When David Sault talks about the Golden Key treasure hunt, which for the past 15 years has been his obsession and defining eccentricity, his tartan~ slippered feet begin to joggle with emotion. They make a gentle rustling sound on the carpet in the living-room, where we are sitting drinking strong tea.
Sault's house is in a hushed Hampshire sprawl. In the back garden a hedgehog is playing matador with a slice of ham, watched by a neighbours tabby. The room we are in is decorated with a photograph of his son's boat, a copper etching of the Tower of London, a couple of framed tapestries which may have been completed from kits, and a woodblock on which is painted a Pinocchio with a rather haunted expression.
It is here that Sault, pronounced “salt”, practises his golf, which explains the furniture pushed back against the walls. Demonstrating the putting-machine in the corner, he gently taps in the ball, which whirrs round before it is vomited back at his feet. A 56-year-old retired manager of a bitumen company, he is a tall - even hulking - yet shadowy presence, with a strong handsome face and flat Leicestershire vowels. He is reasonable and likeable and has a good line in self-mockery, offering at one point to model his anorak for photographs - “I'd do anything for my public” - but, settled in the saddle of his hobby-horse, there is no mistaking the zealot beneath the suburban, slipper-wearing exterior.
IN I982, INSPIRED BY KIT WILLIAMS' HUGELY SUCCESSFUL “MASQUERADE” - a beautifully illustrated book of riddles which revealed the whereabouts of a buried golden hare - the television writer Don Shaw (Z-Cars, Danger UXB, Softly Softly) designed his own treasure hunt. His book, The Golden Key, was a mystery based on Sir Francis Drake's round~the-world voyage, printed in sepia ink on stiff, olde-worlde, brown paper. Maps, directions and narrative (in authentick 16th-century spelling) pinpointed the spot where Shaw had buried an object - possibly a key, possibly not - and the burial was witnessed by Major-General Sir Jeremy Moore, a Falklands hero. Those who thought they had found the “key”, or had discovered the solution to finding it, were invited to write to the publishers, William Maclellan of Glasgow, and claim the prize, £50,000 of Shaw's own money, which had been deposited into a Yorkshire Building Society account.
Shaw's key unlocked a Pandora's box. His readers soon tracked him down. and for five years his telephone rang day and night with treasure-seekers like David Sault frantic for clues or convinced they knew where the key was buried. From others, quite unlike Sault, he received death threats. The enthusiasm of one reader could only be quelled by a restraining order. And on one memorable night when the moon was high in the sky, several dark figures wielding spades slunk out of the shadows around Shaw’s house, their mission to dig up his garden. One desperado hired a JCB and demolished a riverbank of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The publishers were inundated with Coke cans, pieces of moss, feathers; one man drove all night from Wiltshire to Glasgow with a pebble which he knew was the key. There is a belief popular among hard-core enthusiasts that the key may not be buried, may not be golden, and may not be a key at all. Sault himself has never ruled anything out. “The key's just a symbol,” he says, with a resolute stroke of his chin. One extremist has written a lengthy thesis which concludes that the real key is the one depicted on the book's cover. Another has “proved” that there never was a golden key, nor even a symbol of one; that the entire book was a red herring.
Pity Don Shaw. To this day, he can hardly bear to talk about The Golden Key. When I track him down by telephone, he sighs deeply. “You've no idea of the degree of obsession.” He makes no attempt to disguise his irritation and apprehension: “I wish I'd never written the book. It's haunted me.”
Pity Don Shaw, indeed. It wasn't even as though The Golden Key was particularly successful - quite the reverse, in fact, having sold about 10,000 copies to Masquerade's 400,000, and made its author only £4,350. If the prize was found, Shaw was set to recoup less than ten per cent of his £50,000. No wonder he wanted to end the hunt. The publishers William Maclellan went into liquidation. Steven Shipp, a treasure-seeker who helped to make a programme about The Golden Key for the Radio 4 consumer series Punters, recalls visiting the company which took over Maclellan's assets, Stuart Titles, and seeing thousands of copies of Shaw's book stacked against the walls.
Shaw says that his “big mistake” was not putting an expiry date on the hunt. In October I987, five years after the book's publication, judging that the hunters had been given a fair crack of the whip and “sick of being bothered on the phone and in person”, he decided that enough was enough: he would terminate the hunt and reclaim the prize.
Having taken legal advice, Stuart Titles placed announcements in The Times and The Telegraph to this effect. Immediately, three Golden Key enthusiasts - an archaeologist, a craft teacher and a retired major - threatened legal action. The resulting furore dragged the hunt on into 1988, when Gordon Hooke, a retired naval commander and businessman, who had been acting as Shaw's agent for several months, convinced him that there was no need to cut his losses: “I told him that The Golden Key was still a terrific money-making possibility, and persuaded him to sell me the rights.” Hooke had been a fan of the hunt since Christmas 1982, when his secretary gave him a copy, and had tracked Shaw down after reading about the ending of the hunt in the newspapers. In December 1988 Shaw sold the rights of the book to Hooke, and renounced any interest in it or involvement with it ever again, ever. Hooke decided to suspend the competition. On 1 January 1989 the key was dug up, most treasure hunters were informed by post, and that should have been that.
