“Some imaginations these guys have,” said Jeremy as he and Barry surfed the net for updates on his situation.
Barry nodded. “But possibly not so far off the mark. Who would bet against the Ruskies having had a cyber pop at Western democracies and then trying to lure away their top talent? Was it an American who built the first atomic bomb or was it an imported ex-Nazi?”
“Why me though?” said Jeremy. “All I wanted was a life away from my old life. And now this.”
“To sow uncertainties, promote fake news, and sell newspapers, my friend. You are simply the latest convenient catalyst for a good story. You know the other meaning of that word, don’t you?”
“Lie.”
“Exactly. And you have been chosen as the unwitting subject, object, whichever way you want to look at it, of someone else’s narrative.”
Jeremy sighed. “Again?”
“Afraid so. Just let us say you have been framed as the latest player in the age-old game called: ‘Sod the truth if porkies can make more money.’”
“Just when I was trying to be the real me. And now I get to be someone else’s toy?”
“It seems that way.”
“Fuck.”
“Don’t worry, old chap. News never lasts longer than a femtosecond these days. Should the moron in the White House get himself nuked overnight and suspicion fall on either the pudgy bloke with the funny hair in Pyongyang or the Kremlin’s latest version of Stalin, you’ll be yesterday’s news just...like...that...” Barry snapped his fingers. “And be free to plough your own furrow. Won’t he, Pete?”
“Oink,” said Pete.
“Another shot of the nettle brandy, old chap?”
Jeremy sighed and held out his glass.
Ten
Dennis “Shorty”/“Betty” Dawkins wasted no time in his hunt for the internationally sought fugitive megalomaniac bonkers banker, Jeremy Crawford. The very next morning, claiming to Billy McCann, he was off in search of the egregious local poacher, Squiffy O’Donnell. He freed from their kennel his ace sniffer dogs, Colin, an English Cocker Spaniel, and Hans, a German Shepherd, leashed them up, and set off. Ostensibly he was heading in the direction of Squiffy’s caravan, but his real goal was the Crawford mansion again, this time in search of clues.
Having been caged up and not done any proper sniffing for a long time, Colin and Hans were excited, along the way leaping up trees where they suspected squirrels may be hiding, sniffing at fallen branches and leaves then pissing on them. And, embarrassingly for Dennis, although mercifully for him no villagers were watching, on one occasion yanking so hard on their restraints in pursuit of a cat called Maxine sitting stock still in the middle of the lane staring at them, that their master fell flat on his face and was dragged ten metres along the tarmac before he could regain control.
Maxine, still sitting sphinx-like with the dogs only inches from her face, thought it was very funny as Dennis finally managed to scramble to his feet and holler at Colin and Hans they were VERY BAD BOYS who wouldn’t be taken walkies any time again soon unless they behaved themselves.
“No treats for YOU unless you beHAVE,” he told them, as Colin and Hans did their best to look repentant by sitting on their bottoms and giving Master the doe-eye.
Maxine shook her head and stalked off into a hedgerow, saying “Dogs!”
The problem Dennis faced, however, was that, despite their misdemeanours, Colin and Hans refused to budge unless they were given treats, both of them eyeing Dennis’s Bonios-For-Good-Dogs satchel meaningfully.
“But you haven’t been good dogs. You’ve been very bad dogs,” Dennis explained, reading their eyeballing.
Colin and Hans exchanged puzzled glances that translated as: “Some weirdo, this human. What’s a dog supposed to do when it sees a cat? Go up and say, ‘Hi there, Cat. How you doin’ today?’”
The other problem Dennis faced was that, despite being their supposed master, he wasn’t actually very masterful at all. Never had been. The dogs knew that; he knew that. And so it was he relented, dug into his Bonios-For-Good-Dogs satchel, and, breaking all the rules of reward-for-good-behaviour dog training, gave Colin and Hans one each.
The rest of trip to the Crawford mansion was to all intents and purposes a mobile picnic for Colin and Hans. Every three paces they would sit, beg, and be given a new Bonio. But at least Dennis and his “highly trained sniffer dogs”—as he introduced Colin and Hans to Sophie when they eventually arrived at the Crawford mansion—were on hot on the trail of her errant husband.
