CHAPTER
FIVE: TREASURE TROVE
Hunter stowed the big suitcase carefully in his drawingroom, in the middle of his prized Turkish carpet, treasured souvenir of the last holiday he spent with Arabella before their divorce, and prized open the lid. The case was packed with manila files stuffed with photocopies, probably thousands and thousands of sheets. He bent to pick one of the files up, and realised that Elaine was standing behind him, dressed in a tight blue silk shirt and jeans that flattered her backside, with her hair pinned up in bunches tied with blue ribbons.
‘Come and have dinner.’ She made her voice seductive. She had spent the afternoon with a friend, also a divorced antique trader, and now realised just how very close she had come to chopping herself into bits. Good men with good jobs and comfortable flats just a two minute walk from the Portobello Road market were not to be found growing on trees, and time had come for her to crawl, and employ cunning and guile.
She had taken Hunter too much for granted, that was certain, and she must mend her ways. Sweetness must henceforward rule supreme – making her douce, and amenable, and accomodating in everything; cuisining Hunter delicious little meals and sating his most demanding lustings, until he came to count her as an essential comfort in his life, and wholly necessary for a more permanent alliance. Possibly even for paternity, for Elaine had just passed thirty, and felt that it was now high time for them both to settle down.
She visualised Hunter patting a tiny head, and smiled fondly to herself. She knew that he liked children, providing they were pretty and well-behaved, and that his mother, a widow living in Bournemouth, was counting the days until he married again, providing that he could find someone rather more stable than Arabella. She felt she could crack it - given time, energy, and a generous dollop of goodwill, and she was resolved to win.
She had therefore prepared rather a stylish supper to help launch her new assault on his heart, because she knew the weak chinks in Hunter’s armour. She smiled fondly as he sat down at his kitchen table, and served him a plate laden with meaty chunks of grilled pork filet, garnished with pureed yellow lentils and fresh spinach flavoured with pine nuts, teamed with a bottle of good chablis. Then she tempted him further with a salad of strawberries, peeled grapes and Cape gooseberries bedded into sheep's milk yoghurt sweetened with brown sugar, with a glass of golden muscat on the side, and the whole formed a symphony of delicate and delicious flavours and colourings, and she purred happily, because she knew that she was a good cook and that the meal was a winner.
Hunter cleaned away the last scraps of his strawberries, and she nodded benevolently, for now he was busy telling her some long and complex story about political plots, peppered with strings of important names and hints of skulduggery in high places. She was confident admiration would bring congratulation: once he had packed out his plots he would realise how well he had eaten, and smile back at her, and then they would fold themselves, each in the other's arms, and she would take another good step on her way to lifelong security. Perhaps she might even think of taking herself off the Pill.
Hunter was tempted, particularly as a large tot of marc and a brimming mug of black coffee followed his fruit salad and muscat, and toyed momentarily with the idea of tottering straight from table to bed, to take a comforting physical profit from so much devotion. But then he thought of Cradock's suitcase, and struggled a little unsteadily to his feet. He had work to do, and must be serious. He straightened up, swallowing the rest of his marc, smiled gratefully, and made for the door.
Elaine watched, first with surprise, and then with a touch of alarm. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Got work to do.’ Hunter realised that he was slurring his words a little. ‘Got to take a view.’ He smiled owlishly as he paused with his hand on the door handle. ‘Thanks for the delish..., er, lovely meal.’
A moment later he was gone.
Elaine watched the kitchen door close behind him, and her face fell. She stared at the dishes littering the table, the debris of all her fine cuisine, and her dreams began to curdle slowly within her, a hot tear trembling on her lashes. The bastard. The rotten bastard. She wanted to lift her head and howl her rage and grief like a wolf, but wiped her eyes with the corner of a napkin and sniffed damply instead. The humiliating bastard - she might as well be a skivvy. Hunter had taken his fill and moved on, leaving her hot, and tired, and totally unrewarded for an hour spent slaving over his kitchen cooker, an hour wholly wasted. It was a sad, sad pointer. A small hard voice at the back of her mind told her that she must persist, if she wanted to win through. But she felt broken by Hunter's ingratitude, and for a long, sorrowful moment she wanted only to weep.
Then she took a deep breath. She must pull herself together. She must be tough, if she wanted to snare toughness. She must have inner strength, and reject setbacks. She reached out for the bottle of marc and poured herself a generous measure. She would mark Hunter's selfishnessness away, and one day revenge would be sweet. But right now she must get on, and clear away, and wash up.
Hunter meanwhile stood looking down at the case in the middle of his drawingroom carpet and blinked to clear his head. The case was a brooding, challenging mass, and he could feel the palms of his hands moisten with excitement. He lifted the lid, and began sifting through the files. Some were stuffed with photocopies of press cuttings and photographs, government inter-departmental memoranda and the general chit-chat of power. But there were also reams of correspondence between political, military and police chiefs, and a series of weekly situation reports filed by a mysterious unit codenamed 'The Watchers'.
