“Prof Broadbent?” he said.
“The same, old chap.”
“But you look…”
“Different from when we first met?”
Maurice nodded.
Barry smiled. “I was older then, Moffat. I’m younger than that now. A small matter of what the Germans call Weltanschauung. May I repeat, however, what are you doing here? Not still some bally spook, one hopes. Speaking as someone who wrote you a rather flattering reference for MI6.”
“I do not come in that exact capacity,” said Maurice who, like Julie Mackintosh never told overt lies but had been groomed to obfuscate when it came to the whole truth. “Look, may I come in? I have a story in which you might be interested.”
And so it was that, trusting his ex-student, Barry stood aside and ushered Maurice into the now somewhat crowded Shepherd’s Hut where he was confronted by not only the elusive Jeremy Crawford, whom he recognised from his Internet exposure, but also two other people, of whose identity he had a fair idea. Plus there were the animals from his dreamscape. The latter sniffed traces of Terpsichore/Tiddles/Cat and were initially suspicious and standoffish, but once Maurice tickled them on their occipital bones, they were persuaded he was kosher and took to licking him.
By contrast, the humans, Jeremy in particular, remained mistrustful even after Barry had introduced Maurice, saying he was the most high-flying alumnus he’d ever had the pleasure of teaching and was a thoroughly decent chap. Even so they wondered what the hell the bloke was doing here of all places and at this time of night/early morning. And how had he tracked Barry down to the middle of nowhere when their host had assured them all connections with his past life had been severed years ago when he quit Oxford to become a gardener.
Even more pertinently, what if it weren’t actually Barry he was looking for? What if he were a Sir Magnus Montague appointee who had somehow stumbled upon Jeremy’s whereabouts and who, despite the dogs’ thumbs-up and his harmless-looking demeanour in his brown three-piece tweed suit, should be treated with extreme caution?
Jeremy’s face betrayed this suspicion and Maurice wasn’t surprised. How likely was it, after all, that one of the most wanted men on the planet would just smile and say “hi” to some stranger breaking into his erstwhile top secret hidey hole? Not likely at all.
“Perhaps I could take a seat?” said Maurice.
At which Barry waved him to a ratty American rocker.
“Make yourself comfortable, old chap. It’s in that chair I do my crosswords. Cup of tea? Or perhaps something stronger?”
Like Julie Mackintosh before him, Maurice went for the stronger.
Sipping at the Château Broadbent 2015 Premier Cru, he declared it, “Magnificent, better even than the Cockburn’s Special Reserve of our Oxford days.”
“Sorry for the intrusion, Prof, truly I am,” he added. “But believe me, I come in peace and the hope I may be able clear some waters which have become muddied.”
“Such as?” said Barry, topping up the glass of Premier Cru.
Maurice levered himself up in the American rocker and went for broke. “The matter of the megalomaniac bonkers banker, for example.”
Jeremy’s eyes widened and he shrank back on his sofa, as did Dennis and Julie on their seats.
Barry frowned meaningfully. “And may one ask at whose behest such waters are to be clarified, Mister Moffat? Not MI6’s, one hopes.”
Maurice pursed his lips, stroked his chin, and nodded. “Not directly,” he said, which did little to calm nerves. Jeremy, for example, was all set to head for the door until Barry placed the calming hand on his shoulder that kept him on his sofa.
“Care to be a tad more precise, old fellow?” said Barry. “Mystification not exactly the order of the day in the circumstances.”
Maurice sighed and nodded again.
“Let us just say I am officially here on government business,” he admitted. “But not The Circus’s. I come on behalf of the prime minister.”
“Tuh-to fuh-find muh-me?” said Jeremy.
Maurice couldn’t deny it. “She has plans for you, old fellow. But, you will be pleased to hear, such plans do not meet with my approval and under no circumstances shall I be releasing to her any details of your discovery, hence my first somewhat equivocal response to Prof Broadbent’s question as to my role in this visit. And, in case either of your other guests—“Betty” and “Jackie Lamur” I presume—may be worried by my presence, I can equally assure them neither their Internet sobriquets nor their real names shall ever be mentioned outside these four walls.
“You know who we are?” Dennis spluttered. “How…?”
But this wasn’t the moment for Maurice to reveal the workings of the reverse algorithmic code he’d invented to backtrace not only the ID behind the megalomaniac bonkers banker post but also, through a complex series of arcane bugging processes, the names of those with whom he or she had subsequently communicated on the same subject. Nor was it the time to tell of the GRNAV device that had traced Jeremy to the Shepherd’s Hut.
“For the moment, just let us say I have ways and means, shall we?” he said. “Which I would be glad to explain further at some later date. But meanwhile, I repeat, you can be assured that nothing of what I have discovered shall be released to parties with ideas potentially detrimental to the wellbeing of any of you—Mister Crawford, Miss Mackintosh, or PC Dawkins. A fine piece of sleuthing it was to find Mister Crawford in the first place, by the way, Constable. Does you credit.”
“Thanks,” said Dennis.
“Well now, so it was Wibbly Wobbly who sent you,” said Barry.
“Wibbly…?”
“The PM. The one who likes to present herself as strong and stable but is about as steadfast as a blancmange in a high wind.”
Maurice laughed. “Haven’t lost your touch with similes, I see, Professor. And yes it was she.”
“And these ‘plans’ she has for me?” said Jeremy, finally finding his voice.
“In a nutshell, to blame you for practically every aspect of Britain’s current decline into a tiny fifth-rate island nobody in his right mind will want anything to do with once the Brexit fiasco is finally done and dusted.”
“Blame me? I know this damned megalomaniac bonkers banker story has got a bit out of hand, but…”
“Now it’s reached the realms of the absurd?”
“Quite.”
Maurice nodded. “A perfectly understandable reaction, old boy. But the PM is desperate for any story, however far-fetched, to divert public attention from her recent multiple faux pas and, with a little manipulation, yours must have appeared to fit the bill. Unfortunately for you, not even royal births or weddings were sufficient to distract Mister and Missus Joe Public’s attention from the failings of her governance, so she needs a mega focus switcher to persuade them everything is still hunky dory in the sceptred isle and stop them believing it’s her and her flimflam cabinet who’ve got us into the multiple messes we are currently in.”
Jeremy frowned. “And how is she planning to…?”
“By concocting a fabric of lies around you, young man. How you had secret and subversive contacts with Igor Ripurpantzov and his Kremlin cronies in pursuance of the destruction of Western democracy as we know it. Vide the election of the fruitcake to The White House and the infiltration of the Brexit referendum campaign by bot farms all across Russia. How, singlehandedly once you decamped to Moscow, you diverted billions of tainted rubles from the City of London to illicit ‘paradise’ accounts all across the globe, thereby depriving the UK Treasury of the sorts of cash it needed to fund the army, the navy, the air force, the NHS, housing for poor people, and… so… on. How…”