Last Train to Gloryhole (42 page)

‘Who?’ asked Anne.

‘Why, Dick, of course,’ she told her. ‘He didn’t call himself Riccardo Pantheon that night I can tell you.’

‘Why? What was he called?’ asked Zeta.

‘I’m not sure now,’ Maggie replied, thinking hard. ‘Well, he was called a lot of things that particular night, if truth be told - the prizes weren’t up to the usual standard you see. But I’m not going to be repeating them right here and right now, if you don’t mind.’

‘Oh, go on,’ said Janie, encouraging her to come clean, and grinning mischievously.

‘No way. I will not,’ she said. ‘It’s Sunday morning, for God’s sake.’

Anne clicked her fingers, recalling something important. ‘Oh, I’ve just remembered girls. There’s something I have to tell you about Gwen. Oh, you’ll never believe it. Listen to this.’

‘We’re all ears,’ said Loose Linda, tipping her plate of crusts into the bin, and rushing back.

‘She only went and attacked a man and woman with a bread-roll in
Prince Charles Hospital
.’

‘Gwen did!’ a chorus of high-pitched voices cried out.

‘Ooh, that’s awful,’ said Janie, shaking her head..

‘I’d say, said Zeta. ‘There’s a terrible waste of bread. If I told you what my Martin pays for -’

‘Aisht a minute, Zeta!’ commanded Maggie. ‘I need to ask Anne something. Listen, Anne. Her mother is up in
The Willows
with you, right? So I reckon you must see a lot of Gwen these days.’ Anne nodded. ‘Tell me, love - like me, do you think she’s completely off her rocker?’

The large, black police-car pulled up just before a row of old cottages that stood winking back at them in the bright morning sunshine. Chris already stood waiting, just yards away, beside his gleaming, red push-bike, and lifted his hand and shaded his eyes, watching intently as a duffel-coated Carla helped her aged father step out of the vehicle, and edge down the narrow path, that Chris knew ran down towards the little stream and its bridge, and, continuing, then rose up once more as it approached Vaynor Church. This ancient edifice, with its distinctive, triangular-roofed bell-tower, he could just make out to his left, standing, partially hidden, amongst a clutter of lofty elms and horse-chestnuts, and enclosed within its twisted fence of iron-railings, and its ancient, crumbling walls of red-brown sandstone.

On the path the two policemen turned round to wait for father and daughter to catch up with them, then slowly led the way further along the track towards the location which Tom had assured them contained the dead bodies he had seen so vividly in his mind’s eye just the previous day. The two uniformed men halted, looked at each other askance, and then began to laugh uncontrollably. Even from a distance, Chris found he could also now comprehend the mistake that the old man had clearly made, but he realised that, not being from the particular locality himself, it wasn’t possible that Tom could have known an awful lot about it.

‘What’s this? Christ! It’s just an ancient monument, old boy!’ announced Sergeant Foley, reading the rudimentary sign that someone had fixed crookedly onto the fence with a folded piece of rusty wire. ‘Little more than a hillock. No, not even that, I’d say,’ he added. ‘Just some grassy old tump in a field that I swear you’d miss completely if you weren’t actually looking for it.’

‘Sergeant, it’s a mass grave from the twelfth century,’ Chris announced, hurrying up on his bicycle and joining the group on the tight, narrow path. Dismounting, he spun round to address them all. ‘You see, the fields round here were once the scene of a humungous battle between the local Welsh people and the English - the Normans invaders from the castle over there.’ With this he pointed with his free arm directly into the sun’s rays, where what little remained of the ancient limestone battlements on Morlais Hill now made a strange, dark shape in the morning sky that resembled, if anything at all, a great, black whale upon the sea.

‘That’s all well and good, young man,’ the sergeant answered him, though the whole while maintaining his gaze on Tom and Carla, as he walked back along the path to join them. ‘But we fully expected you to be taking us to the site of at least one
contemporary
corpse, Mr. Davies - the mortal, if not still warm, remains perhaps of a second local drug-dealer come to a sticky end.’

‘Aye. Didn’t you tell us there were a shed-load of them buried up here?’ the second police-officer said. ‘Christ alive, man! Don’t you know that our whole forensics team have already been summoned here from Cardiff. It seems to me you could be losing your touch, old boy,’ he declared in his strange, cockney accent. We’d just as well have listened to one of those manky sheep chewing their way through the grassy stump over there as listened to you.’

