Which was why she interrupted halfway through the PM’s verbiage and said, “Cut the crap, Phoebe. We all know you’re on a hiding to nothing and looking for any which way out you can find. Get to the point or I’m hanging up.”
Hubby nodded, sipped at his Dom Pérignon and flipped Phoebe the finger. Just as well they weren’t on Skype.
So it was that Phoebe finally hit the bottom line: how much she needed the sang froid, suavity, sharp-shooting skills, and allure of the latest model 007 Milly and Hubby had on their books to hunt down the Trotskyite megalomaniac bonkers banker clearly in cahoots with the Kremlin and bring him back from wherever he was to face justice. This was the only tiny favour she was asking.
In the following hiatus, Milly and Hubby swapped amused, knowing (and coded) glances, and allowed Phoebe to continue blethering down the line about the way her government was close to having its back broken by “false disinformation” under which she needed to draw a line smartish.
“Well?” she practically shrieked as the blether was drawing to a close.
And so it was that the deal was done. In exchange for an unprecedented hike of £2bn in the budgets of MI5 and MI6, Milly and Hubby were prepared to release into Phoebe’s command the very best operative they had come across in all the years they’d been in the Secret Services.
“Heavens. Heck. Thanks soo much,” said a humbled Phoebe after agreeing to the sum in question. “And his name and number?”
Milly and Hubby exchanged smirks.
“He answers to Casanova,” said Milly. “We think of him as Double-O Seventeen. Speaks the usual four European languages, plus Russian, Arabic, and garage-level Mandarin. Also he has computer skills Silicon Valley would die for, shoots like Wyatt Earp, and has black belts in karate, judo and taekwondo.”
“And does he also possess the sang froid, suavity, and allure I require? The kind of thing one associates with Roger Moore, my personal favourite Double-O Seven?”
“In spades. The sexiest beast on the planet,” said Milly.
Which was a minor distortion of the truth because OO17 Maurice Moffat/ “Casanova” was five foot seven and chubby, his argument being it was quality that counted, not quantity.
“Thanks soo much,” said Phoebe, practically genuflecting as Milly whispered his contact number on the secure line.
“Just make sure the money hits our accounts by close of business tomorrow, though,” said Milly. “Otherwise it’s no Casanova Double-O Seventeen for you.”
“You got it. Done deal,” said Phoebe, in what she thought of as American.
But by then Milly had already cut the call and taken to sipping at her glass of Dom Pérignon.
“Here’s to us, Hubby.” She giggled as the pair clinked flutes. “Poor old Phoebe though, eh? Not exactly what she had in mind, our Maurice, but I’m sure he won’t let the side down.”
Fourteen
Unlike James Bond, who never had a home address, “Casanova”/Maurice Moffat lived in a three-bedroom terraced house in Tooting, South West London, which he shared with a confused tabby he’d rescued from Battersea Dogs and Cats Home and named Terpsichore but only ever addressed as Tiddles, hence the cat being confused. But what was in a name? All Terpsichore/Tiddles cared about was getting her dinner on time and being allowed to sleep on Maurice’s bed.
Also unlike James Bond, Maurice didn’t drive an Aston Martin. If he drove at all, which he seldom did unless to stock up at Tesco once a month, it was in the classic Morris Minor Traveller he’d inherited from his father, Malcolm. In Maurice’s eyes, the car was his father. Whenever he switched on the ragged old engine, he felt his dad’s presence—on the driver’s seat, on the waggly gear stick, on the handbrake. But mainly the four-wheeled Malcolm was parked outside the house under a specially designed weatherproof blanket. If Maurice really wanted to go anywhere, he went by bike. And not on some latterday iron-man mountain-climbing monstrosity with thirty gears, on an old sit-up-and-beg called Janet with a wicker basket on the handlebars and a Sturmey Archer three-speed gear mechanism. That’s how Maurice liked life… slow and easy.
So how, you will ask, did this bloke get to be a top secret service agent? Because, unlike the hyped-up hero in the Ian Fleming stories, he was very, very secret, that was how. All his lights—and there were many of them, Milly hadn’t been lying about that—were so hidden under so many bushels, nobody would ever suspect he was anything more than an undersized, chubby, middle-aged man eking out his days on a small private income and causing no trouble to anybody. That was what his neighbours at numbers eleven and fifteen Oakshot Street thought, an oddity unquestionably but kindly and always with a good word to say about everybody. If they needed help, it was Maurice to whom they, and others in the street, would turn.
As had Milly and Hubby whenever they needed someone deep, deep undercover in capital cities across the world where there was suspected nastiness going on they needed to know about. Who better than OO17 to lurk and skulk unnoticed on the peripheries of Moscow, Beijing, Damascus, Tel Aviv, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Brussels et al when you wanted to know what was really going down? Not some conspicuous Beretta-toting dude with a gambling habit and a liking for flashy women and even flashier cars, that was for sure. That was all well and good for cinema audiences, but not for the real spymasters and mistresses. What they needed was a practically invisible person with a working knowledge of all the relevant languages and an eidetic memory who only tossed baddies off tall buildings or shot them when absolutely necessary. Which on occasion Maurice had been obliged to do, but never with maximum (or even minimum) machismo. Insignificance was his stock in trade, and it had opened all sorts of doors for him.
Posing as a Brit diplomat’s dogsbody, for example, Maurice had been deployed to Washington DC as a White House wine waiter shortly after the madman had been “elected” president and had relayed back to MI5 and MI6 in super-encrypted code the conclusion: “This fellow has the mind of a sewer rat and should never—double understroke never—be invited to our shores, let alone to meet Missus Queen or address parliament. He’s a catastrophe waiting to happen and if he’s to be shot, let it at least be someone on his own turf to do the dirty deed.” It was this sort of advice, amongst a plethora of other examples from all corners of the planet, for which Dame Muriel and Sir Hubert had been deeply grateful.
So that was Maurice Moffat for you. Unassuming, unknown to anybody but his neighbours, who thought he was called Michael, but nonetheless one of the most effective players in the world of global espionage. Alerted by “Milly” and “Hubby” to the possibility of a pleading call from “Phoebe” on his mega-encrypted, government-issue smartphone, “Casanova” was therefore ready and waiting.
“Phoebe,” he said. “What a pleasure.”
“Miaow,” said Terpsichore/Tiddles, who reckoned it was time for her dinner.
At much the same time as Casanova was getting his brief from Phoebe, Julie Mackintosh was beginning to feel ever more comfortable at chez Barry. After several more rounds of the Château Broadbent 2015 Premier Cru, Dennis had fessed up to being Betty on Twitter and even had a good laugh about it, saying he was like the bearded lady in the circus.