“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.