‘Tump - Dawson. Tump,’ the Welsh sergeant corrected him. ‘When in Wales -’

‘Tump, then,’ said the detective, looking even more glum and disapproving than he did before. He nevertheless continued apace. ‘Look - the next time you have a meaningful dream, old boy, or a nasty nightmare, or just wet the bed for that matter, I suggest you just get up and make yourself a cup of tea, like other folk do, or perhaps re-fill your hot-water bottle.’

‘Or, better still, just turn over on your side and go back to sleep, eh?’ Sergeant Foley chimed in, shaking his head at the embarrassing predicament the pensioner had just caused him.

‘Just don’t go calling
us
up and wasting
our
precious time, all right?’ said D.I. Dawson. I can see now how the one in the tunnel was a complete fluke, the last time. Yes, I’ve no doubt we’d have found it ourselves within an hour or so of the canine arriving.’

‘Oh, really? Well, that’s not what you said at the time, I remember,’ Carla told the pair angrily. She clutched her father round the shoulders, and turned up his coat-collar against the cool breeze that suddenly rose up from the direction of the river. ‘You know, your gratitude astounds me. My father is dying, I’ll have you know. He should be at home now and taking his paliative.’

‘Paliative!’ said the Welsh sergeant, chuckling to himself.

‘Don’t say no more, sweetheart,’ Tom told his daughter. ‘You’ve got enough trouble already, my love, what with me, and the house and all.’

‘Yes, paliative,’ said Carla boldly. ‘Pain-killer, if you prefer. Because without it, I swear the acute pain caused by my father’s condition might easily have finished him off by now.’ Carla took a step towards them. ‘It’s quality marijuana, if you want to know, Sergeant Foley,’ she told him. ‘Not your common or garden green. ‘High-grade herbal,’ I believe you chaps call it. But
Respite
, is how my Dad describes it. Or
Welcome Respite
might be an even better name, right, Dad?’

Tom’s concerned look for his daughter’s sake suddenly dissipated. Now, by way of concurring, he just nodded. Chris saw this, and, out of empathy with him, nodded along too.

Carla turned and watched as the boy climbed back into the saddle of his bicycle and pedalled vigorously back up the path in the direction of the road and home. Chris clearly felt he had overstayed his welcome, now that the cat was out of the bag, she thought to herself, smiling. But, there again, some things just needed saying, didn’t they? And, from as far back as she could remember, Carla knew she had never been one who was capable of shirking the truth.

‘
Welcome Respite,’
Carla repeated, now turning back to face them, and grasping her ailing father’s arm even more tightly than before. ‘For us two, at least, that somehow seems to say it all.’ But the policemen she addressed now seemed to be looking everywhere but back at her firm gaze. ‘And, gentlemen,’ she added, now ever so slightly baring her teeth, ‘if we ever should branch out into sales one day, then that’s definitely what we plan to call it.’

Merlyn Foley shook his head and walked up to D.I. Dawson and spoke to him. ‘So what do you make of the occasion when we brought him in and he located for you the body of that dead black girl in London? Do we simply put that down to luck then? Or does the old man have a genuine gift, do you think, as a lot of people seem to reckon he has?’

‘Look, there’s something I’ve yet to tell you about that business,’ said the cockney detective.

‘What’s that?’ asked Foley, tilting his head so his good ear would be sure to apprehend it all.

‘Well, they found out that that dead girl’s female lover came from somewhere hereabouts. And it’s that particular woman who I gather is now trying to bring up her orphaned child.’

‘Eh? You don’t say,’ said a starled Foley, scratching the stubble on his chin and deliberating fast. ‘The woman is from Merthyr do you mean?’

‘That’s what I heard, anyway,’ said Dawson. ‘I’ll give you the confirmation just as soon as I get it. Yes, the plot thickens, sergeant, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Aye, it sounds like,’ said Foley. ‘A young officer gets himself needlessly killed in the performance of his duties, trying to discover where a dead woman’s body has been hidden. Carla Steel happens to be living a few hundred yards away from the scene, and her father - her own father remember - tells us precisely where the girl’s body has been hidden. Fishy or what?’ he asked D.I.Dawson, sniffing raucously, and pointing down to the road. ‘Jeff, I’ll bet you half my pension that that girl knows an awful lot more about this whole grisly affair than she’s prepared to let on.’

‘I was only twenty when I decided to walk away from
Jesus
,’ Carla told him, carefully placing the acoustic-guitar she held onto the floor beside her chair.

‘Do you mean to say you were a Christian back then, then?’ asked Chris.

