“For all the good it will do if I’m to become the subject of a million-pound manhunt. And now you’re sucked into this nonsense too.” Jeremy sighed. “I’m sorry. Maybe the ‘chosen’ business was just a piece of foolishness and I should have stayed put and got on with it.”
“I think not, old chap. ‘Should haves’ don’t count. The past is a foreign country and there’s no point in revisiting it and wondering how one might have behaved differently and to what end. The conditional perfect is a pointless tense and should be elided from grammar. We are where we are and that’s all that matters. No good trying to re-live what we have already lived and attempting somehow to rearrange it. That way only madness lies. And you are not mad. Remember?”
Jeremy smiled.
“And as for my part in this little adventure, you’ve no need for regrets. Who knows, it could be fun,” said Barry, still scrolling.
Mike in Montreal, Isabel in Tenerife, Gunnar in Reykjavik, Samantha in The Scilly Isles...Anon in Knotty Ash...
“Still, strange of the old bastard to use the social media. You’d have thought his first option would be to call the cops.”
Jeremy shook his head. “Not him. Far too much to hide. A major player in the two-thousand-and-eight banking fiasco and as yet still undetected.”
“And you, Jezza?”
Jeremy winced. “I was his right-hand man. That’s why he needs me. For my famous maths, but also to stop me singing.”
“I hadn’t realised.”
“Yup, Bazza. You have a reprobate on your hands. So sorry to have landed you in this mess, like I said.”
“No worries, old fellow. Between us we’ll find a way.”
Titch in Toronto, Dan in Damascus, “Horse” in Brooklyn NYC, the moron in The White House in Washington DC, Kitty in Nebraska, Giorgio in Calabria, Jim—named at last—in Knotty Ash.
“We’ll just need to put our thinking caps on, that’s all. And, to be square with you, Jezza, at my time of life there’s nothing a chap needs more than a bit of a challenge. Now, how about a nice bowl of my famed porridge with honey-roasted peanuts? Going to need to keep our strength up.”
Jeremy laughed for the first time in a long time. The devil’s laughter, was it? He no longer cared, just dipped his spoon into Barry’s special breakfast and took a bite.
“Yum,” he said after the first mouthful.
~ * ~
Sophie, Vince, Val, Gloria, Ron, Jonah, and Harry were astonished to find that when PC Dennis Dawkins said he’d be “right over,” he’d meant “right over.” Once he and Billy McCann had switched all incoming calls to Nighttime Assistance and closed down Fanbury Police Station, he’d told Billy he’d see him tomorrow then feigned his own departure by climbing on his bike and starting to pedal. When Billy was safely out of sight on his way back to Mrs McCann and their brood of mini-McCanns, however, Dennis—aka Facebook’s “Betty”—had swiftly backpedalled, dismounted, stowed his bike in its shed, fired up Fanbury’s only cop car, and, with blue lights flashing and wah-wah-wahs on full blast, burnt rubber to Jeremy’s ex-mansion, before which he skidded to a stop, showering gravel all over the place.
“Bloody hell,” said Vince, watching through the lounge curtains as Dennis climbed from the car, smoothed down his uniform, and headed to the door. “Never seen The Dork in such a hurry before.”
“The Dork” was what Vince called Dennis, both because he thought it a witty take on “Dawkins,” and because he reckoned Dennis to be a dork, given he’d never sussed even a single one of Vince’s shadier bookmaking schemes. Mind you, so much the better for Vince.
“Looks like he’s got ants in his pants,” said Val, as Dennis marched to the door and pulled the chime bell rope, which was still broken because nobody had thought to fix it after Sit Magnus’s yanking.
“I’ll let him in,” said Sophie. “This is my house and I’m the one who called.”
“S’cuse us if you wouldn’t mind,” chorused Jonah and Harry as they sidled out of the lounge into the abutting kitchen area, dimmed the lights over the six-foot-long “eating island,” and checked the back door for an escape route through the solarium/conservatory and into the “garden.” Why? Because, upstanding citizens though they might have appeared to be, there were certain little past misdemeanours—Internet banking fraud, for example—Jonah and Harry did not want broadcast around their new hideaway in Fanbury. It was one thing for them to agree to the coppers finding their pal, Jeremy, but quite another to meet one of them. Not when their mug shots were still on Scotland Yard’s computer.
“Missus Crawfish?” Dennis said as Sophie opened the door.
