Last Train to Gloryhole (35 page)

‘Yes, but they are alive, Ben,’ Sergeant Foley replied, glaring at the younger officer with disdain. ‘The boy we’re searching for is probably dead. We believe he’s been killed, you see. Therefore he’d be dead.’

‘But how do you know that?’ asked Carla, climbing out of the car and clutching her father’s arm.

‘How do we know that?’ the sergeant repeated, staring deeply into the singer’s lovely eyes. ‘Because we have contacts in the druggie community, Miss. But you wouldn’t know anything about that, I imagine.’ He bit his lip and turned away from her at the sheer irony of his brass-necked comment.

‘Well, actually, I do, as it goes,’ Carla told him, to the sergeant’s complete surprise. ‘Five years ago I happened to get busted by an under-cover officer in west London. Only it turned out that the Met knew nothing about it. You see he was really acting on behalf of a tabloid Sunday newspaper. I dare say you know the rag I’m talking about. As a result I almost went to jail, and it scared the living daylights out of me. Nobody was really surprised when I decided it would be best all round to take a brief sabbatical from music completely soon after that. I didn’t get to perform again for three years. I found I wasn’t able to do anything except sit at home and write.’

‘And your career - and the country, might I say - have benefitted enormously as a result, Miss Steel,’ the sergeant replied. ‘My grand-daughter has all your albums, you know. She’s particularly fond of your second one. ‘
Candice Farm,
’ I believe it’s called.’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Carla, fearing what was coming.

‘That’s somewhere round here, isn’t it, constable?’ he asked, spinning round. ‘Isn’t it Miss Steel?’ Foley could tell she wasn’t going to oblige him. ‘Tell me, young lady, what exactly went on there that made you decide to name your very own CD after it, if you don’t mind me asking? As you must be aware, there have been countless blogs and rumours on the matter.’

‘You really wouldn’t want to know, Sergeant,’ Carla told him, turning away to look west, along the line of the river’s course, and way beyond towards the distant
Seven Arches
, and her father’s home, which, though she couldn’t presently see it round the obstructing hill that supported the castle, she knew sat perched, prettily but precariously, alongside it.

‘No? But I think we actually might like to know,’ Sergeant Foley responded. ‘Listen - did you know that Dai - the poor farmer there - had to change the farm’s name after your album went into
The Charts
. It is called
‘Cwm Scwt’
now, I gather. A sad business that, if you ask me, because I can’t for the life of me see as how that name’s any better than the first one was.’

‘There was never anything much to hide, Sergeant. That farmer happened to be a friend of the Davies family, that’s all,’ Carla told him with a thin smile, yet recognising from his stern, impassive look that Sergeant Foley wasn’t buying any of it, and probably already knew about the vast majority of the scandalous activities that went on there when the weather was conducive.

Beginning to feel a little self-conscious, Carla turned round to check on her father.

Tom was standing just behind her, his wrinkled eyes closed, his body bent slightly to one side, an elbow leaning on the bonnet of the car. ‘I am sorry to say I was wrong, Sergeant,’ he said, ‘The boy - Jake, did you say? - is in fact in the old railway-tunnel, deep down beneath us.’ He is lying on his side on the stony ground, his arms stretched out, and - and inside his open mouth - ’ Tom winced perceptibly at this point, and Carla thought he might be about to throw up.

‘Yes?’ said the bleach-blond constable, scribbling down all the old man’s comments into his thin, black note-book as quickly as his young fingers allowed.

‘His mouth has been filled with - it appears to be crammed full of -’ Tom began. Then his hand shot up to his mouth and he spun round and vomited onto the side of the car. Carla rushed over to assist him.

‘His bollocks!’ stammered Sergeant Foley, staring at the old man, and nodding slightly so as to elicit from him a confirmation that he felt he barely needed. ‘I’m right, yes, old boy? Say it, why don’t you?’

‘His private parts, yes,’ Tom told him, as Carla held up his head in order to wipe his mouth clean. The old man suddenly pulled open the car’s rear-door, and Carla, now pale as a sheet herself, helped him to climb back inside.

The two policemen shook their heads almost in unison, quickly realising that the long, blocked-up tunnel was the one place that they hadn’t thought to look.

‘Then it’s similar to that one last month in Cardiff, Ben,’ Sergeant Foley announced. ‘The one in that enormous drain.’

