Single Obsession

by Des Ekin

  ‘Forget it.’ Hunter waved her concerns aside. ‘They won’t charge you with possessing a gun. If you hadn’t had it, and, if you hadn’t fired exactly when you did, that rock would have smashed Emma’s skull to smithereens.’

  ‘Instead of just glancing off my forehead,’ added Emma, lifting her hair and pointing to the jagged lines of abrasions. ‘No jury would convict you in the circumstances, Charley.’

  Charley was shaking her head. ‘I know they won’t take me to court over the gun. They’re too embarrassed that anyone should have been able to bring a weapon in from Denmark without any security problem whatever. When I explained that it came through in the Diplomatic Bag, there were a lot of high-level phone calls and a lot of red faces. I just hope it doesn’t cost anyone his job.’

  ‘They’ll sort it out quietly,’ Hunter assured her. ‘They’ll have an internal inquiry and a report that will be filed and forgotten. That’s the way these things work.’ He glanced at her. ‘You did surrender the gun to them, didn’t you?’

  Charley, walking between them, linked her arms through both of theirs. ‘Of course I did,’ she said. ‘Things have changed, Hunter. I may have gone down into that vault with the intention of blowing myself away; but, thanks to the doctor here, I’ve come to see things differently. I won’t be needing it any more.’

  ‘HELLO, Hunter.’

  ‘Hello, Jill.’

  There was a long, awkward silence. It was obvious that Jill and Anya had been hoping to avoid Hunter at the post-funeral luncheon. However, Claire’s mother had organised the place-settings at the Rivercourt Hotel and had innocently placed Hunter and Jill together at the same table. Anya was seated on Jill’s left. Emma and Charley took their seats at Hunter’s right.

  The sense of embarrassment hung over the circular table like a bad smell until Mark Tobey arrived, declaiming and gesturing histrionically. He took the last remaining seat, between Anya and Charley.

  ‘Hunter, Hunter,’ he said, shaking Hunter’s hand and then clasping it warmly between his. ‘It’s a sad day, old friend, but at least we know that poor Claire didn’t die in vain. We finally exposed Valentia. We did it. Oh … sorry. I do beg your pardon.’

  His hand jerked out towards Charley in a lizard-like movement. ‘Let me introduce myself, since Mr Hunter is obviously too rude to do the honours,’ he said. ‘My name is Mark Tobey.’

  ‘Mark Tobey, Charlotte Valentia,’ said Hunter curtly.

  Charley shook Mark’s hand but kept staring at him. ‘Haven’t we met before, Mr Tobey?’

  ‘No.’ He stared at her and shook his head. ‘No, definitely not. I think I would have remembered. Must have been two other people.’ He grinned and turned back to Hunter. ‘Word around town is that you’re launching your own magazine and hiring half the Street Talk staff. And the banks are tripping over themselves to throw money at you.’

  ‘I’m glad it’s not my money,’ muttered Anya, not quite sotto voce. ‘Could we order a drink, do you think? Excuse me?’

  She summoned a waiter across.

  ‘Well, Hunter, if you need to hire a jobbing reporter to do the occasional article, you know who to call,’ Mark grinned.

  ‘You’d have to do a job interview, Mark,’ Hunter said, deadpan.

  Mark roared with laughter, oblivious to his surroundings. ‘Good old Hunter,’ he said. ‘Seriously, when do we start work?’

  ‘May I take your order?’ interrupted the waiter, tired of hovering around.

  ‘I’ll have chilled cranberry juice, please,’ said Charley.

  ‘Mineral water,’ said Emma.

  ‘Oh …’ Hunter was taken unawares. ‘Coke for me, please.’

  ‘And for you, sir?’

  Mark, who was still waiting for Hunter to reply, looked around sharply. ‘Oh, right. I’m sorry. Do you serve white wine in those individual small bottles?’

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  ‘I’ll have one Sauvignon Blanc, if you have it, and one Australian chardonnay. Can you manage that?’

  ‘Certainly, sir.’ He counted up the orders and continued to hover.

  Emma held her breath. She realised that everything depended on which woman had still to place her order.

  ‘And I’ll have a double gin-and-tonic, please,’ said Anya, wearily. She glanced up, realising that Emma was staring at her. ‘What’s the matter? I’ve just had a hard day, that’s all.’

  ‘A job interview. That’s rich.’ Mark was still smiling at Hunter. ‘What questions could you possibly ask me that you don’t already know the answers to?’