“Crawford”
“Ah-hah,” said Dennis, taking a notepad from his top pocket and scribbling at it sinistrally. “You called about your missin’ ’usband. Mind if I come in?”
Sophie stood aside and obliged. Never having had dealings with the local constabulary, she’d not before encountered Dennis and reckoned he was pretty funny- looking for a policeman, what with the bushy beard and everything. But then she supposed practically all young men had to have beards nowadays in order to prove they were men. Still, at least he was tall. She liked her policemen tall. There were far too many undersized ones knocking around, in her opinion.
“This way, Detective,” she said.
“Constable, missus.”
“Never mind. Do take your boots off and follow me. I’ll introduce you to the family.”
“Boots off?”
“House rule. We don’t allow muck on the carpets.”
Dennis frowned. Given the nature of the socks he hadn’t changed for two days, this wasn’t going to be a good start to the investigation.
“Don’t worry. We have guest slippers,” said Sophie as Dennis struggled with his laces. “Oriental to fit all sizes,” she added, peering down at his immense feet. Still, to be tall—and therefore reliable—she assumed a person also needed big feet. For balance.
“Blue or red?”
“Blue. To match the uniform, innit?”
“Mmm, I like a man with dress sense,” said Sophie as Dennis finally unbooted himself and, as fast as possible, slipped his size twelves into the slippers Sophie held out at arm’s length while averting her nose. “Now you can follow me and meet the family.”
And so it was that PC Dennis “Shorty” Dawkins made his way into the luxurious depths of the Crawford mansion.
“Careful not to bang your head on the chandeliers,” Sophie advised him along the way. “They were very expensive.”
First the boots, now the head, bit of a bleedin’ bossy bitch this Missus Crawfish, Dennis reflected, inching his way along behind her, head bowed.
“Women,” he muttered very sotto voce as he followed Sophie. Bloody glad he’d never got married. Especially not to Gladys, the barmaid at The Wigeon With Wings for whom he’d once carried a torch. Wonderful bottom, and the sorts of knockers a man would pay money to jiggle—but finicky. Pernickety even. Beer mats always needing to be re-arranged on the bar, beer-pump handles always having to be wiped for fingerprints, glasses so clean they were unhealthy. No, no, a fine bedmate Gladys would’ve made, but not a wife.
“Hi there, Dennis,” said Vince, choking back any dork-related slips-of-the-tongue when the copper finally made it into the mega-lounge. “So glad you could spare the time to join us in our hunt for Jeremy. Do take the weight off your feet,” he added gesturing at a faux Louis Quinze green velvet armchair.
“Jeremy?” said Dennis, lowering himself carefully onto the seat for fear of breaking it.
“Sophie’s husband? The missing one? The reason you’re here? Name of Jeremy?” said Vince, still fighting off dork references.
“Ah-hah, Je-re-my,” said Dennis, taking the notebook from his top pocket and again scribbling sinistrally at it. “So...and his whereabouts are now unknown, you say?”
“Unknown,” Vince confirmed.
“And, apart from bein’ our village bookmaker, you are?” said Dennis.
“Vince, Sophie’s dad. And this is her mum, Valerie,” said Vince, wafting a hand at Val, who was looking pale and distressed as instructed by Vince.
“Okey dokey,” said Dennis, scribbling some more. “And these?” Nodding across at Gloria and Ron, who were also looking pale and distressed as instructed by Vince.
“We’re Ron and Gloria, Jeremy’s poor parents,” said Ron.
“We want him back. Wuh-we nuh-need him back,” said Gloria, dabbing at her eyes.
“Right then. An’ Missus Crawfish is called Sophie, I deduce.”
“Correct, Constable,” said Ron. “Our darling daughter-in law. And it’s Crawford.”
“Ah-hah,” said Dennis, turning pages in his notebook, jabbing his pen at them, and thinking, “Christ, what with the Sophie bint as a missus an’ this lot as mums an’ dads, no bloody wonder the poor bloke did a runner.”
“And Jeremy was last seen?”
Which was when Dennis learned from Vince Jeremy hadn’t actually been seen by any of them for two whole weeks, during which time he’d been living in a barn with a pig called Pete and refusing anybody admittance.
“Pete?” asked Dennis, pen poised.
“Pete,” Sophie confirmed. “We’d been planning on eating him, but now it’s too late.”