For the next half hour he knelt, first sorting the files into neat heaps, and pausing momentarily to smile for a moment at an Evening Standard cartoon showing a squad of policemen commanded by Lord Carrington about to execute a row of recalcitrant miners, and then burrowed into the Watcher sitreps.
The reports bore all the hallmarks of a relentless and increasingly deranged march towards authoritarianism. The Watchers reported angrily on attempts by the miners to recruit workers throughout industry, and mobilise what the reports counted as every malcontent in the land. Watchers spied reds under every bed, and fulminated with increasing fury. The reports quoted senior army officers’ views on measures deemed necessary to restore a proper sense of law and order, and talked much of bringing good men, hard men, back from Belfast. But the close lines of typescript made for tiring reading, and the words began to waver and blur as cosy well-fed drowsiness crept up on him.
Hunter broke off to sit back on his haunches. He must pause, regroup, and have some more coffee, plan a proper weekend reading programme, and tackle Cradock's case methodically. Otherwise he would be up half the night, sleep badly, and wake tired, out of sorts, and very probably hungover into the bargain.
He stepped quietly into the kitchen, and found Elaine washing the last of the dishes. She smiled at him tightly, but he barely glanced at her as he filled his cup from the cafetiere. He was busy, and about to tackle important work, and socialising would have to wait.
His coolness dealt Elaine a fresh blow. She sighed as she dried a final plate, her nascent hopes withering: a girl might plot, and a girl might plan, but some men remained forever unredeemably selfish.
Her hand strayed back towards the bottle of marc, still more than half full, and she found herself holding a half-filled glass, and swallowing a fresh mouthful of liquid fire to soothe her pain before she had quite realised what she was doing.
Now she understood that Hunter was determined to be a cold, unfeeling, ungrateful bastard, and knew that she was wasting her time: she might just as well have fed him on frozen hamburger and chips, washed down with a cold beer, with nothing for afters at all. She swallowed another mouthful of marc, and the drink warmed her consolingly. But she also wanted to weep, for marc was her only companion, and she swallowed again, and her hand strayed out towards the bottle for a refresher, because she deserved some kind of consolation, even if she had to fashion it herself.
Soon the marc began to prove more than a friend. Several large gulps started a warm glow coursing in Elaine's veins, rendering her quite philosophical. She began to wonder whether Hunter really was Mr. Right, for all his smart job and comfortable flat. Perhaps she should be looking elsewhere. True, he might be goodnatured, and reasonable company, most of the time. But he was also a bastard, and the fact was incontrovertibly plain, albeit she had a little trouble getting her mind round such a long word, what with the hyped-up state she was in, and all, but he was certainly a stinking little shit nonetheless. Perhaps, perhaps, and here she lost her thread for a moment, because she felt warm and comfortable now inside, and her tears had gone, and she wondered why the hell she was worrying, when the marc was so consoling, perhaps she should be looking for a new life, and new hopes, and new expectations.
Here Elaine thoughtfully poured herself yet another refresher, noting with a touch of regret that the marc had nearly run dry as she ran a string of men friends through her mind, and found sorrow flooding back with fresh force.
Men were were all bastards, every single living manjack of them, and a number might even be very much better dead. She began to sob, in a quiet, self-contained sort of way, grieving her misfortune. A barrage of little sniffs punctuate her tears as marc helped her appreciate the full, bitter unfairness of her deprivation. Fortune dealt other women golden hands, but cut Elaine up into chunks.
She reached for her glass, and realised that it had somehow emptied itself again, and drained the marc bottle to the very last drop, because she knew that Hunter would miss it, and his loss would be a well-deserved punishment for him. But drink was no consolation, for the marc retaliated by turning against her, sending fresh waves of depression rolling through her mind, and she wondered whether she would ever, or never, be happy again.
Age was creeping up on her, and one day in the not-too-distant future her breasts would sag, and her cheeks would turn to jowls, and she would have to take the first man to leer at her, and it would be a dreadful, dreadful reckoning. At this point she tried to pull herself to her feet, because she needed to check herself out in Hunter's kitchen mirror. But she lurched wildly instead, and only just managed to swing herself back into her chair, where she swallowed the very last drop in her glass, and buried her head in her hands, and cried again, until she was so cramped and uncomfortable that bed was the only solution, and she staggered off to collapse into sleep.
