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, and 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.