  ‘Well,’ said Hunter quietly, ‘I’d begin by asking you how long you’ve been sleeping with my wife.’

  ‘Whoops!’ Mark jerked like an electrocuted raptor. ‘If this is your idea of an interview, Hunter, I shall be complaining to the Fair Employment Agency.’

  He shook his head, staring down at the table in amused incredulity.

  Then Jill spoke.

  ‘How did you know, Hunter?’ she asked. Her voice was soft and sad.

  ‘When a man orders a specific drink for a woman without even asking her first, it’s a bit of a giveaway,’ said Hunter. ‘That’s the trouble with having a secret affair. It deludes you into thinking that everyone around you has become deaf and blind.’

  ‘Oh, Hunter, come on –’ said Mark.

  ‘And it wasn’t exactly subtle when you suddenly volunteered to go to the southeast of the United States at exactly the same time as my wife decided to take a surprise holiday in Florida.’ He accepted the drinks from the waiter and paid for the round. ‘When I learned that both of you had travelled back home together on the same plane, it sort of clinched things.’

  Anya decided it was time to pitch in. ‘My God, Hunter, you are so pathetic,’ she trilled, her voice carrying clearly across the crowded room. ‘We all know that you’re burdened down with guilt because you caused the death of that poor innocent girl, but there’s no need to take it out on –’

  ‘Shut up, Anya,’ said Mark. He had the weary air of a man who’d already had a stomachful of Anya’s manoeuvrings.

  ‘Yes, shut up, Anya,’ Jill agreed testily.

  Anya swallowed half her gin in a single gulp. She shut up.

  Mark regarded Hunter with amused respect. ‘Okay, you rumbled us, Hunter,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want this to happen, matey. I didn’t choose to fall in love with the wife of my best friend. But you were so busy with Robbie, dashing up and down to Passage North every other weekend, and Jill was lonely, and – well, it’s no secret that your marriage was a big mistake.’

  Hunter said nothing. He continued to stare at Mark with distaste.

  ‘Come on, it’s happened before in the history of the world,’ protested Mark indignantly. ‘Men do fall for their best friends’ wives. Take Eric Clapton and Layla, for instance. It was sad, but they all worked it out in the end. These things happen.’

  ‘Well, I’m certainly glad that it’s out in the open now,’ said Jill, her face a picture of relief, as she accepted the small bottle of Australian chardonnay from her lover. ‘If it’s any consolation to you, Hunter, our holiday in Florida was completely ruined, what with Mark having to dash back to Ireland to help you out. I wouldn’t have minded, only it didn’t even prove necessary in the end. We could have stayed on.’

  Her voice had assumed a high-pitched tone of self-pity. Mark winced. Emma and Charley could only stare at her in disbelief.

  ‘Yes, let’s talk about that,’ said Hunter. ‘You never did get to tell me what your big story was, Mark. The one you were dashing back to reveal in time for the deadline.’

  Mark looked uncomfortable. ‘I suppose it’s all irrelevant now,’ he said. ‘But I’ve found out where Valentia made his money in America. I got a hot tip from an impeccable police source. Sorry, Charlotte, but it seems that your father was involved in drug-running for the Mafia. It’ll take a bit of work to confirm this, but –’

  Hunter was leaning back in his seat. ‘Don’t i
nsult my intelligence, Mark,’ he said. ‘I know exactly where Valentia’s money came from, and it had nothing to do with the Mafia or drugs. That was all a charade played out for my benefit – just like your attempts to get home in time for the deadline.’

  Mark shrugged.

  ‘I told you, Mark,’ said Jill, in the same nasal tone of complaint. ‘I told you he wouldn’t appreciate it. I told you we could have had another two days in Boca Raton. There was no need to dash from airport to airport making all those bloody connections.’

  ‘There certainly wasn’t,’ Hunter agreed. ‘You could have taken advantage of the half-empty charter flight that was sitting on the runway at Orlando, ready to fly direct to Dublin, at exactly the right time. I checked – it would have brought you home with hours to spare.’

  He fell silent as the waiter served a selection of salads and sandwiches.

  Mark was tearing his napkin into little scraps. ‘Okay, Hunter, I screwed up,’ he said despondently. ‘I let you down. I wasn’t there when you needed me. I’m sorry, okay?’

  Hunter said nothing.

