Chosen

by Paddy Bostock

“So rather than ‘happy,’ let us just say I am at peace with myself and leave it at that, shall we? Now, look, you’ve had a long day, old chap. I’ve been gassing for far too long and there’s still a lot to think about. So why don’t we call it a day and hit the hay?”

  “Call it a ‘dawn,’ maybe,” said Jeremy, as slants of light started filtering through the Shepherd’s Hut window and Shirley and Pete began showing signs of life.

  “Possibly literally and metaphorically,” said Barry. “In any case, let me show you to your quarters.”

  Seven

  Nobody made a mockery of Sir Magnus Montague and got away with it, and he was going to make damn sure Jeremy Crawford, the maths genius upon whom the bank’s future depended, wasn’t going to succeed where others had so frequently failed. First the little blighter had gone bonkers and lived in a barn with a pig. Then he refused psychiatric assistance. Then he had the audacity to disappear altogether, leaving Sir Magnus the laughing stock of his very own army of shrinks and thespians. At least he’d had the pleasure of firing them. But what was his next step to be? That was the million-dollar question.

  Back in his City office, he twirled around and around in his high-backed, maroon-leather swivel behind his mahogany Chippendale desk and, sucking on a Havana Tranquillity cigar, rehearsed what he knew so far. He’d checked with Sophie and found that all three of Jeremy’s cars were still in the garage, so he couldn’t have skedaddled in one of those. Scrub that escape plan then. Unless he still had his credit and debit cards on him. But Sir Magnus had also checked that possibility with Sophie. The cards were in his wallet in the bedside table where he always kept them. And, when Sir Magnus dialled, his smartphones only made funny, gurgling, watery noises, so no chance of his having used those to facilitate his escape. He was on foot then, which meant he couldn’t have got far. Great! So call in the sniffer hounds. But by then, the trail would have gone cold, however many pairs of Jeremy’s soiled underpants and socks the hounds were given to sniff. And the last thing Sir Magnus needed after the risible failure of his dimmo hired army was a pack of bemused hounds setting off in different directions sniffing each other’s bottoms for want of anything better to do.

  So what was his next step to be? Call the rozzers, possibly? But no. Too many of Sir Magnus’s business dealings were far too shady to get those blighters involved. Ditto for private eyes. Alert the press? Also no, for the same reason. So what was he to do? It was a conundrum indeed for a person of Sir Magnus’s limited intelligence, and frustration soon set in.

  “FUCKKKK,” he ululated, the Havana Tranquillity having failed to live up to its name.

  It was this racket—plus the same expletive being repeated six fold, each time accompanied with what sounded to Julie Mackintosh, Sir Magnus’s PA, a lot like headbanging—that persuaded her first to knock tentatively at the door, then, at the seventh ululation, to open it.

  And what Julie saw wasn’t a pretty sight. Never had she witnessed her boss so out of it. Flinging his arms about while nutting the Chippendale and continuing to mutter profanities.

  “Everything okay, Sir Magnus?”

  You know how it is with us British. How we ask people who’ve just been run over by a pantechnicon if they’re okay, and expect the answer: “Yes, fine, thanks.”

  But Sir Magnus, his silver expensively coiffed hair all askew, said nothing of the sort.

  Instead, he ululated FUCKKKK for an eighth time and took to headbanging his antique desk yet again.

  “Cup of tea, perhaps?” asked Julie, also Britishly.

  But then, from one second to the next, Sir Magnus stopped spinning around in his high-backed, maroon leather swivel and thumping his head on his desk, and shrieked “EU-RE-KA!!!” before calming down, taking a cerise silk handkerchief from the top pocket of his navy blue, pin-striped, Savile Row suit jacket and using it to dab at his fevered brow.

  “Tea, Julie. Earl Grey. Milk and two sugars as usual,” he barked.

  “Coming right up, Sir Magnus.”

  Julie was relieved at having no more than a cup of tea to deal with.

  And why had Sir Magnus calmed down so quickly? Because, using what he thought of as his “ingenious” mind, he had, out of nowhere, come up with an extremely cunning ruse. Which was, in his missing-persons search for Jeremy, to by-pass the old-fashioned media whom he didn’t want poking their noses into his nefarious business anyway and hit the unregulated social ones, which, as he’d learnt from America’s new president whom he much admired, was the new-fangled way to get to hearts and minds...in...an...instant. Twittering, he believed it was called. There was only one problem: Sir Magnus didn’t know how to twitter.

