At the time, we knew absolutely nothing about what Eamon had been blackmailed into doing and tried to offer as much support as we could to Nick though it was obviously limited. Eamon had mentioned to us one evening that when he was a student there was a problem with the loan he had taken out and he referred to the Bulmer character. As it happened, we knew about the photographs as we had bought a magazine in Amsterdam which included them. It was clearly a difficult time for Eamon and we decided it would be better not to mention it.
There really is nothing new for men with a liking for other men to be blackmailed. If you look closely, history is littered with it but Eamon was and still is a good friend and he didn’t deserve that. But as for Nick, what a terrible introduction he had. It all happened so fast and it just went from bad to worse. A total nightmare, as some have said, and it seemed that everyone had a view about what had happened.
When Eamon attempted to smuggle the drugs to France, he had no idea of the importance of the shipment. Anyone can be a smuggler – just a mule – and there’s no doubt it happens in and out of every major city in the world, but if he had not been caught, that junk would have found its way onto the streets and killed many thousands of people. Bulmer was merely an innocent as far as it all went. The Arthur Daly link, who was never going to achieve the heights of someone as powerful as Fabrier, had his uses. Bulmer was not aware of the breakdown of the actual cocaine compound either. To him it was just another way of making a few hundred pounds.
It wasn’t really cocaine anyway but something quite new which hadn’t been given a true “street” name yet. It was never destined to be the sort of thing you might buy on street corners. On the contrary, it was the next generation of the drug that everyone in that world who was making money out of it wanted to get their hands on. It had been designed with the power classes in mind. Not the student on the street but the professionals with more money than sense. A designer drug of the highest calibre. It was refined but had gone through a rather different process in Argentina, with a couple of ingredients added. We have no idea what they were though there have been rumours that it contained a type of lichen. Its little secret was worth many millions of dollars. The powder Eamon carried was powerful. I suppose one way of describing it was rather like a ginger beer plant – simply add a little more liquid and watch it grow and grow. When it was mixed with purified water, it formed a fungus on the edges which when scraped away and dried out was as pure as the original few kilos. The cocaine, or whatever you chose to call it, just doubled with the additive. No more International shipments or couriers concealing it about their bodies. No more setting fire to poppy fields or third-world country drug refineries. A self-perpetuating additive which was found merely by chance by the Argentine farmers who could not even see that simply by selling this magic potion, it would ruin their lives and bring the whole drug trade to a standstill if it was widely available.
But the best part was that it was so addictive that the user had no idea they were becoming hooked until it was too late.
But Eamon had no idea about all that until it was too late. The climate was changing then and being blackmailed because of your sexuality was something which was dying out. Even the newspapers were no longer interested in what people got up to in their private lives, and the laws were changing. But threats to loved ones will always be one of those crimes that no amount of legislation will remove.