  ‘Aren’t you being a bit harsh on poor Mark?’ asked Anya, helping herself to a couple of lettuce leaves. ‘We can’t all be perfect like you, Hunter.’

  ‘He’s obviously still upset about our affair,’ said Jill. She turned to her husband. ‘There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to cope with this situation more maturely, Hunter. Mark and I are planning to move abroad, so you’ll never see us again. And now that Mark’s legacy has come through, we’ll be more or less financially secure, so I won’t be suing for maintenance or anything silly like that. We can both admit our mistake, make a clean break and just … walk away.’

  ‘Yes.’ Mark was nodding vigorously. ‘Relax, Hunter. I wouldn’t have taken a job on your new magazine, anyhow. The thing is, Jill and I are going to be terribly decadent and settle down permanently in the Florida sun. That was one of the reasons for our trip. We’ve put down a deposit on a condo in Boca Raton.’

  ‘It’s a terribly upmarket resort just north of Fort Lauderdale,’ Anya whispered to Emma. ‘All the best people have condos there – senators, surgeons, film stars. And now that Barry, my husband, is retiring, we’ll have plenty of time to visit Jill and Mark and stay with them … oh, for as long as they’ll have us.’

  She smiled brightly. Mark’s face fell.

  Throughout all this, Hunter had been slowly shaking his head. ‘There’ll be no condo in Boca Raton, Jill. I’m sorry.’

  Mark’s face turned hard. ‘With respect, Hunter, that’s hardly up to you to decide.’

  ‘You’re right, Mark. It’s not up to me. It’s up to the judge. Tomorrow the High Court will be asked to freeze the three hundred grand in your bank account. Prevent you from taking it out of the country.’

  ‘But they can’t freeze it.’ Jill looked aghast. ‘That’s Mark’s legacy. From his aunt in New Zealand.’

  ‘Well, if he can prove that to the High Court, then he’s got no problem, has he?’

  Mark’s face had turned pale under his Florida tan.

  Hunter put his hand into his pocket and removed a newspaper cutting. He unfolded it slowly and passed it over to Mark.

  ‘What is it?’ demanded Jill. ‘Mark, what’s happening?’

  Charley was peering over Mark’s shoulder. ‘I knew I’d met him before,’ she said.

  Hunter nodded. It was the cutting he’d unearthed from the archives of the Sunday Hibernian – the one showing Charley and her boyfriend William Garville cycling through Christiania together. Right in the middle of the article, in bold type, were the three words that had wrenched Hunter’s gut that night. The words were ‘By Mark Tobey’.

  ‘You met Charley Valentia when you were freelancing in Copenhagen,’ Hunter told Mark. ‘You recognised her immediately when she visited my office posing as a prostitute called Mags Jackson.’

  ‘If you’re suggesting that I helped set up this shoddy conspiracy, I can assure you that I didn’t.’

  ‘I’m not suggesting that you were involved at the start.’ Hunter turned to Charley. ‘There were two weak points in your father’s decoy plan,’ he said. ‘Firstly, he had no idea that Mark Tobey, the only Irish journalist ever to have met his reclusive daughter, was now working in Street Talk. Mark’s bright – he figured out what was happening straight away. If he’d done the right thing and told me the truth, Valentia’s entire scheme would have collapsed in a heap of dust.’

  ‘I did try to warn you, Hunter,’ said Mark defiantly. ‘Over and over again. I told you to walk away from that story.’

  Hunter took a long drink of Coke. ‘But you didn’t tell me why. You were deliberately unconvincing. Because you’re a hard-core gambler, Mark. You were in serious debt. And you’d glimpsed the gambler’s Holy Grail. The chance to make a fortune from a dead-cert wager.’

  ‘It’s true,’ Emma told Jill. ‘Before the Street Talk article, Valentia was so far ahead in the election race that he was regarded as unassailable. Unstoppable. The odds against him losing his seat were two hundred to one, three hundred to one, even five hundred to one at the local bookie. Mark saw the opportunity to make a fortune.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Anya said. ‘There’s no such thing as a dead cert.’

  ‘Not in journalism, anyway,’ said Hunter. ‘That’s where we come to the second weak point in Valentia’s grand plan. He assumed we would go to press with the story purely on the basis of the evidence of one person. But you, Mark, you knew that wouldn’t be enough to make us run the story. We needed corroboration.’

  ‘Of course we did. And we had our police source.’

