“Exactly. And you have been chosen as the unwitting subject, object, whichever way you want to look at it, of someone else’s narrative.”
Jeremy sighed. “Again?”
“Afraid so. Just let us say you have been framed as the latest player in the age-old game called: ‘Sod the truth if porkies can make more money.’”
“Just when I was trying to be the real me. And now I get to be someone else’s toy?”
“It seems that way.”
“Fuck.”
“Don’t worry, old chap. News never lasts longer than a femtosecond these days. Should the moron in the White House get himself nuked overnight and suspicion fall on either the pudgy bloke with the funny hair in Pyongyang or the Kremlin’s latest version of Stalin, you’ll be yesterday’s news just… like… that…” Barry snapped his fingers. “And be free to plough your own furrow. Won’t he, Pete?”
“Oink,” said Pete.
“Another shot of the nettle brandy, old chap?”
Jeremy sighed and held out his glass.
Ten
Dennis “Shorty”/“Betty” Dawkins wasted no time in his hunt for the internationally sought fugitive megalomaniac bonkers banker, Jeremy Crawford. The very next morning, claiming to Billy McCann, he was off in search of the egregious local poacher, Squiffy O’Donnell. He freed from their kennel his ace sniffer dogs, Colin, an English Cocker Spaniel, and Hans, a German Shepherd, leashed them up, and set off. Ostensibly he was heading in the direction of Squiffy’s caravan, but his real goal was the Crawford mansion again, this time in search of clues.
Having been caged up and not done any proper sniffing for a long time, Colin and Hans were excited, along the way leaping up trees where they suspected squirrels may be hiding, sniffing at fallen branches and leaves then pissing on them. And, embarrassingly for Dennis, although mercifully for him no villagers were watching, on one occasion yanking so hard on their restraints in pursuit of a cat called Maxine sitting stock still in the middle of the lane staring at them, that their master fell flat on his face and was dragged ten metres along the tarmac before he could regain control.
Maxine, still sitting sphinx-like with the dogs only inches from her face, thought it was very funny as Dennis finally managed to scramble to his feet and holler at Colin and Hans they were VERY BAD BOYS who wouldn’t be taken walkies any time again soon unless they behaved themselves.
“No treats for YOU unless you beHAVE,” he told them, as Colin and Hans did their best to look repentant by sitting on their bottoms and giving Master the doe-eye.
Maxine shook her head and stalked off into a hedgerow, saying “Dogs!”
The problem Dennis faced, however, was that, despite their misdemeanours, Colin and Hans refused to budge unless they were given treats, both of them eyeing Dennis’s Bonios-For-Good-Dogs satchel meaningfully.
“But you haven’t been good dogs. You’ve been very bad dogs,” Dennis explained, reading their eyeballing.
Colin and Hans exchanged puzzled glances that translated as: “Some weirdo, this human. What’s a dog supposed to do when it sees a cat? Go up and say, ‘Hi there, Cat. How you doin’ today?’”
The other problem Dennis faced was that, despite being their supposed master, he wasn’t actually very masterful at all. Never had been. The dogs knew that; he knew that. And so it was he relented, dug into his Bonios-For-Good-Dogs satchel, and, breaking all the rules of reward-for-good-behaviour dog training, gave Colin and Hans one each.
The rest of trip to the Crawford mansion was to all intents and purposes a mobile picnic for Colin and Hans. Every three paces they would sit, beg, and be given a new Bonio. But at least Dennis and his “highly trained sniffer dogs”—as he introduced Colin and Hans to Sophie when they eventually arrived at the Crawford mansion—were on hot on the trail of her errant husband.
Well, hot-ish. Actually more like lukewarm. Fine, the dogs sniffed around the barn picking up scents of its previous occupants for a bit, but once outside again, they lost much of their interest and took to rambling about the estate, pissing on plants.
“Omigod, stop them doing that on my begonias, will you?” Sophie barked, reminding Dennis of the irritating ‘no boots in the house’ line she’d come out with on his last visit.
“They’re checking,” he said. “Maybe they’ve picked up a trace of your ’usband. Maybe he pissed on the begoonias too.”
“Begonias.”
“Whatever.”
“And Jeremy never did his business on begonias.”
“Not even late at night when you were asleep? Hard to tell what a bloke might do when he’s gone bonkers. Plus there’s the pig to think of, innit?” said Dennis as Colin and Hans took an unnatural interest in a blackberry bush and pissed on that too.
“Oh… my… GOD. We’ll never eat those now. I was going to get the cook to make a pie out of them. With apples,” said Sophie pointing out a Bramley tree in which Colin and Hans, following what they took to be her instructions, also took an unnatural interest in and pissed on too.
Losing the will to live, let alone any faith in Dennis and his filthy dogs having a snowball’s chance in hell of finding Jeremy, Sophie faux wept, stamped a foot, tugged her hair theatrically, turned, stormed off back to the mansion, and slammed the door, causing the newly repaired door chimes to start ding-a-ling-a-linging at full volume.
“Hmm,” said Dennis. “Not the best of starts, boys.”
Which Colin and Dennis took as a sign of them needing more Bonios-For-Good-Dogs.
“Hardly any left in here,” said Dennis, ferreting about in his satchel. “And we’ve got a whole morning’s sniffing ahead of us.”
But Colin and Hans weren’t buying any of that old “hardly any left” bollocks, and remained resolutely on their bottoms with their tails swishing at the grass. Obediently.
“All right then. But if I give you these last two…”
Colin and Hans smirked at each other, knowing full well Master was bluffing and there were at least another twenty-two hidden in the satchel.
“…You’ll have to promise to be good boys and do what Master tells you.”
“Raaf, raaf,” chorused Colin and Hans, sitting up straight.
Mind you, even when they left the Crawford estate and headed to the stream along which Dennis surmised Jeremy might have beaten his retreat, there was still no response from the dogs. More squirrel chasing, more pissing on vegetation—mainly ferns and suchlike—but little indication of a human or porcine trail to follow. And, let’s be quite clear about this, Colin and Hans were in fact pretty expert in such matters. Colin had once led Billy McCann to a heroin stash worth two million pounds in a disused warehouse, and Hans had a gold medal for his part in a counter-terrorist sting in a town near to Fanbury leading to the arrest of the anti-Brexit protesters Hugo de la Zouche and Janet Googlesbury (both aliases) who had been letting off fireworks the local police mistook for AK-47 rounds.
No, no, the lukewarm trail Colin and Hans were being asked to follow wasn’t just lukewarm. It was, as Sir Magnus Montague had suspected when he’d thought of employing sniffer dogs, stone cold. A fact Dennis was also forced to concede after no more than three hundred yards of pointless pissing, and some pooing, by which time the Bonios-For-Good-Dogs satchel really was empty.