‘God - no! Although I did used to attend chapel with my mother when I was young, and my uncle on my father’s side is a man of the cloth,’ she went on. ‘No,
Jesus
. It’s a college at Oxford. God knows how, but I got to go there to study music. Apparently I was the first girl to ever get in there from Pennant. ‘A superb achievement, Carla,’ they told me at Speech-Day. ‘You’ll be a role-model for all our young women musicians.’ Well, O.K. Nevertheless I just up and quit.’

‘You walked away from Oxford University! Wow! But why?’ asked Chris.

‘Well, after being there for only a matter of weeks I felt like I was like a fish-out-of-water in the place. And then I made friends with a very bright, black, working-class girl from Yorkshire who seemed to be every bit as out of it as I was. Sadly both of the girl’s male siblings had unexpectedly died in the space of just a few months, both stabbed, the younger one more than likely on account of the elder, if you get my drift. Well, not surprisingly the girl was seriously depressed, and close to suicidal, no longer seeing very much point in life, let alone in studying. And at Uni she didn’t receive the support I felt she was entitled to, except the help our friends in the Socialist Soc. gave her, who were true to the end. Our political enemies not so, I’m afraid.’

‘You had enemies there!’ exclaimed Chris.

‘Yes, we did,’ Carla replied. ‘Although I dare say they were very much of our own making in a way. This weird, second-year, Tory prick from Market Harborough, with a handle-bar moustache, a cravat, and horrendous acne came up to our table drunk one night in
‘Brown’s’
and thought it dreadfully clever to announce - ‘While losing one brother is plainly a misfortune, Miss Boyce - that was Jackie’s name, by the way - the loss of both might be regarded as plain carelessness.’

‘Wilde,’ said Chris.

‘Much more vindictive than wild, I’d say,’ said Carla. ‘Sebastian Jarvis his name was, if I remember. Daddy was a banker - Mummy something in boutiques, I gather.’

‘I mean he was quoting - misquoting, actually - a line by Lady Bracknell from an Oscar Wilde play,’ said Chris, raising his eye-brows. ‘GCSE English Lit. I got a B.’

‘Oh, yes, I remember now. Wow! You’re good, Master Cillick,’ Carla told him with an admiring grin. ‘Well, anyway, it wasn’t so much his pompous comment that riled me, as the sneering guffaw that swiftly followed after it. I mean I thought, w
hat a nerve!
’

‘Or,
what a nerd!
’ cut in Chris.

‘Quite,’ said Carla. ‘And what a total snob and a complete twat. Well, angry as I was, it appears I must have stood up and swung for the little man. I sent him flying into the patisseries.’

‘You floored him!’ ejaculated Chris.

‘Sort of,’ she replied. ‘They told me later I had broken his nose with my watch-strap, and that his silver monocle went rolling round the room and was never found again. He said he planned to sue me, naturally.’

‘Monocle! God! How pretentious your chap sounds,’ said Chris.

‘I know. Well, anyway, the college rag had a field day over it. It was all my fault, blah, blah. The articles they wrote, and their stupid banners. ‘Left-wing fire-brand.’ ‘Violent Welsh hussy.’ One even called me ‘a Traveller,’ for Pete’s sake. There again, I suppose I was, in a way.’

‘How do you mean?’ Chris asked her.

‘Well, you see, I was up and gone by the following Monday. First train out of town, you could say. Never travelled so fast in all my life.’ Carla grinned.

‘Not to Worthing, by any chance?’ he asked, smiling.

‘No, silly. Oh, I get it. Very droll. No. Heading to London, as a matter of fact. With my leather travelling-bag - baby-less, naturally - perched securely on the seat beside me.’

‘And I guess, from that moment you never looked back,’ Chris added, smiling thinly at his attempted musical reference.. ‘You know, Bob Dylan might have described it like that.’

‘No, not once did I look over my shoulder,’ she retorted, looking down and recalling the moment. ‘My varsity life was behind me and good riddance to it, I thought. I remember that when I dragged my bags from the train I was greeted by a statue of Paddington Bear, and, standing alongside it, a balding, male busker playing
‘My Funny Valentine’
on a tenor sax, and I just knew, somehow, that I had come to the right place. And, believe it or not, within a fortnight I was strumming away at the very same song myself outside Fulham Broadway Tube-Station, and, though it seemed from that day on I was eternally shivering and penniless, I just loved life in ‘the smoke,’ and felt so, so at home there. ‘Capital punishment’ is how I recall Dylan described life in London. He and his wife lived there for quite a long time, you know. Lovesick, homeless, and about as penniless as I was.’