  But once Julie came back with the Earl Grey, that could be easily rectified. Julie was young and was sure to know how it worked. He had seen her thumbing her smartphone when she thought he wasn’t looking. It would mean taking her into his confidence on the Jeremy issue, of course. But, if the girl wanted a future at the bank, she would know on which side her bread was buttered, wouldn’t she?

  “Julie, thanks soo much for the cuppa,” he therefore said as his PA came back into the office toting a tray holding both the tea and a plate of the Hobnobs she knew Sir Magnus favoured. She was pleased to see him looking less loony.

  “Sir feeling a little better, is he?” she said, easing the tray onto the antique Chippendale number like the Savoy-trained waitress she had once been to help pay back her London School of Economics student loan fees. Truth be told, Julie Mackintosh was far better qualified to run a bank than Sir Magnus, but a girl had to climb the greasy pole somehow.

  “Tons better, thanks, sweetheart.”

  Julie didn’t like being called “sweetheart,” but what was she to do?

  “Glad to hear it. Anything else I can do for you, sir?”

  There were plenty of other things Sir Magnus would have liked Julie to do for him, fellatio top of the list, but currently there were even more pressing issues on his mind. Which was how Julie learned of the unexplained disappearance of Jeremy Crawford with whom she’d had sex, just the once, in a closet during an office party and Sir Magnus’s need to locate him soonest. By means of “twittering.”

  “A tad behind the times on the actual methodology though,” Sir Magnus explained while dunking a Hobnob into his Earl Grey. “So one would be awfully grateful for a little help in the matter. Very grateful...if you know what I mean,” he added, hoisting his hirsute eyebrows. “I’m sure you’re cut out to be more than a mere PA, eh, Julie?”

  Julie smiled rictally.

  “Thought so. Now, if I give you my script, perhaps you’d do me the small favour of twittering it into the Twitter zone or wherever it is twitters go. Ready? Got your instrument on you?”

  “Yes, Sir Magnus.”

  And so it was that Julie took from the secret back pocket in her leggings her latest model Apple iPhone and hit all the sites—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google Plus etc on which she (under the alias Jackie Lamur) had accounts—and posted Sir Magnus’s dictated message: MEGLOMANIAC BONKERS BANKER ON THE LOOSE, MILLION-POUND REWARD FOR INFO LEADING TO HIS CAPTURE. To which, at Sir Magnus’s behest, she attached the photo of a smiling Jeremy taken from the bank’s in-house “Top Troopers” page.

  “That should do it, sir. Now we just wait for responses.”

  “Wonderful, sweetheart! Fantastic,” said Sir Magnus, extending an arm to stroke Julie’s bottom. “I don’t suppose...?”

  “Oops, I think that’s my office phone,” said Julie, scuttling from the room. “Good luck on the Jeremy front.”

  A shame, from his point of view, that Sir Magnus hadn’t thought through all the implications of employing the Internet, naively believing it was inhabited by kindly folk ready and willing to help him in his cause. A bad case of “duh,” Julie could have told him, but it was no good telling Sir Magnus anything when his dander was up.

  ~ * ~

  It was at the behest of Gloria and Ron, plus her parents, Vince and Val, a
nd two of Jeremy’s squash club buddies, Harry and Jonah, that Sophie called the police to report her husband missing. Sir Magnus had proudly told them of the tweet announcing Jeremy’s disappearance and insisted that under no circumstance should they involve the law, but none of them was happy with that.

  “No good leaving it to the Internet, Babes,” said her father, “Honest” Vince, the local bookmaker and small-time crook. “Full of bleedin’ nutters it is. Ain’t that right, Val?”

  His wife flicked back her shoulder-length, peroxide blonde hair. “Spot on, Vincey. Tell any old story for a million quid, some of them shysters would. Gawd knows.”

  Gloria and Ron nodded in agreement.

  “Most of ’em even nuttier than our Jeremy,” said Ron. “And could be foreigners to boot. All over the bleedin’ world those messages go. China, Russia, India, North Korea…”

  “Right. And look what happened in the US,” said Jonah, at which Sophie, Gloria, Vince, and Val exchanged perplexed looks seeing as their preferred view of any news outside village gossip was “noise in the system.” This had even included 9/11, never mind the 2016 election.