Only it wasn't. Firstly because Golden Key hunters were, indeed are - though their ranks are now sadly depleted - a tenacious bunch. A Miss Mary Hollinshead wrote to That's Life, who made a programme about the hunt. In 1989 a group of disaffected key hunters led by Steven Shipp, self-styled “gentleman and adventurer”, started up Golden Key News, a newsletter to keep others informed. In the early Nineties Miss Hollinshead took Shaw to court on the grounds that there was a contract between the author and those who bought his book. She lost. “It never was a competition,” Shaw says, his voice rasping with frustration, “and, even if it had been, the judge said I had leant over backwards by giving it five years. They're all chasing moonbeams. Anyone who disagrees can sue me.”
Mark Parry, the hardline chairman of the Armchair Treasure Hunt Club of Great Britain, scorns the judge's decision: “He ruled that there was no implied contract - I would say that a contract is the one thing that most definitely was implied." Hooke maintains that he wants to relaunch the hunt one day, with a few fundamental differences. Understandably, he wants it to make money this time round, so there are heady plans for television and newspaper tie-ins, a drama series, garage promotions, bumper stickers and “wassername, the woman with the bottom”, as he describes Anneka Rice, running breathlessly around the countryside followed by a cameraman. Phrases like “market conditions” trip off his tongue, along with “potential gross”, which he claims could be “in the Lottery league". It is not surprising that Hooke's agenda strikes fear into the hearts of those who relish the mystique of the traditional wits-pitted-against-cunning hunt, but it may all come to nothing: the stalwarts who believe they have already solved the puzzle could go and dig up the key the moment it was reburied.
For David Sault, all this is neither here nor there. Tucked away from the tempest, for 15 years he has plodded away relentlessly. He didn't see the notices in The Times or The Telegraph. He was never put on the Golden Key News mailing list, nor did he catch That's Life or Punters. Despite having written to Shaw from time to time, he has never had a letter back to say that the hunt is over. He was omitted from Hooke's list of the Golden Key regulars who were to be kept informed. And so he continues his quest.
He remembers the day he heard about The Golden Key as a day of revelations: “I was doing asphalt work on the hill climb at Broadchalk at the time. I heard Don Shaw talking on the radio about The Golden Key, and I thought, that sounds all right, so I cut off from my route home and drove into Salisbury to W H Smith. I couldn't wait to open the book, and as soon as I did I was hooked." Since then, according to his son Andy - a 34 year-old management consultant - he has amassed “mountains of paperwork” and put in “hundreds of man-hours” in search of the key, appropriating along the way various artefacts he takes to be clues - a piece of wire in the shape of a pistol, for example - in the hope of scuppering the opposition. Staring wistfully at the net curtain, Sault rhapsodises about his first digging excursion: “We left at about seven o'clock at night in the pouring rain with all four kids in the car. We went to the middle of nowhere, and I mean nowhere. But, of course, we were gripped by treasure-hunt fever back then.” I have a fleeting impression of the Sault offspring, who would all have been in their late teens or early twenties at this time, crammed reluctantly into the back of a Volvo. But it seems that at first the whole family, including Sault's wife, was similarly captivated. Andy enthuses about the episode: “We were convinced we'd cracked it, and we just went bombing out on the spur of the moment. It was very exciting; instead of watching Coronation Street and going to bed, we were staying out late at night.” Fifteen years on, he persists in believing that his father will get there eventually: “I've got faith in my dad.”
Meanwhile, the rumours run and run. Mark Parry of the Armchair Treasure Hunt Club explains that, inevitably, some people will assume that the hunt was never valid: “If Don Shaw was prepared to dig up the key, then what was to stop him digging it up sooner than he said he did?” And, of course, as Parry points out, without a solution, or anyway of proving a solution, the hunters' imaginations will run riot. He cites Quest for the Golden Hare, the book by Bamber Gascoigne about Masquerade, which explores the “inverted pyramid”: the process by which people disregard logic in the attempt to solve a puzzle, and instead - seemingly, as Parry points out, in the belief that they are destined to win - create theories which are based upon their own interests, distorting or overlooking what is there in black and white. For example, such is Sault'˜s compulsion that when he reads the line “no iron and strength of wood”, his first thought is “golf clubs”.
The key is the treasure hunters' Holy Grail, and it continues to fascinate those who think they are in on the secret. So, however often Shaw protests that it is all over, however much he moans about the die-hards driving him to distraction, his fate, like that of the treasure-seeker Sault, remains for the foreseeable future caught up in the quest.
Like the tormented souls who continue to compete for the key, Shaw can never win. He admits that, once he'd realised the extent of the loss he looked likely to make, he was reluctant to pay up the £50,000. The obvious conclusion is that he was naive. But one thing is for certain: until the solution is revealed and the hunters' curiosity satisfied, The Golden Key treasure hunt will never be completely forgotten.
Sault certainly hasn't forgotten it; he knows no reason to do so. He denies that he is especially patient: “I'm persistent. If you sit all day at a pond with no fish in it, you're patient. But if you sit all day at a pond with fish in it, you're persistent."
During our conversation, he thumbs through his battered, Sellotaped copy of The Golden Key and reverently quotes passages of Shaw's cod-Elizabethan prose. As I am about to leave, he takes up his book one last time, slips on the gold-rimmed specs which hang around his neck, and finds the dog-eared page in seconds. He clears his throat and reads:
“I have chosen to give to all men a joy and understanding that the chase is greater by farre than the prize itself." It is an adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson line: “to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour”. But Sault likes it - he thumps the page significantly and murmurs, “I believe that.” Which, all things considered, is probably just as well.