Last Train to Gloryhole (58 page)

‘Cabbages,’ the sergeant told him.

‘Cabbages!’ the other asked, bemused.

‘Or cauliflowers, Ben. Cabbages or cauliflowers, or any other type of fruit and veg for that matter.’

‘Really? So what
is
a hot spot, then, Sergeant Foley?’ Ben enquired.

Turning, the white-haired sergeant signalled briefly to the heavy-set constable at his rear, and with a great, sweeping thud of his big red key, the huge man suddenly split apart, and forced open, the wooden door of the shed. ‘This is what a hot spot is,’ Foley told them, pointing ahead of him into the darkness. ‘Just smell that, would you? That’s prime skunk - that’s what that is. A bleedin’ shed-full of the stuff. I guess those young whipper-snappers must have thought they were home-free, but you can’t expect to fool the heli-cops, can you? That heat-seeking camera they’ve got is truly amazing, wouldn’t you say? You know boys, if you shat in a wheelie-bin and tossed it in the river, then those boys would be sure to find it.’

‘As you know, Sarge, I’m a police-interceptor these days,’ Ben told him, with a wicked grin. ‘So, naturally, I crap in the woods like everyone else.’

Suddenly a small form in dark clothes shot out of the shadows and ran straight past them. The sergeant turned and watched as the two younger, fitter officers chased after, then pounced upon, the running boy’s back, flattening him out like a pancake on the wet ground.

‘Put both your hands behind you - now!’ Sergeant Foley bellowed at him, hurrying over to join them. ‘Say - have you got anything on you that you shouldn’t have?’

‘Er, yeah - police. At least two of ‘em, by the feel of it.’ the face-down boy replied. ‘Yaah! Hey - that bloody hurts.’

‘Stop resisting!’ the burly Constable Llewellyn shouted at him, twisting the boy’s skinny, bare arm right up his back.

‘Yeah - stop resisting!’ Ben Thomas repeated, reaching down and curling up the boy’s calves from the knees, so that any notion he had of fleeing from them was now out of the question..

‘How the hell can I resist?’ said the boy, spitting grass and twigs out before him. ‘The two of you must weigh half-a-ton each at least.’ He turned his head back and bit into his lip. ‘No offence intended, of course, lads. Aah! O.K., O.K. - I admit that was a bit below the belt. You probably both go to ‘
Weight-watchers
.’ ’

‘You carrying needles?’ Llewellyn asked him.

‘What! Yeah - a couple. I was just knitting a sweater when you drove up, as a matter of fact.’

‘Oh - is that right?’ said Sergeant Foley, stepping, ever so gently, on the boy’s back so as not to be left out, and adroitly removing a set of handcuffs from off his belt.

‘Yeah. I was planning on doing you all one, as it goes,’ the boy continued. ‘You don’t mind black, do you, lads? I figured it was bound to go well with your riot-gear.’

‘Hey - pencil-dick!’ Llewellyn bawled at him. ‘You probably think you’re funny, don’t you? When the only thing remotely funny about you, butty, is your face.’

The boy sniffed in a couple of times. ‘Well, you did just manage to re-break my nose for me, big boy,’ he responded, turning his head from side to side, and trying hard to breathe normally.

‘Thanks for that, by the way, ‘cos it’s incredibly painful when you have to do it yourself, like.’

‘O.K. Let’s get him in the van, Dan,’ Sergeant Foley told the larger constable.

‘Van Damme! God - he’s not here, is he?’ the boy shot back, rolling over onto his back and looking up at them with terrified eyes.

‘Shut it!’ Sergeant Foley told him. ‘Now bring yours knees up to your chin and get to your feet. O.K. Right - now stand with your feet wide apart. Wider! Search him, Thomas. Say - why’s there blood pouring from your nose?’

‘Oh, I guess I must have stuck a needle up it,’ the lad retorted. ‘Knitting’s so bloody complicated these days, I find, don’t you?’

