“Bugger,” he said, before calling Billy McCann to come and get them in the cop car.
“No sign of Squiffy O’Donnell in these parts,” he told Billy, loading Colin and Hans into the hatch at the back when Billy drew up alongside.
“Always was a touch nut to crack, old Squiffy,” said Billy.
“Tell me about it. Wanna turn on the old-time radio? My brain’s hurtin’.”
And so it was that Dennis “Shorty/ “Betty” Dawkins returned to base empty-handed. Colin and Hans liked the ride though, particularly the part when the radio played Patti Page singing “How Much is That Doggie in the Window?”
“Raaf, raaf,” they sang along, both wondering how much longer they’d have to go on being sniffer dogs. Dreaming dreams of a better life in Hollywood.
“Anyway, real me or no real me,” Jeremy asked Barry, “what if neither the pudgy bloke with the funny hair in Pyongyang nor the new Stalin in the Kremlin nuke the moron in The White House and nothing else earth-shattering happens to divert attention from me? If the worldwide media have my story, you can be sure MI5 and MI6 will too. Brooding on it, they’ll be. And how long will it take them to find me? No time at all, that’s how long.”
Jeremy’s was a perfectly legitimate concern. The HQs of MI5 and MI6 at 12, Millbank and Vauxhall Cross respectively were abuzz with rumours, counter-rumours and suspicions, some even connecting the megalomaniac bonkers banker’s objectives not only to aiding and abetting the Kremlin’s clear desire to “fuck” with “our sacrosanct British democratic values,” but also—this was only a conjecture, but it was “on the table”—to aid and abet homegrown ISIS fighters back from Syria in their quest to “rock the boat.”
“We live in interesting times, eh, Muriel?” said Sir Hubert Humphreys, Head of MI5, to Dame Muriel Eggleshaw, Head of MI6, over tea and crumpets in the sequestered drawing room of Dame Muriel’s club in one of the back streets behind Park Lane.
“Indeed so, Hubert. One needs to be on full alert, does one not?”
“Indeed one does, Muriel.”
“Any indications so far from your chaps where the megalomaniac bonkers banker chappie might have gone? Moscow? Damascus? Holed up in some foreign embassy claiming diplomatic immunity like that Wikileaky chappie.”
“Not a one,” said Sir Hubert. “Internet overflowing with sightings. But you know how it is…”
“Staff stretched? Budget cutbacks?”
“Cutbacks, my dear. Downing Street still scrimping and saving in line with their austerity mantra, protesting insufficient moolah to go around if we’re to pay off the bally Europeans for our divorce settlement even though we were supposed to save money on the deal, so…”
“No progress.”
“None at all. Little blighter could be anywhere so far as we at Five know. Any better news from your lot?”
“Ditto. Do help yourself to a crumpet, Hubert. A top-up of tea?”
“No chance of a snifter of something stronger, I suppose?”
Dame Muriel clicked her fingers and a flunkey called Jackson tapped on the door in secret tapping code, three taps in quick succession followed by four with intervals of ten seconds each.
“Enter,” said Dame Muriel. “Ah Jacko, brandy for our guest and possibly a splash for me too, if you please.”
“Dark days, Hubert, eh?” she added, once Jackson had bowed out.
“Dark indeed, Muriel. Shifty tactics and terrorists wherever one looks.”
Silence as Jackson returned with a bottle of Asbach Selection 21 and two crystal brandy glasses engraved with the legend Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense.
“Frankly, just between the two of us and these four unbugged walls, of course…” said Dame Muriel, pouring the brandies when Jackson had again bowed out.
“Mais bien sûr ma chère. Ça va sans dire.”
“Let’s face it. We haven’t a bally clue what’s going on. Let alone where to find this megalomaniac bonkers banker blighter.”
Which top-secret conversation would have been music to Jeremy Crawford’s ears, except, like everybody else in the (Dis) United Kingdom, he wasn’t party to it and therefore continued to ask Barry what he was to do if attention weren’t diverted from him by either the little pudgy bloke with the funny hair in Pyongyang or the new Stalin in the Kremlin nuking the nutter in the White House.
“Well,” Barry replied, smoothing down the wispy grey tresses that hung to his shoulders. “The way I see it we only have two options.”
“We?”
“You don’t think I’m going to leave you to fight this battle on your own, do you?”
“Well I… Thanks so much,” said Jeremy, who’d never before had a friend of this order. Acquaintances yes, hundreds of them. But they had all been too busy with their own interests to concern themselves with anybody else’s.
“I appreciate it. Really I do. I…”
“No need for hyperbole, old fellow. If one is involved, one is involved, and that’s that. Now, to the two options?”
“Okay, shoot.”
“Pretty simple, really. Either we do a runner or we stick around and face the music. In either scenario, we would, of course, need to be heavily disguised. Many years ago, in a brief moment of vanity back in Oxford, I saw myself as something of a thespian. Even appearing as Macbeth on one occasion, the poor player that struts the stage before being heard of no more and so on. Explaining life as ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’”
Jeremy smiled. “A fair description of my tale.”
“Nobody like old Shakey when it comes to hitting nails on heads. But I wasn’t for a second imputing idiocy to you, my friend.”
“Although the worldwide media are. And indictable idiocy to boot.”
Barry shrugged. “And what do they ever signify except for sound and fury?” he continued. “As I said, it’s their bread and butter. Anyway we’re getting off-track here. My point is that I have a nice little stash of costumes down in my cellar. Never thought I’d have a use for them again, but, you know how it is with old friends, how you just hate to dispose of them.”
Jeremy nodded, although until recently the concept had been alien to him. Having been born into a throwaway society then becoming wealthy beyond even his expectations, he had never kept anything past its sell-by date. If his last year’s 4x4 Merc developed a glitch, he bought a new one with all the latest gizmos, keeping only the A1 JC vanity plate from the old one. Image was everything and needed to be constantly renewed. Now, of course, he knew better. Understood it had never been him choosing the car, but him having been chosen by it. The memories lingered.
“All from Shakespeare plays, the costumes?” he said.
“No. Not all of them. Wouldn’t want you wandering about looking like Puck, now would we? No, no, there are items in there from productions of Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, Pirandello, Brecht and even rock musicals. Just in case I hit the big time. Which, of course, I didn’t.”
“Must be a big cellar you have.”
“It is. Now, are we to run? Or are we to hide in plain sight? That is the question,” Barry was saying, as there came a knock at the door.
“What the…?” said Jeremy, wide-eyed and fearful.
“Damned if I know. I’d better answer it, though. Go and hide in the kitchen.”
“Anybody home?” came a voice through the unused letterbox as the knocking continued.