But cardiac wasn’t the only arrest Sir Magnus was to suffer. Attached to a defibrillator though he was in the ambulance on his way to Intensive Care, Jason Humphreys also read him his rights where the assault of police officers was concerned. And such rights were few and far between, so Jason wished Sir Magnus well on the heart issue but added he’d be seeing him in court when, and if, he recovered.
Not one of the best days in Sir Magnus Montague’s life so far therefore.
Fifteen
Maurice Moffat had never liked “Capricious” Clarissa, as he’d dubbed the prime minister. Too wishy-washy even to run a laundrette never mind a country, he reckoned. The sort of person who’d be hard put to organize footballs to roll down a hill let alone corral her cabinet into obedience. And this at the very time the UK needed a canny leader to see it through its worst crisis in modern history, a subject Maurice was able to speak about with authority, given his Oxford starred triple first PPE and the chats he’d shared with Prof Broadbent in his rooms after tutorials. Like the professor, Maurice was no xenophobe, but since the fiddled Brexit vote he was beginning to rue the way Britain had become the laughing stock of not only Europe but the rest of the world. Capricious Clarissa could say what she liked about Russian meddling in “democratic” elections and how we would stand firm against it, but did the Kremlin give a monkey’s when the United Kingdom was at its least united in living memory and seeking divorce from very economic bloc to which the Kremlin might pay attention? Of course it didn’t. Ripurpantzov just rubbed his hands, chuckled, and advised his top brass to go on laundering their ill-gotten rubles by continuing to buy up empty mansions in London’s most salubrious enclaves.
But Maurice wasn’t paid to be political. He was a spy. And thus it was only with Terpsichore/Tiddles he shared such thoughts as the pair sat on their late evening sofa channel surfing for relevant news. Well, that’s what Maurice did. Terpsichore/Tiddles just nodded off. As did Maurice when the news became too tedious to bear.
Nonetheless, when “Phoebe’s” call came through as expected, he was as polite as he was able. Almost felt sorry for the woman as she told him a cock and bull story about the “vital importance to the nation at this critical juncture” of finding the megalomaniac bonkers banker Jeremy Crawford and thereby diverting attention from as many of lies told about her government’s “achievements” as conceivable. Even possibly blaming him for them. How, for example, his involvement in covert money laundering and systematic tax evasion on behalf of rogue regimes worldwide was depriving the Treasury of billions of pounds annually and threatening the demise of “our beloved NHS.” How his collaboration with the Russian Internet Research Agency to produce Twitter bots had destabilized not only the entire banking system but also threatened the very Mother of Parliaments herself.
“What we require in Downing Street, Casanova, is an incredible story,” she said, as this fiction ran away with her and became practically a faction. “But first we need to catch the blighter. And it is to you, on excellent recommendations from Milly and Hubby at Six and Five, that we have chosen to entrust this noble, dare one say it, ‘nation saving’ enterprise.”
“Most honoured I’m sure, Milady,” said Maurice in his best Uriah Heep voice.
“And so you should be. Upon your shoulders shall fall responsibility for the maintenance of the very fabric of the British society we all so cherish and in which we trust, the unflinching backbone that has seen us through so many centuries of turmoil and always ensured we came out victorious. The never-say-die Dunkirk spirit and reliance on the wisdom of our noble queen, who…”
Maurice held the phone from his ear. As if this mumbo-jumbo weren’t bad enough, there had to be mention of the bally queen. Many a time Maurice had wished Charles II had never been invited back from France after England’s only ever successful revolution and then spawned the better part of four centuries’ worth of totemic wastrels.
A hiatus, therefore, while OO17 struggled to retain his sang froid.
“You still there, Casanova?”
“Still here, ma’am. So it’s more fake news we’re going to be spreading, is it? Always assuming I can find this megalomaniac bonkers banker chappie.”
Another hiatus while Capricious Clarissa attempted to compute what sounded to her a lot like disbelief, possibly even an objection. But then she hit her rhythm again.
“There’s fake news, Casanova, then there’s fake news which is simply alternative truth,” she retorted robotically. “As you should know from the special relationship with our friend in the White House. And, in your position, it is not a question of reasoning why. Yours just to do or die, eh? One assumes you have signed the Official Secrets Act and pledged allegiance to the Crown.”
Despite his inbuilt loathing of said crown, Maurice couldn’t deny he had. It had been a humiliating experience, but without such nauseating oblation he would never have been given the job he’d most wanted since leaving Oxford.
“Indeed so, ma’am,”
“Well then, get to it, man,” said “Phoebe,” who was starting to feel a tad cross at having to boss someone around like this. Why couldn’t people just do the jobs they were paid for and stop being so pernickety about everything?
“Please,” she added after a moment’s silence.
At which backslide into unexpected decency, Maurice again felt a pang of sympathy. Just the wrong woman in the wrong job, he reckoned. How long would it take her to realise?
“Okay,” he said, running a hand along Terpsichore/Tiddles’ fur, which caused her to roll on her back and dangle her four legs in the air. “I’ll do my best.”
“Thank you, Casanova. Thank you sooo much,” said “Phoebe,” cutting the call as her foreign secretary barged into the office with disturbing news concerning the president of Iran’s reaction to a “misspeak” the FS—some read the acronym as “Fat Slob”—might or “might not” have made in response to the “Muzzie” president’s claim his country had every right to nuclear weapons given the hostility to everything Muslim emanating on daily tweets from the madman in White House.
“I mean, for fuck’s sake, what was so wrong with my telling him he’d be better off building a yellow submarine?” huffed and puffed Fat Slob, pulling at his blond-going-on-whitish toupée.
“Nothing, dear boy. A jolly good thing to say, I’m sure. Now, why don’t you pop off and get yourself a cup of tea and a bun? Then you’ll feel a lot better,” said Clarissa. “And close the door behind you.”
Maurice Moffat pondered long and hard on the new task he’d been set, employing all the super-neurons he’d been born with and therefore examining the problem from every conceivable angle. First the entirely pragmatic matter of where to start looking for this Jeremy Crawford fellow. Whether to stay at home and employ only the top-of-the-range computer bank in his third bedroom, or whether to use the old-fashioned gumshoe methodology and skulk about in his three-piece tweed suit asking obscure questions of Jeremy’s ex-coworkers and family in the hope of picking up the scent of a trail. A tricky choice. Additionally, however, he had at his disposal a tool of his very own invention he had not yet shared with MI5, MI6 or GCHQ because it was still in its experimental stages. The GRNAV (Genetic Response Navigator) he called it, a machine that combined the wonders of satellite imagery with advances in microbial genetics and could, in principle, detect any person at any distance when fed only a smidgeon of that person’s DNA. All he would need for this course of action would be such a dab of the bonkers banker’s genetic coding smeared onto a converted Satnav app and Bob would be Maurice’s uncle. He’d never so far tried it out, but might this be an appropriate moment for a test run? After considerable reflection, Maurice thought so. What, after all, was the point of months of painstaking invention if it were to be mothballed and never to see the light of day? No point at all, he concluded.