Merlyn Foley placed his huge, lined forehead up against the young chap’s face, ‘Well, get any of it on my uniform and I’ll bloody hammer you, butt. Compris?’ He then spun the youth’s body round and snapped the hand-cuffs on him securely.

‘Received,’ the boy replied, staring down at the wet ground and beginning to shiver.

‘Right. Now walk over to the car.’

The police-men retraced their steps, ushering their puny, young prisoner ahead of them.

Arriving first, and opening the back-door, Sergeant Foley addressed the boy. ‘Now turn round and slide your skinny arse across the back-seat,’ he commanded. ‘And don’t go trying to conceal anything neither, because that won’t work. We only cleaned the car out last Wednesday, so any drugs or weapons that we happen to find in there -’

‘Must have been left there since Thursday, right?’ said the boy, attempting a thin smile as he slid his way inside.

‘No - must have been left there by you!’ Foley told him firmly.

‘Oh, really?’ said the boy.

‘Listen, ass-wipe - so far we’re only planning on charging you with possession. O.K.?’

‘Possession of what?’ the boy asked. ‘You can’t mean drugs ‘cos I haven’t got any. Hey - what the fuck’s that?’ the lad asked, looking up and seeing what Constable Thomas now held up in the palm of his hand.

‘Drugs,’ Thomas told him.

‘Your drugs,’ Sergeant Foley clarified for him.

‘Show me,’ said the boy leaning closer. ‘But we don’t deal in amphets. You must know that, boys.’

‘Well, you do tonight, butt,’ Foley told him. Then more quietly, ‘’Cos that’s all we brought with us, see.’

‘Fuck me!’ the boy exclaimed, shaking his head about. ‘Where’s the barrel, boys? ‘Cos I figure I’d best start lying over it.’

‘Hey. Don’t go playing the victim, now, sonny,’ Sergeant Foley told him. ‘You’re lucky we’re not charging you with evading, or obstructing.’

‘But I’m in cuffs, for Christ’s sake,’ the lad replied.

‘Your hands are, yeah. But you’ve still got legs, right? You could easily have fled, do you get me?’

‘Fled!’

‘Exactly,’ Sergeant Foley told him. ‘And run headlong down to the river like a - like a headless chicken.’

‘But I’d have drowned,’ the boy shot back.

‘Not a bit of it,’ Foley continued. ‘’Cos, seeing you struggling, we all dragged you out and
saved
your arse, see.’ The older man illustrated this with a powerful tugging motion.

‘Hey?’

‘And did CPR. on you and everything,’ said the sergeant. ‘And, even though you told us plainly you’d rather have died, we courageously carried on anyway.’

‘But how the hell could -’

‘Which would explain all the bruises on your body, and the broken nose.’

‘Bruises! What bruises?’ the boy asked. He turned his head, first to the left, then to the right, then addressed them all. ‘Oh, I get it now - I get it.’

The grey-haired officer carried on, in no way pausing to acknowledge the young lad’s comment. ‘And went and won ourselves a medal apiece for it too.’ He then stopped and smiled broadly at his two younger colleagues who quickly shot smiles back at him.

‘I remember winning one of those in school once,’ Ben told them. ‘They presented me with it under the diving-boards at the deep end. It was a bronze with a pin in the back. Only I was in pyjamas at the time.’

‘Ooh! Sounds painful does that,’ said the sergeant, chuckling.

‘Hey. What the hell’s that fella talking about?’ the boy asked the sergeant.

‘I’ve no idea,’ Foley retorted, chuckling away.

‘Great story, fella,’ the boy told them. ‘Got any more?’

‘I’m glad you liked it,’ Constable Thomas told him, shaking his blond head back, his face flushing a bright, rose colour. ‘Now shut your cake-hole ‘til we get you down the station, yeah?’

The boy stared up at him. ‘Aw, don’t tell me you’re going to be putting me on a - on a - on one of those things,’ he said.

‘On a what?’ asked Thomas.

‘On a train,’ the youngster retorted, laughing heartily.