  “A tweeting dickhead president elected by Russians,” Harry explained.

  “And by even more tweeting dickheads in…his...own...country.” Jonah was on a roll. “Populism it’s called. And look where it’s got us. How else would Brexit ever have happened?”

  But neither Sophie’s parents nor her in-laws had any answer to that—more noise in the system—and so didn’t encourage Jonah or Harry to continue with their exegesis. For them, it was enough to establish that the Internet was infested with dangerous lunatics, or, as Gloria put it: “Nasty spidery people who try to con you out of your money with fake emails.”

  “Right, that’s it, then,” said Vince, passing Sophie his phone. “So it’s agreed we call the cops. And make sure you cry a lot, Babes. Coppers don’t listen unless you cry a lot. Think you’re wasting police time.”

  Anyway, to Sir Magnus’s fury when he found out some days later, that’s how it was that Sophie came to call the local cop shop.

  It was shaven-headed, heavily bearded, six-foot-three PC Dennis “Shorty” Dawkins who picked up.

  “Fanbury Police. ’Ow may I be of hassistance?”

  Were weeping an Olympic sport, Sophie would have bagged the gold medal. All her (failed) actress cravings she put into the performance—wailing, snuffling, back-snorting, spluttering, eye-dabbing even though she wasn’t on camera, the whole shebang.

  “Problem, missus? Pussy got stuck up the chimney or sunnink?” said an unimpressed Dennis. “In which case, it’s the fire brigade you need,” he added, all set to hang up after a long day of tedious village crime fighting shared between him and his fellow officer Billy “Dustbin” McCann—Fanbury could only afford two policemen. Silly old biddy, Hattie Duchamps, known to the local cops as “Batty Hattie” at Chestnut Cottage reckoning she’d spotted an ISIS terrorist pissing up an oak tree in her garden. Ninety-four-year-old egregious grump, “Earl” Montmorency Fortague calling to tell Dennis and Billy that if one more “urban interloper” cyclist came within six inches of the 1958 Rolls Royce parked outside his front gate and almost scratched it, he would feel obliged to shoot him with the Boer War rifle he’d proudly inherited from the first earl of Fanbury, Earl Basil. The list of geriatric time wasters went on…and on, and on. Fanbury was a small village, which was boring Dennis and Billy into practical catatonia. Both had applied for transfers to anywhere in the vicinity with proper crime.

  Faced with Dennis’s unempathetic response, Sophie cranked up the decibels.

  “WAH, WAH, WAH, WOOH, WOOH, WOOH,” she went, until Vince nudged her and whispered, “Time to say something, Babes. If that’s Dennis you’re onto, crying’s not his bag. Should’ve warned you. Sorry.”

  So, only microseconds before Dennis hit the Quit Call button, transferred all further incoming calls to NAT (the Nighttime Assist Team), and closed up the cop shop for the night, Sophie got the slimmest of windows to tell of her husband Jeremy’s disappearance.

  Dennis sighed. “Go on then. But be quick about it.”

  Which was when Sophie, resurrecting the (poor-going-on-zero) thespian skills she’d had before Jeremy Crawford lured her from a promising stage and TV career with his money, moved swiftly from the horrorshow to the blunt and pithy.

  Dennis was stopped in his tracks.

  “Say that again, missus.”

  “I just told you, my banker husband went bonkers, lived in our barn with a pig called Pete for a bit, but...now...he’s...disappeared.”

  “Description?” said a newly interested Dennis, pulling a smartphone from his Kevlar vest and jabbing at it. For, yes, being a social media addict, the “megalomaniac bonkers banker” story resonated somewhere in the depths of Dennis’s normally switched-off mind. And, when Sophie gave Jeremy’s description and it matched exactly the pic of Jeremy Crawford Jackie Lamur had attached to Sir Magnus’s dictated post, little bells distantly chimed in Dennis’s otherwise blank mind and he became interested. Nothing Dennis would have liked better than a million quid bung in a brown envelope and promotion to DC for having cracked the case of the missing megalomaniac bonkers banker. Better not to tell Billy McCann anything about it, though. A million quid shared two ways was, after all, only five hundred thousand quid each.

