“Dandelion wine would be smashing.”
“Okay, coming right up. Now why don’t you take that seat? I’ll be back in a mo to make the introductions.”
It was only then it struck Julie that the sole person she knew in the room was Jeremy. Who the bloke who’d answered to door was or who the tall grinning bloke in police uniform with the straggly beard was, she hadn’t a clue. And where was “Betty”? Also, now she looked a little closer, why, she wondered, was Jeremy wearing a woman’s nightie over his old suit trousers?
The answer, which Julie couldn’t possibly have known, was that Barry had offered him a change of clothes since the escape from the barn, but none had fitted. Barry sporting a boxer’s chest and a waistline of thirty-four, by comparison with which Jeremy was skinny. All far too baggy and, it had to be said, smelly Barry’s outfits had been. A wardrobe refurb was part of future plans, but hadn’t been addressed yet.
“Okay then,” said Julie, flopping into an armchair with sprouting stuffing, around which clustered Hans, Colin, Shirley and Pete, all of them eager to see the new arrival feel right at home.
“Here we are then,” said Barry, returning with a brimming glass of dandelion wine and passing it to Julie. “Hope the Château Broadbent 2015 Premier Cru is to your taste.”
“Château Broadbent?” said Jeremy.
“It’s my second name, old chap.”
“Ah,” said Jeremy, who’d only ever known Barry as “The Gardener.”
Julie sipped the wine and wondered. Not only did she not know who these other blokes were, but apparently they didn’t either. And still no sign of “Betty.”
It was Jeremy who picked up on her confusion. “Probably time for those introductions, Bazza? And possibly a little backstory first?”
And so it was, on the strict understanding his narrative would never be relayed beyond those walls, to which Julie nodded her full consent, that Barry told the tale of his part in Jeremy’s escape from the barn in which he’d been living with Pete the pig after deciding his life needed re-examining. And, loathing circumlocution as he did, Barry’s account was to the point in its description of the actual events, although he was unable to resist a footnote indicating how much he agreed with both Jeremy’s and Socrates’s precept about the unexamined life not being worth living. Beyond his part in Jeremy’s escape, of himself—let alone his past life as an Oxford professor—he made no mention.
“So I am Barry, and this is my house, and Jeremy is my guest for as long as he wishes to stay,” he concluded.
It wasn’t just Julie who listened wide-eyed to this history. Dennis was equally glued. Neither said anything, however.
“And the policeman over there,” said Jeremy, “is PC Dennis Dawkins, the one who finally tracked me down to my hideout.”
Julie smiled at Dennis, who looked back sheepishly, fiddled with his beard, and felt the need to re-tie his bootlaces.
It wasn’t for nothing, however, that Julie Mackintosh had achieved straight starred As in her A-Level subjects of Economics, Politics, and Music—Julie was also a Grade 8 cellist. As her dad Steve had always said, “The girl’s got brains comin’ out of her ears.”
“So you’re ‘Betty,’” she said.
“Yup,” said Dennis, not quite sure where to put himself.
Thirteen
In the big bad world outside Barry Broadbent’s Shepherd’s Hut, interest in the megalomaniac bonkers banker story and his potential role in worldwide political shenanigans had slipped from the headlines, just as Barry had predicted it would if the pudgy bloke with the funny hairdo in Pyongyang tried nuking The White House. Which he had, only the Hwasong-17 super-intercontinental missile had experienced an unforeseen glitch over the Pacific, blown up, and flopped into the ocean a few nautical miles north of San Francisco. But there was no question of its intended target. On some, the fragments rescued from the seabed by US Navy Seal Chuck Chambers in his submersible and later reassembled by experts were written the words BYE BYE WHITE HOUSE in North Korean characters. At which the mentally deranged US president was reported by a deep-throat Washington DC source to have gone “apeshit” and only been restrained from using the nuclear football codes by being hit on the head by his Secretary of State with a lead pipe.
So it was that Jeremy’s story had been relegated to a footnote in history, at least for the time being. Mind you, there were also plenty of other juicy tales knocking around to take its place, specifically the explosion of sex pest scandals engulfing both Hollywood and the Westminster parliament. GOTCHA GROPER blazed The Daily Snitch, for example, while Simone de Vérité in The Daily Truth went for MITTS OFF TITS beneath which she ran an article jam-packed with first-hand lurid accounts of ageing, obese American movie moguls and senior British parliamentarians from all parties lying naked on couches commanding female underlings to strip to the waist and blow them. A case of “kiss my dick or kiss your career goodbye.”
There were counter protestations from the accused, of course there were, the most frequent being “the sex was always consensual,” and “for crissakes, this kinda stuff’s being going on since ancient Athens and even before that, so what the fuck?” Which gave rise to a barrage of pro-and anti-tweets and posts from across the whole Twitter zone, even one from the madman in The White House once he’d recovered from being hit over the head with a lead pipe after attempting to start World War Three. “Pussy’s ther for the grabbin’,” read his tweet.
And these were just the sex stories. Within a week of their unveiling came news of offshore investment paradises in which it was claimed the queen and the whole of her otiose family, never mind the nation’s other superstars, had for years been squirrelling away trillions and never paid a penny in tax to the Treasury. DAYLIGHT ROBBERY screeched The Daily Snitch, for example, above an editorial asking what the government intended to do about it.
Anyway, anyway, what, you will be wondering, did all of this have to do with Jeremy Crawford?
Answer: 10 Downing Street was getting its collective knickers into so much of a twist it needed to divert public attention soonest from its litany of woes with a spanking new story of the PM’s unequivocal success at something or another, anything would suffice. Quite apart from the—justifiable—fears of being branded sex pests or tax dodgers themselves, cabinet ministers were experiencing failures in more or less every avenue of their responsibilities caused largely by a pig-headed refusal to ditch their austerity mantra. On and on the budget slashes went, including those of MI5 and MI6 as noted by Dame Muriel Eggleshaw and Sir Hubert Humphreys, and even then government borrowing was still way off its target of 0%. The National Health Service was on its knees but its bosses were told that was their fault and to make further cuts. The army, navy, and air force chiefs ditto, even though the defence of the realm was, to quote Sir Ronald Biggins, Head of the Armed Forces: “In severe jeopardy.”
As were the lives of those worst affected by reductions in welfare benefits. In all the major cities, homelessness was rife, especially amongst the young, and street crime statistics were up as the result of the ongoing frustration caused by the disparity between the incomes of the super rich and those of the super poor. Why should we suffer, objected the latter, when the mega rich, including the two-faced politicos and Missus Queen, could hide their trillions from the taxman in offshore accounts instead of paying their fair share into the wealth of the nation? And all this at the same time as Westminster ponces had porn on their computers and groped any staffer that took their fancy. Revolution was in the air, no doubt about it.