Well, hot-ish. Actually more like lukewarm. Fine, the dogs sniffed around the barn picking up scents of its previous occupants for a bit, but once outside again, they lost much of their interest and took to rambling about the estate, pissing on plants.
“Omigod, stop them doing that on my begonias, will you?” Sophie barked, reminding Dennis of the irritating ‘no boots in the house’ line she’d come out with on his last visit.
“They’re checking,” he said. “Maybe they’ve picked up a trace of your ’usband. Maybe he pissed on the begoonias too.”
“Begonias.”
“Whatever.”
“And Jeremy never did his business on begonias.”
“Not even late at night when you were asleep? Hard to tell what a bloke might do when he’s gone bonkers. Plus there’s the pig to think of, innit?” said Dennis as Colin and Hans took an unnatural interest in a blackberry bush and pissed on that too.
“Oh...my...GOD. We’ll never eat those now. I was going to get the cook to make a pie out of them. With apples,” said Sophie pointing out a Bramley tree in which Colin and Hans, following what they took to be her instructions, also took an unnatural interest in and pissed on too.
Losing the will to live, let alone any faith in Dennis and his filthy dogs having a snowball’s chance in hell of finding Jeremy, Sophie faux wept, stamped a foot, tugged her hair theatrically, turned, stormed off back to the mansion, and slammed the door, causing the newly repaired door chimes to start ding-a-ling-a-linging at full volume.
“Hmm,” said Dennis. “Not the best of starts, boys.”
Which Colin and Dennis took as a sign of them needing more Bonios-For-Good-Dogs.
“Hardly any left in here,” said Dennis, ferreting about in his satchel. “And we’ve got a whole morning’s sniffing ahead of us.”
But Colin and Hans weren’t buying any of that old “hardly any left” bollocks, and remained resolutely on their bottoms with their tails swishing at the grass. Obediently.
“All right then. But if I give you these last two...”
Colin and Hans smirked at each other, knowing full well Master was bluffing and there were at least another twenty-two hidden in the satchel.
“...You’ll have to promise to be good boys and do what Master tells you.”
“Raaf, raaf,” chorused Colin and Hans, sitting up straight.
Mind you, even when they left the Crawford estate and headed to the stream along which Dennis surmised Jeremy might have beaten his retreat, there was still no response from the dogs. More squirrel chasing, more pissing on vegetation—mainly ferns and suchlike—but little indication of a human or porcine trail to follow. And, let’s be quite clear about this, Colin and Hans were in fact pretty expert in such matters. Colin had once led Billy McCann to a heroin stash worth two million pounds in a disused warehouse, and Hans had a gold medal for his part in a counter-terrorist sting in a town near to Fanbury leading to the arrest of the anti-Brexit protesters Hugo de la Zouche and Janet Googlesbury (both aliases) who had been letting off fireworks the local police mistook for AK-47 rounds.
No, no, the lukewarm trail Colin and Hans were being asked to follow wasn’t just lukewarm. It was, as Sir Magnus Montague had suspected when he’d thought of employing sniffer dogs, stone cold. A fact Dennis was also forced to concede after no more than three hundred yards of pointless pissing, and some pooing, by which time the Bonios-For-Good-Dogs satchel really was empty.
<
br /> “Bugger,” he said, before calling Billy McCann to come and get them in the cop car.
“No sign of Squiffy O’Donnell in these parts,” he told Billy, loading Colin and Hans into the hatch at the back when Billy drew up alongside.
“Always was a touch nut to crack, old Squiffy,” said Billy.
“Tell me about it. Wanna turn on the old-time radio? My brain’s hurtin’.”
And so it was that Dennis “Shorty/ “Betty” Dawkins returned to base empty-handed. Colin and Hans liked the ride though, particularly the part when the radio played Patti Page singing “How Much is That Doggie in the Window?”
“Raaf, raaf,” they sang along, both wondering how much longer they’d have to go on being sniffer dogs. Dreaming dreams of a better life in Hollywood.