  ‘Your police source, Mark. Nobody else’s.’ Hunter turned to Charley. ‘Mark decided to nudge things along a bit by finding a cop source who was able to back up Mags Jackson’s story of an official cover-up. In fact, there was no cover-up, because the abduction had never been reported to the police in the first place. We know that for certain now.’ Hunter turned back to Mark, his face filled with contempt. ‘There never was a police source, was there, Mark? You invented him in order to make sure we’d publish the story and you’d get your three hundred grand from the bookies.’

  Jill was appalled. ‘Mark, tell them it’s not true. Tell them!’

  ‘I’m afraid it is true, Jill.’ Hunter had been told the whole story by Bernard Sauvage. ‘You see, I have my own police sources. Genuine ones.’

  He produced a wad of photocopies. ‘I’ve got the details here. Just before we published our article, Mark drove around Ireland placing bets on Valentia to lose his seat. He placed a few bets by phone to bookies in Northern Ireland and England, another batch via the Internet. Altogether, there were thirty small wagers of fifty each. Never enough to attract attention. But when they were all paid out, they came to a total of three hundred thousand.’

  ‘Insider trading,’ shrugged Mark. ‘That’s what made our country great.’ He turned to Jill. ‘It happens all the time. There’s nothing wrong with it.’

  ‘That’s a matter of opinion, old friend,’ said Hunter. ‘The bookies are claiming their money back, on the basis that you earned it through fraud. It’s an unusual case, but the word around the Four Courts is that, if you’re smart, you’ll hand it all back at the courtroom door and hope they don’t press a criminal charge of deception.’

  He felt Jill’s hand on his arm.

  ‘Hunter,’ she said softly. ‘I had absolutely no idea …’

  ‘I know you hadn’t.’

  ‘That money I took from our joint accounts – it was just temporary, to fund the trip. We were going to repay it. It was all his idea.’

  Hunter shrugged. ‘It’s not important,’ he said. ‘It’s only money.’

  He finished his Coke and rose to leave.

  ‘Hunter …’

  Her voice was a whisper of entreaty.

  Hunter shook his head. ‘You were absolutely right, Jill. Our marriage was a mistake. We should both walk away and wish e
ach other luck.’ He glanced at Mark, whose fixed smile of defiance was not reflected in his panic-stricken eyes. ‘And if you’re really choosing to settle down with a penniless gambling addict who’ll never get a position of trust again, you’ll need every bit of luck you can get.’

  Emma and Charley rose too, and wordlessly left the table. They went towards the door to say goodbye to Claire’s family.

  Hunter paused as he stood behind Mark’s chair. ‘I could forgive everything else, Mark,’ he whispered. ‘The affair with Jill, the money, the hell I’ve lived through over the past few weeks … perhaps it could all be forgotten in time. But Claire’s death I can never forgive. If you had told me the truth at the beginning, she would still be alive today.’

  He threw the wad of photocopied betting dockets on the table. ‘Thirty bets, thirty payouts,’ he said, turning on his heel and walking away. ‘The price of betrayal.’

  ‘I know.’ Mark was still grinning. ‘It’s almost biblical, isn’t it?’

  WITH a mixture of sadness and resignation Emma and Hunter watched Charley’s flight take off for Copenhagen. They knew it was unlikely they would ever see her again; but they understood that Christiania was her home, the only place where she wanted to be. The only place in the world that accepted her as she was.

  ‘Now what do we do?’ Emma asked.

  ‘You mean right now?’ asked Hunter. ‘Or generally?’

  ‘Both,’ said Emma, linking her arm through his.

  ‘Right now,’ Hunter said, ‘I’d like something to eat.’

  ‘Okay. And generally?’

  ‘Launch the new magazine. Get it up and running. Sort my life out. Start the divorce proceedings.’ He looked at her. ‘Your turn.’

  Emma paused on her way through the Departures area. ‘I’m going to take a couple of days off. I mean, really off. Robbie is having the time of his life at my sister’s house, playing with his cousins. He’s begging me to let him stay there for another few days.’

  ‘Time off? That doesn’t sound like the Emma I know,’ he teased. ‘Now that you’ve been cleared of that ridiculous assault charge, I would have thought you’d be up to your beloved clinic like a flash. Counting the number of patients to make sure none of them has gone astray. Checking over the accounts. Rubbing your finger along the shelves to check for dust.’