Paddy Bostock - Chosen

But Sir Magnus, his silver expensively coiffed hair all askew, said nothing of the sort.

Instead, he ululated FUCKKKK for an eighth time and took to headbanging his antique desk yet again.

“Cup of tea, perhaps?” asked Julie, also Britishly.

But then, from one second to the next, Sir Magnus stopped spinning around in his high-backed, maroon leather swivel and thumping his head on his desk, and shrieked “ EU-RE-KA !!!” before calming down, taking a cerise silk handkerchief from the top pocket of his navy blue, pin-striped, Savile Row suit jacket and using it to dab at his fevered brow.

“Tea, Julie. Earl Grey. Milk and two sugars as usual,” he barked.

“Coming right up, Sir Magnus.”

Julie was relieved at having no more than a cup of tea to deal with.

And why had Sir Magnus calmed down so quickly? Because, using what he thought of as his “ingenious” mind, he had, out of nowhere, come up with an extremely cunning ruse. Which was, in his missing-persons search for Jeremy, to by-pass the old-fashioned media whom he didn’t want poking their noses into his nefarious business anyway and hit the unregulated social ones, which, as he’d learnt from America’s new president whom he much admired, was the new-fangled way to get to hearts and minds… in… an… in stant. Twittering, he believed it was called. There was only one problem: Sir Magnus didn’t know how to twitter.

But once Julie came back with the Earl Grey, that could be easily rectified. Julie was young and was sure to know how it worked. He had seen her thumbing her smartphone when she thought he wasn’t looking. It would mean taking her into his confidence on the Jeremy issue, of course. But, if the girl wanted a future at the bank, she would know on which side her bread was buttered, wouldn’t she?

“ Ju lie, thanks soo much for the cuppa,” he therefore said as his PA came back into the office toting a tray holding both the tea and a plate of the Hobnobs she knew Sir Magnus favoured. She was pleased to see him looking less loony.

“Sir feeling a little better, is he?” she said, easing the tray onto the antique Chippendale number like the Savoy-trained waitress she had once been to help pay back her London School of Economics student loan fees. Truth be told, Julie Mackintosh was far better qualified to run a bank than Sir Magnus, but a girl had to climb the greasy pole somehow.

“ Tons better, thanks, sweetheart.”

Julie didn’t like being called “sweetheart,” but what was she to do?

“Glad to hear it. Anything else I can do for you, sir?”

There were plenty of other things Sir Magnus would have liked Julie to do for him, fellatio top of the list, but currently there were even more pressing issues on his mind. Which was how Julie learned of the unexplained disappearance of Jeremy Crawford with whom she’d had sex, just the once, in a closet during an office party and Sir Magnus’s need to locate him soonest. By means of “twittering.”

“A tad behind the times on the actual method ol ogy though,” Sir Magnus explained while dunking a Hobnob into his Earl Grey. “So one would be aw fully grateful for a little help in the matter. Very grateful… if you know what I mean,” he added, hoisting his hirsute eyebrows. “I’m sure you’re cut out to be more than a mere PA, eh, Julie?”

Julie smiled rictally.

“Thought so. Now, if I give you my script, perhaps you’d do me the small favour of twittering it into the Twitter zone or wherever it is twitters go. Ready? Got your instrument on you?”

“Yes, Sir Magnus.”

And so it was that Julie took from the secret back pocket in her leggings her latest model Apple iPhone and hit all the sites—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google Plus etc on which she (under the alias Jackie Lamur) had accounts—and posted Sir Magnus’s dictated message: MEGLOMANIAC BONKERS BANKER ON THE LOOSE , MILLION-POUND REWARD FOR INFO LEADING TO HIS CAPTURE . To which, at Sir Magnus’s behest, she attached the photo of a smiling Jeremy taken from the bank’s in-house “Top Troopers” page.

“That should do it, sir. Now we just wait for responses.”