‘And I guess, if he’s way down below us,’ said the constable, pointing to the van at the end of the cortege labelled ‘
K-9
,’ ‘then the dog we brought wouldn’t have found him any sooner than anyone else would.’

‘Yes, I guess that’s true,’ retorted Foley. ‘As I said, Ben, it’s virtually the same as what happened the last time, right? Which suggests to me that the killer could be one and the same. The tunnel-entrance is just down there through the trees, by the way,’ he said pointing to the line of dwarf oaks and elms that skirted the precipitous edge of the rolling, boulder-strewn plateau that the squad of police-officers, in their long line of vehicles, were all now sat silently parked upon. ‘Let’s get the dog out of the van anyway, shall we,’ continued the sergeant, ‘and give the old boy a run. You see we’ll need to go down there with a stretcher, and locate the fellow and bring him up.’

Merlyn Foley leaned on the open window of his car and peered inside. ‘Well, it’s a good thing you’ve managed to tell us exactly where to point the old fella, Mr. Davies, because I’ve noticed Cymro’s no longer got the sniff that he once had.’ He looked to the ground. and said quietly, ‘Sixteen, isn’t he?’

‘The dog?’ asked the young constable. ‘No, he’s got to be younger than that, surely.’

‘No, the boy I’m talking about!’ the sergeant told him sternly. ‘Jake Haines we think the missing boy’s called. Another bloody Valleys’ coke-dealer, if our informant is correct.’ He shook his head from side to side in frustration. ‘You know, Ben, I’ll be glad when next year comes, and I get to retire from this damn job, I really will.’

‘Why’s that, Sir?’ asked Ben.

‘Well, why do you think?’ retorted Foley, dipping his head, stroking it with a sharp nail, and ruminating. ‘Once again it’s me that’ll have to go and tell the poor lad’s parents, you see.’ He shook his head from side to side. ‘And although I’ve never found it easy having to do that, even though it’s a task you have to accept is part and parcel of the policeman’s job, I’m definitely getting to hate it a lot more these days now that the poor buggers are getting to be so incredibly young.’

Chris was wondering why he felt a great gaping hole in his existence these days, and he soon decided that the likely cause of it was the fact that Emily hadn’t come home, and that he hadn’t been able to locate her in any of the potential sites he knew about - underground, or otherwise. Annoyingly he believed that his mother held him responsible for the strange event, even though she had not once actually said so to his face. And this apparent dishonesty on her part to his mind illustrated the lack of trust she now had in him generally, and, perhaps, the absence of any genuine love for him, which he might find understandable had she found out about the use to which he had put next-door’s loft, or that he had begun selling drugs once again, but which nevertheless undermined his self-confidence greatly.

A group of boys in rugby-practice had once called him
‘a mummy’s boy,’
and, although he had managed to get them to retract the slight almost immediately, through a mixture of bluster and physical exuberance on his part, he could now see quite clearly that they had been right all along, and that it was probably best just to acknowledge and accept the fact. The girls who came into his life had no realistic chance with him, he told himself with a shrug of the head; none of them, least of all Pippa or Rhiannon. This was largely because his mother had already met them, had swiftly summed them up, in that infernal all-seeing, all-knowing way of hers, and dismissed them both as sluts and harpies, and patently beneath him.

No. Pippa, Rhiannon and the other, younger ones, who seemed to plague him daily in the school-playground, stood no real chance of getting him to commit fully to them. The girls concerned were doomed even before they received their first valentine, their first bouquet, their first guitar-serenade, even if they ever got so far as to be invited to the home he shared with his family. Each would sooner or later have to admit that, though they might love him, they wouldn’t be able to claim him for themselves. And Chris knew full well that this had all been his mother’s doing, even if she would never acknowledge it, or probably even agree to discuss the subject.

Chris searched his brain for an example of how this all-consuming, all-singing, all-dancing love of his mother’s had found expression in his life, so that he might, hopefully before long, relate it to Carla and glean her opinion. He tried to imagine her response when he told her of his concerns. ‘I’d say it’s almost as if you have a T-shirt on under your school-shirt that displays text that reads ‘
Property of Anne Cillick - kindly return after use
.’ Yes, he told himself, Carla’s response would almost certainly be along those lines, and he felt heartily glad that it would be.

Chris chuckled despairingly, then, suddenly sensing the greater than usual depth of the afternoon reverie that his waking mind had succumbed to, looked around him, and suddenly remembered that he wasn’t alone.