Meanwhile Hunter was roughing out a strategy. The files named names, and some of the names were still very much in circulation, and impressive into the bargain. He must hunt down the best known, and collate what they said, weaving a web from the past to ensnare the present. He must find those who wanted strong measures, and those who called for total ruthlessness, and construct strong snares to trap them, assembling man-traps capable of fastening the iron teeth of truth around memories seeking to forget.. He must shine a bright light into dark corners, and expose grey and power-hungry men for what they were: because greed and lust had rendered some fat with the passage of time. He would tell a tale of men seeking to instal a dictatorship in Downing Street, and build detention camps on Dartmoor and in the Highlands and Outer Hebrides, he would lay bare plans to set up military tribunals empowered both to corral shirkers and order much more radical measures against perceived persistent trouble-makers. He would map out a progression towards government by decree, and then show – just as the hard men felt they had power within their grasp - how common sense had brought Britain back to its senses, with police chiefs taking to safe fences, and blustering resolves wavering. He would show how strong men had thundered in vain, and then lost their nerves, until the only sound left in Whitehall was the soft delicate rustling of men gently covering their tracks.
He sat back and took a deep, deep breath. The papers were red meat of the very finest, stuffed with enough incriminating evidence to make dozens of the great and the good sing like canaries. He had been a political journalist for long enough to know that famous names would queue to sink each other, once the shit hit the fan, and that sibilantly insidious whispers of treachery would counterpoint the sharp brittle sounds of breaking reputations, whilst frantic attempts to claw succour out of betrayal would enable him to clean up in spades.
He would write a splash and a backing feature, perhaps a series of features, and then a book, and very possibly a film script, and become famous, and rich: for the papers represented the scoop of a lifetime, and a pot of gold deep enough to gild gingerbread for generations of Hunters to come. He sat quietly, because he could barely believe his good fortune, but his heart beat out a racetrack rhythm, and he knew that the world would pave an admiring path to his feet, that whole armies of beautiful women would queue to allure him, and that very soon he would rank as a very, very bright star indeed.
He yawned, and glanced at his watch. It was now late, and he thirsted for a celebratory drink. He stacked Cradock's files back into the big leather suitcase, tucking it carefully away behind his sofa, and made for the kitchen and his marc of honour.
But the marc was gone. Hunter stared unbelievingly at a small stand in the corner of the kitchen that he used as a bar, and saw nothing but a half empty bottle of red cooking wine and a Japanese saki bottle, empty but for a couple of centimetres, remains of a gift from a travelling Financeday writer.
He blinked, but nothing changed. His eyes swivelled, scanning the kitchen frantically, driven by the thirst of a cheated man, until he realised that the marc bottle stood on the kitchen table, with a glass at its side, and that both were empty.
Suddenly a fierce gust of anger ripped through him, and he marched to his bedroom door. He did not need to turn on the light - a dim glow from the street lights outside his bedroom window showed Elaine as a dark mass, sprawled out across her duvet, and she began to snore in great stertorous gusts as he looked down at her.
For a moment Hunter felt like rolling her off the bed onto the floor, piling her duvet on top of her, and beating the living daylights out of her. But his anger ebbed as fast as it had risen. It was plain that she had sulked her way down his bottle. It was no moment for vengeance: he had been drunk himself once or twice, and Elaine always put him to bed. He owed it to her at least to make her comfortable. The marc had gone, and rage was pointless.
He stripped her quickly, dumping her dress in a heap on the floor, and straightened her out on his bed as her snoring broke into a series of fitful grunts. She muttered to herself in her drunkenness, but did not wake, and began snoring again as he collected his own duvet and pillows and carried them into his drawingroom to drop them on the sofa.
The sofa was not the best bed in the world, but it would have to do. Hunter undressed, and returned to the kitchen to heat a small pan of water for the saki, the only strong drink left. He placed the bottle carefully in the pan, watching until the surrounding water began to bubble, and then decanted and sipped. The saki was warm and sweetish, and sadly lacked the impact of brandy. But it was alcohol, and any alcohol was better than no alcohol at all, and he took it to bed with him on the sofa, and mulled over his plans as the sweetness soothed him, and his eyelids grew heavy.
Suddenly he jerked back to alertness. A fear nagged at the back of his mind, and he realised that the corner of Cradock's case was peeping out at him. The sight triggered alarm bells: Elaine might bring up a doubtful men, and the case might walk.
A cold rivulet of sweat trickled down Hunter's cheek. His flat had no proper hidingplaces, and he was doubtful about the resident porter. He would have to ferry it to Financeday in the morning, and squirrel it away in some forgotten corner, so that he could go in on Sunday and start reading photocopies seriously, making notes as he went. If he could find a corner. He began to panic. Financeday was a very public building. Plenty of security at the doors, but nowhere to hide once past them. He worked in an open plan office, and there were no cupboards to lock. He would have to leave the case with Security.
Or perhaps with Arabella. But he pushed the thought away. Arabella sometimes made him crawl when he came calling, and he was past courting humiliation.
Choices turned and swirled in his mind as the saki crept through him, and he began to snore softly.