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, Jackie 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.
“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.”