Paddy Bostock - Chosen

“Whatever.”

“And Jeremy never did his business on begonias.”

“Not even late at night when you were asleep? Hard to tell what a bloke might do when he’s gone bonkers. Plus there’s the pig to think of, innit?” said Dennis as Colin and Hans took an unnatural interest in a blackberry bush and pissed on that too.

“Oh… my… GOD . We’ll never eat those now. I was going to get the cook to make a pie out of them. With apples,” said Sophie pointing out a Bramley tree in which Colin and Hans, following what they took to be her instructions, also took an unnatural interest in and pissed on too.

Losing the will to live, let alone any faith in Dennis and his filthy dogs having a snowball’s chance in hell of finding Jeremy, Sophie faux wept, stamped a foot, tugged her hair theatrically, turned, stormed off back to the mansion, and slammed the door, causing the newly repaired door chimes to start ding-a-ling-a-linging at full volume.

“Hmm,” said Dennis. “Not the best of starts, boys.”

Which Colin and Dennis took as a sign of them needing more Bonios-For-Good-Dogs.

“Hardly any left in here,” said Dennis, ferreting about in his satchel. “And we’ve got a whole morning’s sniffing ahead of us.”

But Colin and Hans weren’t buying any of that old “hardly any left” bollocks, and remained resolutely on their bottoms with their tails swishing at the grass. Obediently.

“All right then. But if I give you these last two…”

Colin and Hans smirked at each other, knowing full well Master was bluffing and there were at least another twenty -two hidden in the satchel.

“…You’ll have to promise to be good boys and do what Master tells you.”

“Raaf, raaf,” chorused Colin and Hans, sitting up straight.

Mind you, even when they left the Crawford estate and headed to the stream along which Dennis surmised Jeremy might have beaten his retreat, there was still no response from the dogs. More squirrel chasing, more pissing on vegetation—mainly ferns and suchlike—but little indication of a human or porcine trail to follow. And, let’s be quite clear about this, Colin and Hans were in fact pretty expert in such matters. Colin had once led Billy McCann to a heroin stash worth two million pounds in a disused warehouse, and Hans had a gold medal for his part in a counter-terrorist sting in a town near to Fanbury leading to the arrest of the anti-Brexit protesters Hugo de la Zouche and Janet Googlesbury (both aliases) who had been letting off fireworks the local police mistook for AK-47 rounds.

No, no, the lukewarm trail Colin and Hans were being asked to follow wasn’t just lukewarm. It was, as Sir Magnus Montague had suspected when he’d thought of employing sniffer dogs, stone cold. A fact Dennis was also forced to concede after no more than three hundred yards of pointless pissing, and some pooing, by which time the Bonios-For-Good-Dogs satchel really was empty.

“Bugger,” he said, before calling Billy McCann to come and get them in the cop car.

“No sign of Squiffy O’Donnell in these parts,” he told Billy, loading Colin and Hans into the hatch at the back when Billy drew up alongside.

“Always was a touch nut to crack, old Squiffy,” said Billy.

“Tell me about it. Wanna turn on the old-time radio? My brain’s hurtin’.”

And so it was that Dennis “Shorty/ “Betty” Dawkins returned to base empty-handed. Colin and Hans liked the ride though, particularly the part when the radio played Patti Page singing “How Much is That Doggie in the Window?”

“Raaf, raaf,” they sang along, both wondering how much longer they’d have to go on being sniffer dogs. Dreaming dreams of a better life in Hollywood.

“ Any way, real me or no real me,” Jeremy asked Barry, “what if neither the pudgy bloke with the funny hair in Pyongyang nor the new Stalin in the Kremlin nuke the moron in The White House and nothing else earth-shattering happens to divert attention from me? If the worldwide media have my story, you can be sure MI5 and MI6 will too. Brooding on it, they’ll be. And how long will it take them to find me? No time at all, that’s how long.”

Jeremy’s was a perfectly legitimate concern. The HQs of MI5 and MI6 at 12, Millbank and Vauxhall Cross respectively were abuzz with rumours, counter-rumours and suspicions, some even connecting the megalomaniac bonkers banker’s objectives not only to aiding and abetting the Kremlin’s clear desire to “fuck” with “our sacrosanct British democratic values,” but also—this was only a conjecture, but it was “on the table”—to aid and abet homegrown ISIS fighters back from Syria in their quest to “rock the boat.”

“We live in interesting times, eh, Muriel?” said Sir Hubert Humphreys, Head of MI5, to Dame Muriel Eggleshaw, Head of MI6, over tea and crumpets in the sequestered drawing room of Dame Muriel’s club in one of the back streets behind Park Lane.

“Indeed so, Hubert. One needs to be on full alert, does one not?”

“Indeed one does, Muriel.”

“Any indications so far from your chaps where the megalomaniac bonkers banker chappie might have gone? Moscow? Damascus? Holed up in some foreign embassy claiming diplomatic immunity like that Wikileaky chappie.”

“Not a one,” said Sir Hubert. “Internet over flowing with sightings. But you know how it is…”

“Staff stretched? Budget cutbacks?”

“Cutbacks, my dear. Downing Street still scrimping and saving in line with their austerity mantra, protesting insufficient moolah to go around if we’re to pay off the bally Europeans for our divorce settlement even though we were supposed to save money on the deal, so…”

“No progress.”

“None at all. Little blighter could be any where so far as we at Five know. Any better news from your lot?”

“Ditto. Do help yourself to a crumpet, Hubert. A top-up of tea?”

“No chance of a snifter of something stronger, I suppose?”

Dame Muriel clicked her fingers and a flunkey called Jackson tapped on the door in secret tapping code, three taps in quick succession followed by four with intervals of ten seconds each.

“Enter,” said Dame Muriel. “Ah Jacko, brandy for our guest and possibly a splash for me too, if you please.”

“Dark days, Hubert, eh?” she added, once Jackson had bowed out.

“Dark indeed, Muriel. Shifty tactics and terrorists wherever one looks.”

Silence as Jackson returned with a bottle of Asbach Selection 21 and two crystal brandy glasses engraved with the legend Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense .

“Frankly, just between the two of us and these four unbugged walls, of course…” said Dame Muriel, pouring the brandies when Jackson had again bowed out.

“ Mais bien sûr ma chère . Ça va sans dire .”

“Let’s face it. We haven’t a bally clue what ’s going on. Let alone where to find this megalomaniac bonkers banker blighter.”

Which top-secret conversation would have been music to Jeremy Crawford’s ears, except, like everybody else in the (Dis) United Kingdom, he wasn’t party to it and therefore continued to ask Barry what he was to do if attention weren’t diverted from him by either the little pudgy bloke with the funny hair in Pyongyang or the new Stalin in the Kremlin nuking the nutter in the White House.

“Well,” Barry replied, smoothing down the wispy grey tresses that hung to his shoulders. “The way I see it we only have two options.”

“ We ?”

“You don’t think I’m going to leave you to fight this battle on your own, do you?”