“Wonderful, sweetheart! Fan tast ic,” said Sir Magnus, extending an arm to stroke Julie’s bottom. “I don’t suppose…?”

“Oops, I think that’s my office phone,” said Julie, scuttling from the room. “Good luck on the Jeremy front.”

A shame, from his point of view, that Sir Magnus hadn’t thought through all the implications of employing the Internet, naively believing it was inhabited by kindly folk ready and willing to help him in his cause. A bad case of “duh,” Julie could have told him, but it was no good telling Sir Magnus any thing when his dander was up.

It was at the behest of Gloria and Ron, plus her parents, Vince and Val, and two of Jeremy’s squash club buddies, Harry and Jonah, that Sophie called the police to report her husband missing. Sir Magnus had proudly told them of the tweet announcing Jeremy’s disappearance and insisted that under no circumstance should they involve the law, but none of them was happy with that.

“No good leaving it to the Internet, Babes,” said her father, “Honest” Vince, the local bookmaker and small-time crook. “Full of bleedin’ nutters it is. Ain’t that right, Val?”

His wife flicked back her shoulder-length, peroxide blonde hair. “Spot on, Vincey. Tell any old story for a million quid, some of them shysters would. Gawd knows.”

Gloria and Ron nodded in agreement.

“Most of ’em even nuttier than our Jeremy,” said Ron. “And could be foreigners to boot. All over the bleedin’ world those messages go. China, Russia, India, North Korea…”

“Right. And look what happened in the US,” said Jonah, at which Sophie, Gloria, Vince, and Val exchanged perplexed looks seeing as their preferred view of any news outside village gossip was “noise in the system.” This had even included 9/11, never mind the 2016 election.

“A tweeting dickhead president elected by Russians ,” Harry explained.

“And by even more tweeting dickheads in… his… own … country.” Jonah was on a roll. “Populism it’s called. And look where it’s got us . How else would Brexit ever have happened?”

But neither Sophie’s parents nor her in-laws had any answer to that—more noise in the system—and so didn’t encourage Jonah or Harry to continue with their exegesis. For them, it was enough to establish that the Internet was infested with dangerous lunatics, or, as Gloria put it: “Nasty spidery people who try to con you out of your money with fake emails.”

“Right, that’s it, then,” said Vince, passing Sophie his phone. “So it’s agreed we call the cops. And make sure you cry a lot, Babes. Coppers don’t listen unless you cry a lot. Think you’re wasting police time.”

Any way, to Sir Magnus’s fury when he found out some days later, that’s how it was that Sophie came to call the local cop shop.

It was shaven-headed, heavily bearded, six-foot-three PC Dennis “Shorty” Dawkins who picked up.

“Fanbury Police. ’Ow may I be of hassistance?”

Were weeping an Olympic sport, Sophie would have bagged the gold medal. All her (failed) actress cravings she put into the performance—wailing, snuffling, back-snorting, spluttering, eye-dabbing even though she wasn’t on camera, the whole shebang.

“Problem, missus? Pussy got stuck up the chimney or sunnink?” said an unimpressed Dennis. “In which case, it’s the fire brigade you need,” he added, all set to hang up after a long day of tedious village crime fighting shared between him and his fellow officer Billy “Dustbin” McCann—Fanbury could only afford two policemen. Silly old biddy, Hattie Duchamps, known to the local cops as “Batty Hattie” at Chestnut Cottage reckoning she’d spotted an ISIS terrorist pissing up an oak tree in her garden. Ninety-four-year-old egregious grump, “Earl” Montmorency Fortague calling to tell Dennis and Billy that if one more “urban interloper” cyclist came within six inches of the 1958 Rolls Royce parked outside his front gate and almost scratched it, he would feel obliged to shoot him with the Boer War rifle he’d proudly inherited from the first earl of Fanbury, Earl Basil. The list of geriatric time wasters went on… and on, and on . Fanbury was a small village, which was boring Dennis and Billy into practical catatonia. Both had applied for transfers to any where in the vicinity with proper crime.