“Yes, do please,” snarls a sarcastic Durham.
“Well, it seems a number of your more senior Brownshirts were involved in a little incident at Battencross Manor the other day.”
“The crowd control officers you requested?”
“The men I made you lend me. Yes.”
“And you know how much I hate the fact you can make me do that, don’t you?”
“Yes, it’s half the reason I do it. There has to be some perks to running the country. Anyway, it seems your boys went a little bit mental, assassinated Lord Battencross and would have moved on to the guests if Jupiter here hadn’t interrupted them.”
Durham shoots me a seething look.
“My men don’t go mental. You set them up!” he spits.
“Yes, I did rather,” Malmot sneers. “But that’s what I do to young gentlemen with orders to kill me.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” says Durham.
“Audio!” Malmot orders and a disembodied voice fills the room. It’s Spencer, the Brownshirt thug I supposedly executed:
“He’ll be there, skulking in the background somewhere. When we’ve fulfilled all our contractual obligations, so to speak, we grab the old bastard by the shoulders and ram him, head first, through the windscreen. Make it look like a traffic smash. Simple as…”
“And you’re sure about this?” asks an unknown voice.
“Sure as sure. Chief D’s orders, straight from the beetle’s backside, as they say.”
“You can see,” Malmot teases, “the esteem in which your men hold you.” And when Durham makes a disrespectful noise, he subjects him to an unpleasant procedure. What happens next? Well, once again, I have the transcript. It’ll be quicker if you read it out:
MALMOT: Now, if you’ll just stop burbling blood and let me finish…
DURHAM: Yes. [Sarcastic] Sorry.
M: Okay. Now, what would you say if I said I had evidence that you were behind the murder?
D: I know what you want me to say. You want me to confess. I won’t, though.
M: You won’t? Well, what if I was to show you… In fact, I will show you! Look at this! It’s a flowchart! See this heading: ‘Bloodbath at Battencross Manor’ – it feeds into a box marked ‘Class Warfare’ before splitting off into two possible directions: ‘Death and Glory’ and ‘Complete Proletariat Revolution’.
D: All of which has nothing to do with me.
M: Well, you can say that, but if you look here, next to the caption, ‘Our Wise and Benevolent Ruler’, someone’s drawn a picture of you wearing a big crown.
D: No one will believe I did that.
M: You dress as an insect for sex. People will believe anything about you.
D: But… But…
M: No buts. Someone stab him with something.
D: Aaaaah!
M: That’s for planning to kill me. Now, about this Revolution.
D: There is no Revolution! You know that as well as I do!
M: But, if there’s no Revolution, how can there be a Counter Revolution?
D: I… Aaaaagggggh!
M: Exactly. Now, listen to me. I said, listen to me, Durham! If you stop wailing then you might find this interesting. You see, in a few weeks time – not sure of the date, but it’ll probably be a Friday – a group of men dressed suspiciously like your bullyboys will start a vicious protest against democracy.
D: Why?
M: Haven’t worked that out either. Some kind of scandal or something. Anyway… There’ll be all kinds of violent mischief, culminating in the armed occupation of New Downing Street. They’ll have about two hours to declare a new government with a stupid name, issue some weird decrees, make themselves thoroughly unpopular, before I invoke the Emergency Powers Act. You remember what that is, don’t you?
D: Yes. We used it before. It’s a license for you to declare martial law.
M: It is. And the first thing I’ll do is flatten Number Ten with the ‘Brownshirts’ inside it.
D: But you’ll be killing your own agents.
M: No, there’s an escape tunnel. I’ll be killing members of your extended family I bus in specifically to provide bodies. But that’s by the by. Martial Law means no more fannying around with Parliament and crappy old democracy – just the rule of my iron fist!
Oh, remember the old days, when we reclaimed London and toasted our success from the top of a Chieftain tank?! It’ll be like that. Only, this time, I’ll be up on the turret and you’ll be smeared all over the tracks! Hurrah!
All Present: Hurrah!
M: And then it’s onwards and upwards toward official dictatorship! Not sure which way we’re headed yet. Could be socialist – you’d like that, wouldn’t you? – or perhaps we’ll go goose-stepping off in the fascist direction? I haven’t decided. Perhaps we’ll do both, like the Castro boys’ Cuba: set off to the left and end up marching back on ourselves from the right!
I hate it when conversation gets too political. Throw in a smattering of Finance talk and you’ll find me staring out the window thinking about sun-dappled woodland and fast-flowing streams full of trout.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, Malmot’s talking about establishing a Corporate State. Every country needs to stand on its own economic feet, he says. But Durham believes our economy is based upon the production of cheap alcohol, counterfeit clothing and reliant on poseurs drinking themselves to death. With that in mind, why not play to our strengths and open England as a massive tourist resort?
He mentions Cuba again and someone else mentions that tourists bring in fresh DNA.
“And you’ll need DNA if you’re going down the fascist route,” says Durham, “because too much of this Far-Right-Racial-Purity malarkey and you’ll end up as a nation of window-lickers.”
“It’s a fair point,” says Malmot. “But there’s one other business option we haven’t considered yet.”
“And what’s that?”
“Warmongering. We’ve nothing better to do.”
We stand in hushed silence. We’re a hundred years behind the rest of the world in weapons technology and starting a war would be suicide. But that’s for the future to decide. We’re here to interrogate the prisoner, Malmot reminds us, and soon we’re back into his alternate reality of Revolution and Counter-revolution.
“I didn’t put King William back on the throne to have you haul him off and guillotine him!” he snarls.
Well, we won’t be leaving until Durham ‘confesses’ his involvement in something or other. So I decide to get out of here. In mind, if not in body. I picture myself on the banks of a crystal-clear Estonian lake, eating beef sandwiches with a new wife and the children I don’t have yet. We’re all smiling and no one’s drunk. But Durham can scream louder than I can think and soon the kids are screaming, too. And I consider that God must have been in an exceptionally malicious mood when he gave misery a broadcast frequency.
Well there’s nothing for me to do until Durham signs his confession, and he can’t sign it till Malmot’s finished making it up. But instead of sitting down and applying himself to the damn document, the evil wraith’s left his beetle friend to stew in a blindfold and earmuffs and decided to drive me home in his great big, horrible car. Is he going to kill me? There’s no chauffeur, no bodyguards and, when I do tune into the damned weird noise he calls his voice, I get the distinct impression he’s attempting to be friendly. I don’t like being in enclosed spaces with him. I find the whole experience distinctly unnerving. Why’s everyone rushing to confide in me all of sudden? Do I look like a sympathetic listener? More likely, it’s because I’m unknown and expendable. There’s no way I can use their secrets against them.