“Pete has vanished too?”
“Yes. Been spirited away.”
“Jeremy and Pete? Both of them ‘spirited away’?”
“Yes.”
Dennis’s largely ineffective brain was starting to hurt.
“By demons?”
“Wuh-we duh-don’t nuh-know,” said Gloria. “Tell the nice policeman about Sir Magnus, Sopha.” That’s what Sophie’s mother called her daughter: Sopha.
So, while Dennis scribbled sinistrally, Sophie recounted at length both failed attempts by Jeremy’s boss Sir Magnus Montague and his team of trick cyclists to heal Jeremy’s evidently deranged mind.
“And the second time, huh-he wuh-wasn’t even there,” she wailed.
“No Jeremy? No Pete either?” said Dennis.
“Nuh-no. Both of them...gone.”
“An’ this Sir Magnus geezer? Wanna spell that for me? Might need to contact him.”
And so it was that Dennis “Shorty” Dawkins learned the family version of Jeremy Crawford’s disappearance. Not that he didn’t already know Jeremy had disappeared, of course. As “Betty” on Facebook, he already knew about and coveted the million quid reward for clues leading to his discovery. But it was always good to get details from the horses’ mouths.
Not that Dennis was much impressed by these horses. Snobby dipshits, he reckoned. And again, as he pocketed his notebook, made his excuses, headed back to Fanbury’s only cop car and burnt rubber away from the estate, he felt sympathy bordering on empathy for poor old Jeremy. And Pete. Dennis had always rather liked pigs. But, wherever they were, at least they were safe from their loony family.
Nine
Sir Magnus Montague was startled and baffled at the global response to “Jackie Lamur’s” plea for information as to Jeremy’s whereabouts when Julie plugged him into his little-used desktop iMac and showed him her results.
“Bloody hell,” he said as she scrolled up and down from “Maxim” in Minsk to “Jim” in Knotty Ash and back again. “Stop going so damn fast, woman, you’re hurting my eyes.”
“I thought sir would be pleased,” said Julie, faux pouting. “What with it going viral and everything. So many to choose from.”
“Viral? Sounds like a bally disease. And sir is not pleased. Sir is confused.”
“Sir confused?”
“Yes,” Sir Magnus was forced to admit, grabbing at his box of Havana Tranquillities. “How the hell am I supposed to pick any one from this lot? And you’re not telling me Jeremy bloody Crawford has been all over the world in the last seven days. What am I supposed to think, that he’s Superman or something? Some damn bollocks this Internet business has got to be. Talk about finding needles in haystacks.”
Julie shrugged and stared off. “Only doing my best for you, sir.”
“Well, your best isn’t bally good enough!”
“Sorry, sir.”
Sir Magnus held a Havana Tranquillity to his ear, twizzled it between a thumb and a forefinger, then, satisfied it was up to scratch, cut off its end with a Donatus Gold-plated V- cutter, stuck the cigar in his mouth, and fired it up with a St Dupont Slim 7 lighter. Julie wafted her hands before her eyes and coughed thespianly, but Sir Magnus puffed on regardless.
“And where is this Knotty Ash place that keeps coming up? One has heard of most of the other places. But Knotty Ash?” he said from within the cumulus of Tranquillity smoke swirling around his head. “Sounds like some joke town.”
Julie went on with the hand wafting but, having grown up in Liverpool, she was also smiling. Sometimes wished she’d never left the place. And in a way Sir Magnus was dead right. It was a joke town. You had to be a comedian to live there, some said. But not a day went by without her remembering the times when things had gone wrong and somebody would come up to her, throw an arm around her shoulders and say, “C’mon, love, give us a smile and you’ll be all right. If you don’t laff, you cry, right?” And she’d laffed, and every time the pain had gone away. When did that ever happen in London? Never, that was how often. Everybody too busy, busy, busy and locked up in themselves. Well, more fool them.
“It’s a suburb of Liverpool,” she said. “Made famous by Ken Dodd. Remember him?”
Sir Magnus frowned. “Ken...?”
“Dodd, the comedian with the big teeth and the tickling stick? The one with the diddymen and more than his share of happiness?”
Sir Magnus stopped frowning and, for once in his life, chuckled.
“Oh, Doddy,” he said. “I rather liked him. Completely off his trolley, of course, but, how shall I put it...?”
“Funny?”
“That’s it. Funny. A proper clown. And he’s a Knotty Asher, is he?”
