Perhaps he shouldn’t have yelled, “Bomb!” when the answer became clear because everyone around dived for cover. The image he had seen was of a sherbet bomb lolly, one where you sucked some sherbet powder from a packet into your mouth through a hollow stick. That was what the tubes reminded him of. When he had finished apologising to everyone around, he explained his notion that the tubes could be used for inhaling whatever was secreted inside them. The McAllisters had managed to not only find a way to secrete drugs, but an easy way for end users to get a quick benefit quite discreetly.