  “I’ll be right over,” he whispered, signalling to Billy it was time he packed his bags and went home.

  Ron, Gloria, Vince, and Val breathed sighs of relief when Sophie passed back the phone to her father and announced her triumphant result.

  “He’ll be right over,” she said.

  Eight

  It was only as the result of Barry’s interest in worldwide flora and fauna that he and Jeremy also became aware of the Jackie Lamur post. Philosophically, Barry had no time for social media, particularly given recent evidence of their pernicious effect on the erstwhile reliable processes of representative democracy. By “the moron” in the White House’s psychotic use of Twitter, he was particularly exercised. Outraged, in fact, especially once the addiction had spread to politicians across the globe. Even to those of his once beloved Labour Party, which he had recently quit in protest at its use of such tools as a means to achieve cult status for its leader. No, no, Barry was no fan of what he termed “technology for zombies.” Unlimited choice, sharing, openness and connectivity it seductively offered, but who was really doing the choosing? Especially given the recent revelations of Facebook’s collection of personal data and the way it had been used to sabotage elections.

  Nonetheless, and despite these visceral misgivings, Barry remained a user, although no longer of Facebook. Why? Because he couldn’t bear to lose the remaining contacts he’d made all around the world as a compulsive photographer of local plants and animals using the latest Canon DLSR. Repulsive though the medium was, it had provided him with a unique means of sharing his pics with “friends” all around the globe and, in exchange, seeing theirs. His photo app was full to bursting with snaps taken by fellow enthusiasts from even the remotest of regions of the planet, regions Barry would never visit if he lived two hundred years. How he loved the insights he gleaned from these exchanges. And how proud he had been when his images of a badger sett in construction had won plaudits from even professionals in the field. In this regard, and this regard only, Barry found the activity an addition to his understanding of the aspects of life on earth that most interested him, his excuse being he chose it for specific benign purposes rather than it choosing him for random malign ones. And never had he posted personal information beyond the very basic requirements.

  Even so, he couldn’t resist the odd peep at other folks’ pages, just in case there was anything he should know about. And Jackie Lamur was one of his favourites. A girl from Liverpool who could make him laugh even in some of his darkest moments, and Barry had had plenty of those.

  “Hey, Jezza, take a look at this,” he said, as the pair settled down to b
reakfast after returning to the Shepherd’s Hut from taking Pete and Shirley for their morning walkies.

  “Bloody hell,” said Jeremy, peering at the screen announcing the million pound reward for info on the whereabouts of the escaped megalomaniac bonkers banker. “That’s me,” he added, with a sharp intake of breath, pointing at the picture clipped from the bank’s in-house “Top Troopers” page. “What the fuck?”

  Barry raised a perplexed eyebrow. “Hard to say, but there’re thirty-four thousand, eight-hundred and sixty-two hits already.”

  (Including one from Dennis “Shorty” Dawkins using the sobriquet “Betty” and saying she was “on the case.”)

  “According to this, you’ve already been sighted in Minsk, Sausalito, Prague, St Ives, Beijing, Mumbai, The Outer Hebrides, and...”

  “Christ. Any clue who posted this crap?”

  “Jackie Lamur. She’s a regular.”

  Jeremy blinked. “Jackie Lamur?”

  “You’ve read her too?” said Barry, surfing the site for more places Jeremy had been spotted—Helsinki, Cairo, Knotty Ash, Kansas City, Knotty Ash again...

  Jeremy swallowed hard and nodded. “Yes. Her real name is Julie Mackintosh. Jackie Lamur is her alias.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “Because she’s PA to Sir Magnus fucking Montague, my ex-boss.”

  “Ooops.”

  Marie in Montmartre, Fritz on the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, Anon in Knotty Ash again, Salah in Cairo...

  “Ooops is right. The old bastard has no idea how to use the Internet, so he must have got Julie to do it for him,” said Jeremy, calming a little. “No doubt his idea of a clever plan to scare me back onside after the shrink idea had failed and I’d scarpered. What he won’t understand is what ‘viral’ means and the can of worms that can open.”

  Jaime in Barcelona, Norman in The Maldives, Gianfranco in Naples, Anon in Knotty Ash yet again.

  “Still, at least we now have a clue as to who’s behind all this,” said Barry, still scrolling.