Author’s note: (it would definitely be helpful to read “A More Mysterious Life Part 1” published on these pages in 2023,

“Kevin, Kevin, Kevin” said Lavinia Croop shaking her head. “What are we going to do with you?”

Kevin didn’t yet know the answer to this rhetorical question but was about to find out. His fantasy life which had started as a kind of hobby, a distraction from his life as an unremarkable geography teacher in Swindon had got completely out of hand. Croop listed the occasions on which his “meddling” had forced the abandonment of several sensitive operations.

He tried to protest this description of his activity. After all he hadn’t known about the plot to blow up the South bank and had merely been drinking a coffee whilst pretending to meet his made-up girlfriend (the exotic Manuela Di Santiago). Neither had his disguise as a Parisian street artist near the Louvre, had anything to do with the recent Mona Lisa heist. Basically he just liked to imagine himself living a more mysterious life.

Croop, a formidable operator at Mi5 rose, leaned across the table and muttered “You’re a Fucking idiot.”

She paused before continuing. “ Nevertheless we are prepared to waive your many acts of stupidity on this occasion as we have a certain delicate matter to resolve that might require your talents, such as they are.”

And this was how he came a few days later, to be sitting by a lake just outside Vienna, reading Das Bild and eating a tuna sandwich. There was a fake zoom lens camera on the table in front of him and a distinctive spotted umbrella by his side.

He had been excited by his task at first, his years going under the radar, would stand him in good stead, he suggested. “Just spy with your usual aplomb” Croop replied.

He looked around at the scene, the lake was deserted apart from a distant refuse operative cleaning out the bins, the young counter assistant in the café and at a table nearby a very Russian looking man with huge eyebrows and a homburg hat who was looking ostentatiously through a copper telescope at some trees across the lake. It seemed a relatively simple job.

Kevin approached him silently, only tripping once over the leg of a cast iron chair on the way.

“The sunrise was marvellous today” he whispered in the man’s ear.

“A delicious piece of strudel” replied the Russian in a very thick Russian accent, just as Kevin had expected.

Kevin sat down and stared squarely at the agent. If he hadn’t known better he would have said the fellow was more an undergraduate fancy dress version of a Russian spy than “Sputnik5” one of Moscow’s top spooks, his secret recording device was protruding from his pocket and one of his luxuriant eyebrows appeared to be slipping down in the direction of his false-looking nose. No matter, Kevin had his orders and the sooner he succeeded in his mission the sooner he could go home and restart his life.

“Have you got the treacle pudding?” asked Kevin using the codeword he had been taught for a microfiche file he’d been asked to receive.

“Do not play games with me” answered the heavy set Russian “It is you who are bringing ze treacle puddink to me!”

The words of Croop rang in his ear “Do not return without it!”

He marched forward and put his hand in Sputnik’s pockets but at the same moment the portly KGB man was doing exactly the same to him. An amateurish fight ensued which ended with both men rolling down the bank and into the lake. Kevin grabbed his opponent again and looked once more into his face. Both his bushy Russian eyebrows had now fallen off. A moment later a masked man dressed entirely in black stepped from the shadows and pointed a gun at both men.

Having searched both men’s pockets and asked several times where the treacle pudding was this new arrival was disturbed by the screech of car wheels on the gravel, he then shouted in fury to see both the refuse collecter and the counter assistant drive away at breakneck pace.

A moment later Croop stepped out from the cafeteria. Neither Kevin nor Nigel Inglethorpe, an RE teacher from Nuneaton with a predilection for impersonating Russian spies, knew why she seemed so pleased at their evidently botched operation.

But she was, “it all went like clockwork” she declared looking at her dishevelled troops, “and should we ever need some imbecilic decoys again, I ‘ll know just where to come. With you two hamming it up our real agents were able to slip entirely” she paused for a moment before finishing quietly, “under the radar.”