~ * ~
“Anyway, real me or no real me,” Jeremy asked Barry, “what if neither the pudgy bloke with the funny hair in Pyongyang nor the new Stalin in the Kremlin nuke the moron in The White House and nothing else earth-shattering happens to divert attention from me? If the worldwide media have my story, you can be sure MI5 and MI6 will too. Brooding on it, they’ll be. And how long will it take them to find me? No time at all, that’s how long.”
Jeremy’s was a perfectly legitimate concern. The HQs of MI5 and MI6 at 12, Millbank and Vauxhall Cross respectively were abuzz with rumours, counter-rumours and suspicions, some even connecting the megalomaniac bonkers banker’s objectives not only to aiding and abetting the Kremlin’s clear desire to “fuck” with “our sacrosanct British democratic values,” but also—this was only a conjecture, but it was “on the table”—to aid and abet homegrown ISIS fighters back from Syria in their quest to “rock the boat.”
“We live in interesting times, eh, Muriel?” said Sir Hubert Humphreys, Head of MI5, to Dame Muriel Eggleshaw, Head of MI6, over tea and crumpets in the sequestered drawing room of Dame Muriel’s club in one of the back streets behind Park Lane.
“Indeed so, Hubert. One needs to be on full alert, does one not?”
“Indeed one does, Muriel.”
“Any indications so far from your chaps where the megalomaniac bonkers banker chappie might have gone? Moscow? Damascus? Holed up in some foreign embassy claiming diplomatic immunity like that Wikileaky chappie.”
“Not a one,” said Sir Hubert. “Internet overflowing with sightings. But you know how it is...”
“Staff stretched? Budget cutbacks?”
“Cutbacks, my dear. Downing Street still scrimping and saving in line with their austerity mantra, protesting insufficient moolah to go around if we’re to pay off the bally Europeans for our divorce settlement even though we were supposed to save money on the deal, so...”
“No progress.”
“None at all. Little blighter could be anywhere so far as we at Five know. Any better news from your lot?”
“Ditto. Do help yourself to a crumpet, Hubert. A top-up of tea?”
“No chance of a snifter of something stronger, I suppose?”
Dame Muriel clicked her fingers and a flunkey called Jackson tapped on the door in secret tapping code, three taps in quick succession followed by four with intervals of ten seconds each.
“Enter,” said Dame Muriel. “Ah Jacko, brandy for our guest and possibly a splash for me too, if you please.”
“Dark days, Hubert, eh?” she added, once Jackson had bowed out.
“Dark indeed, Muriel. Shifty tactics and terrorists wherever one looks.”
Silence as Jackson returned with a bottle of Asbach Selection 21 and two crystal brandy glasses engraved with the legend Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense.
“Frankly, just between the two of us and these four unbugged walls, of course...” said Dame Muriel, pouring the brandies when Jackson had again bowed out.
“Mais bien sûr ma chère. Ça va sans dire.”
“Let’s face it. We haven’t a bally clue what’s going on. Let alone where to find this megalomaniac bonkers banker blighter.”
Which top-secret conversation would have been music to Jeremy Crawford’s ears, except, like everybody else in the (Dis) United Kingdom, he wasn’t party to it and therefore continued to ask Barry what he was to do if attention weren’t diverted from him by either the little pudgy bloke with the funny hair in Pyongyang or the new Stalin in the Kremlin nuking the nutter in the White House.
“Well,” Barry replied, smoothing down the wispy grey tresses that hung to his shoulders. “The way I see it we only have two options.”
“We?”
“You don’t think I’m going to leave you to fight this battle on your own, do you?”
“Well I...Thanks so much,” said Jeremy, who’d never before had a friend of this order. Acquaintances yes, hundreds of them. But they had all been too busy with their own interests to concern themselves with anybody else’s.
“I appreciate it. Really I do. I...”
“No need for hyperbole, old fellow. If one is involved, one is involved, and that’s that. Now, to the two options?”
“Okay, shoot.”