“Was. He’s dead now. But yes he was a Knotty Asher all right. Born and bred. Wouldn’t leave the place for a big clock. They made him a sir before he died.”
“A sir? Like me?”
“Like you, Sir Magnus.”
“Good Lord. Still, it takes all sorts, I suppose. Anyway, back to the point at hand. Namely what we are to do with this deluge of improbable information concerning the whereabouts of Jeremy Crawford? Do you know this ‘Jim’ chappie from Knotty Ash, for example? Could he be a reliable source? Or is he perhaps just another diddlyman?”
“Diddyman. Too early to say, sir,” said Julie, who had no Knotty Ash ‘Jim’ in her address book. Mind you, as far as she was aware, she hadn’t befriended ‘Maxim’ in Minsk either. Or any of the other oiks who’d swamped her pages with self-evident lust for a million pounds. Some hacking must have gone on somewhere, but Julie had no idea how or where.
“Perhaps sir would just like to leave the problem to me?” she suggested. Betty in Fanbury, whose post had only just pinged into the list, looked like a person of interest, for example. Especially as Fanbury was where Jeremy had lived before disappearing. But then Jim in dear old Knotty Ash was also tempting.
“Indeed sir would,” said Sir Magnus, as the Havana Tranquillity this time had its desired effect and he flopped forwards across his mahogany Chippendale desk, whispered “aaaahh,” and took to snoring for England.
“Sleep tight, bossy boy,” whispered Julie, heading for the door.
~ * ~
After they’d put their thinking caps on, Jeremy and Barry debated at length Jeremy’s dilemma in face of the deluge of Internet interest in his whereabouts, which had by then spread to the conventional media. After all, newspaper editors aren’t proud when it comes to hooking a big fish in case somebody else hooks it first. They too have smartphones and aren’t the types to ignore a viral when it smacks them in the face, especially if it can be hitched to a human-interest story. Within a day or so of it airing, therefore, Jacki
e Lamur’s post and its global response had been spotted. And tweaked a little to give it more oomph. In its first revised version, Jeremy became the lone parent of six children whose drug-addicted mother had abandoned the family home to become a porn star in America, where she was hoping to have sex with the madman in the White House. And now the bonkers banker had done a runner too, the six children were in the care of a grandmother, herself suffering from dementia.
But that was only the first tweak, featuring as a mere taster in a few inside pages.
Once The Daily Truth’s editor, Simone de Vérité, spotted the legs such a story might have, however, it took on a whole new—international—dimension. No more bother with such fripperies as children and porn star wives for Simone. No siree. Instead she was able to reveal as headline news that she and her team of “undercover experts” had been able to link the disappearance of megalomaniac bonkers banker in question to not only the 2008 banking crash but also (“tellingly”) to Maxim in Minsk who, it was believed, had CIA-confirmed connections to Bratva, Russia’s Mafia, and thereby direct links to the Kremlin.
Similar and yet more inventive interpretations were to follow in The Daily Grunt, The Sunday Planet and other organs across the nation, all of them directly linking the unexplained vanishing of what had become the “renegade Trotskyite megalomaniac bonkers banker” to Russian president Igor Ripurpantzov himself. According to these accounts, not satisfied with the Internet fiddling of the election of a paranoid narcissist to The White House and the destabilization of the UK’s age-old parliamentary democracy by flooding the social media with pre-Brexit referendum bot-generated pro-Leave posts, Ripurpantzov’s quest for world domination had sunk to the level of tempting into his inner circle Britain’s top talent, possibly by doping them. The News described the phenomenon as “BRITAIN’S NEW BRAIN DRAIN,” while The Morning Scrutiny asked: “IS THE BONKERS BANKER THE BURGESS AND MACLEAN FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY?” and, in similar vein, The Evening Informer wanted to know: “IS THE BONKERS BANKER THE NEW EDWARD SNOWDEN?”
And so on...and on...and on as the story took flight and was further amended to suit the tastes of readers in places as far flung as Australia where normally it was only cricket or rogue kangaroos that made the headlines. Back home even supposedly balanced heavyweight titles and respectable TV and radio channels pounced on the story, careless of the danger of yet again arousing the same xenophobic angst that had caused voters to rally to such specious concepts as “Britishness” and “sovereignty” in the 2016 Brexit referendum.
Chosen Page 6