Despite the pain caused by the tight bandage that he still wore on his right thigh, the piercing cramp that he felt in his buttocks, and the unmistakable, burgeoning onset of hemorrhoids just a centimetre or two away from that spot, Chris was spending his lunch-hour sitting on the uncarpeted floor of the dim and dusty science-corridor, once again holding hands with Pippa Jenkins. He reached up his free, right hand and rubbed a bleary eye.

Just then the seemingly oblivious, mini-skirted form that was Rhiannon Cook suddenly stepped over the two of them, then strode purposefully away into the illuminated end of the hallway, where the one o’clock sun streamed in powerfully, spreading its warmth horizontally, but slowly, up in the direction where the uniformed, newly-united, couple were awkwardly sitting.

‘God! You can even see her bra - the peanut-smuggler!’ Pippa suddenly announced, in a high, sneering tone, though too late, of course, for Chris to be able to catch a glimpse of the enticng sight himself. ‘I reckon she’s a student rep for
‘We Buy Any Bra Dot Com,’
she told him, giggling. ‘You know, I can’t understand what you ever saw in her, Chris. And what pale, thin legs she’s got, too - the lanky, old goose. Euggh!’

Chris eyed the slender calves he had once loved pass through the fire-door and walk out into the bright school-yard, from where cries of boys punting a rugby-ball back and forth pierced the afternoon air. From the jerking movements that her body made, he predicted that Pippa was far from done. Yes, another deprecating comment was plainly imminent, he felt, and so it was.

‘You know, when she went to Switzerland with her German class last year, two girls from the hockey-team claimed she tried to get into bed with them. What do you think of that, Chris, eh? The dirty bitch! If she’s not a full-on lesbian, then I’d say she has to be bi- , don’t you think?’

Chris wasn’t really listening to the vindictive diatribe emerging from the rose-painted, warbling mouth that moved thinly, and somewhat dementedly, just a foot or so from his, now throbbing, over-warm face. He knew from personal experience that Rhiannon wasn’t anything but heterosexual, and calling the girl ‘
old’
like that was simply plain spiteful, since she had spent five years of the last six in the same year that he was in, until that sad day, almost a year ago now, when she was informed that her subject-levels and her test-grades were so disappointing that she needed to be kept back for a second year in Year Eleven. It turned out that he had been far more gutted than she was, Chris recalled, her dad quickly sensing that, in the long run, this would undoubtedly give his daughter the best possible chance of future success. And so it had proved, since she was not only leader of the school-band these days, but had been given an award that recognised her academic progress and achievements. And, only weeks before, Chris had shared in Rhiannon’s joy and celebrated it with her with a weekend-meal at ‘
Nando’s.’

‘You know, she’s so dumb, that girl, that she took a scarf back to Debenhams because it was too tight.’

Leaning forward, and rubbing the cramp from the taut muscles of his bottom, Chris slowly got to his feet, looked down insightfully, for what would be the first and last time, at Pippa’s lolling, bleach-blond skull, contrasted it instinctively with Rhiannon’s finely shaped head and deliciously flowing tresses, shouldered his school-bag, and marched off towards the still-closing, glass fire-door. This he not only stopped in its tracks, but fairly took off its metal hinges, with an almighty, thumping, drop-kick, and, turning to the right, and breaking into a lumbering trot, hurried after his former girlfriend through the long line of regimentally parked-cars that bordered the playground.

In the leafy lane that circuited the astro-turf, Chris must have called Rhiannon’s name a dozen times or more before she even deigned to look back once in his direction, and then only to verbally compare him to an orifice in which, sadly, he was presently experiencing the most severe of pains. It was four o’clock that afternoon before she finally chose to even address him by his name, and seven-thirty p.m. before she engaged him in any meaningful conversation.

In the deepening shadows at the side of the house that her mother had recently, and somewhat bizarrely, decided to name ‘
Caerleon,’
(and so had attached a wooden board to its front-wall that, artlessly, declared the same,) Rhiannon told Chris that she definitely wasn’t a girl for turning, and that taking a backward step in life was, and always had been, anathema to her, since it invariably led to bitterness and regret. She even declared things that she had hitherto kept from him, such as the fact that her friends had all warned her against getting back with him on account of the fact that he might, after all, be gay, that he unquestionably took drugs, and that he appeared to have caught a lethal dose of acne from the bottle-bronzed, but fast-peeling, Pippa Jenkins, and possibly a lot more besides.