“Pretty simple, really. Either we do a runner or we stick around and face the music. In either scenario, we would, of course, need to be heavily disguised. Many years ago, in a brief moment of vanity back in Oxford, I saw myself as something of a thespian. Even appearing as Macbeth on one occasion, the poor player that struts the stage before being heard of no more and so on. Explaining life as ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’”
Jeremy smiled. “A fair description of my tale.”
“Nobody like old Shakey when it comes to hitting nails on heads. But I wasn’t for a second imputing idiocy to you, my friend.”
“Although the worldwide media are. And indictable idiocy to boot.”
Barry shrugged. “And what do they ever signify except for sound and fury?” he continued. “As I said, it’s their bread and butter. Anyway we’re getting off-track here. My point is that I have a nice little stash of costumes down in my cellar. Never thought I’d have a use for them again, but, you know how it is with old friends, how you just hate to dispose of them.”
Jeremy nodded, although until recently the concept had been alien to him. Having been born into a throwaway society then becoming wealthy beyond even his expectations, he had never kept anything past its sell-by date. If his last year’s 4x4 Merc developed a glitch, he bought a new one with all the latest gizmos, keeping only the A1 JC vanity plate from the old one. Image was everything and needed to be constantly renewed. Now, of course, he knew better. Understood it had never been him choosing the car, but him having been chosen by it. The memories lingered.
“All from Shakespeare plays, the costumes?” he said.
“No. Not all of them. Wouldn’t want you wandering about looking like Puck, now would we? No, no, there are items in there from productions of Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, Pirandello, Brecht and even rock musicals. Just in case I hit the big time. Which, of course, I didn’t.”
“Must be a big cellar you have.”
“It is. Now, are we to run? Or are we to hide in plain sight? That is the question,” Barry was saying, as there came a knock at the door.
“What the…?” said Jeremy, wide-eyed and fearful.
“Damned if I know. I’d better answer it, though. Go and hide in the kitchen.”
“Anybody home?” came a voice through the unused letterbox as the knocking continued.
“Just a mo,” Barry called until he was sure Jeremy was shut in the kitchen with the door locked.
“Ah, PC Dawkins, and what may I do for you this fine afternoon?” he said when he opened the door. “And what nice dogs you have,” he added, patting Colin and Hans on their heads. Which they liked. “Raaf, raaf, raaf,” they said, sniffing the scents of both Shirley and Pete and wagging their tails meaningfully at Dennis “Shorty”/“Betty” Dawkins.
It was as the animals were getting to know each other that Barry again asked the purpose of Dennis’s visit. �
�Pleased to see you, of course, but I’m a little busy just now and…”
Which was when Dennis explained he had reason to believe Barry may know something about the whereabouts of the megalomaniac bonkers banker everyone was making such a fuss about and would be obliged if he could step inside for a moment. At which Barry was forced to weigh his options. The easiest course of action was to deny all knowledge of bonkers bankers, wish Dawkins well in his enquiries and close the door. But what if—somehow, God only knew how—he had evidence of some sort and came back with a warrant to search the premises, in which case the whole bally police force would be involved? The very last thing Barry needed. Simpler by far to deal with just the one copper and come clean by explaining the true nature of Jeremy’s presence at the Shepherd’s Hut and the manner in which it had been blown out of all proportion by the media. That should take to wind out of his sails.
“Step this way,” he therefore invited Dennis.
Colin and Hans were very pleased.
~ * ~
And how, you will be asking yourselves just as Barry had, did Dennis, Colin and Hans finally track down Jeremy even when the trail had apparently gone stone cold and they’d all returned to the cop shop empty handed? By Dennis telling Billy McCann he was damned if he was going to give up on finding Squiffy O’Donnell and intended to give it one last try, that was how. Then by him and the dogs setting off, again on a false track in case Billy got suspicious, before knocking on the doors of each and every one of the villagers on Fanbury’s main drag and asking if they’d spotted anything at all unusual on the night of Barry’s and Jeremy’s escape from the barn. And of course, they all had. UFOs, ISIS lookalikes creeping up to their windows, crazed cyclists about to scratch their cars. The list went on...
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