‘Very funny,’ Sergeant Foley told him, ‘But Ben was referring to the police-station actually.’ Foley reached out his arm and slammed the door on the boy, and then turned where he stood and watched admiringly as Llewellyn-the-Great, (as his colleagues often called Dan,) lifted up, then tossed, the large, red enforcer back into the trunk of the police-car.

Llewellyn climbed into the front-seat, and frowned aggressively across at his bleach-blond, uniformed colleague as the latter started the engine with a sudden jolt that shook all four men about like a jelly, and betrayed the fact he had left the car in gear.

‘Twat!’ Sergeant Foley told the driver emphatically, from behind, leaning forward.

But, after a combined shake of heads, both beside and behind him, and a second attempt by the young constable, which this time proved more successful, Constable Thomas at last managed to engage the vehicle’s transmission and manoeuvred the large, black car back onto the narrow, muddy track they had arrived by. Then seconds later, in a loud and shuddering first-gear, he proceeded to drive them up the steep, grassy hill, and from there across the field of newly-sheared, and plainly terrified, sheep, and off towards the crescent-shaped horizon.

Chris had found out from the school’s web-site that it was the morning of Rhiannon’s final GCSE examination, and, although he tried his utmost not to, he had snuck along to Pennant to catch a glimpse of her, as she came out of the main-gate and crossed the road to get her bus home. But determined not to be seen, especially not knowing how she had taken his earth-shattering news, Chris lay flat on his stomach on the small grassy knoll across the road from the main-entrance, and from this vantage-point, elbows stretched out in front of him, and his interlaced fingers supporting his stubbly chin, gazed over at the cluster of small buildings, willing Rhiannon to emerge, but knowing that he had almost an hour more to wait before she would in fact do so.

Soon Chris fell asleep. In the dream, (that he now had for the second time,) he was speaking to some people in town beside his new, white car, which was parked alongside him on Brecon Road. Completing his conversation, he decided to proceed on down the hill towards Pontmorlais and Merthyr High Street, and so squeezed the stick-like remote he was holding in his hand, and made the car proceed along the road before him, but under his full control. Chris manoeuvred the white car round the bend and onto the downslope of the main road when he suddenly noticed that it was beginning to run away from him. Despite his urgent fiddling with the controls in a vain attempt to slow it down, he realised that the car was getting farther and farther away from him, and that it was already merging in with lots of other cars, many of which were also white, that were also passing through the green traffic-light, then making their way north towards Dowlais. Chris saw that there was no hope of catching up with it, and so he ran into a nearby office, found a phone, and rang up the police, and told them that his white car had been stolen.

A noisy lorry suddenly disturbed him, and, on waking, Chris immediately thought of Rhiannon. The fact was - and Chris knew it well - that the membrane between his waking and his sleeping self was so thin that he often seemed to have little trouble discerning the meaning, and even the significance, of some of the things that he dreamed. Yes, he told himself, the white car was definitely Rhiannon. It wasn’t just her pale, white skin that suggested this, but Rhiannon had also once told him that she habitually wore white underwear in the days before the two of them started going out together: a habit she had retained from childhood, he assumed.

The sun emerged from behind a small cumulus-cloud to his right and so Chris shaded his face with his hand, closed his eyes, and thought about Rhiannon. He wet his lips as he considered her slim, white form, and the beautiful pair of sweet, pert, damson-like breasts that had poked out at him on the occasions when he had undressed her. No girl he had ever known possessed the unusually broad, pink nipples that she did, and, to him, this was a secret treasure that Chris felt sure only he had yet discovered, and that only he had teased and made love to.

Discomforted more than a little by what this wonderful thought provoked, Chris rolled over onto his back and peered up at the blue-and-white sky that lay spread out above him. Through half-closed lashes he recalled the way Rhiannon had often cupped in one of her hands his penis and testicles, and lifted, and squeezed, and kneaded the fleshy prize firmly, but gently, almost as if she was transplanting into fresh soil some garden-shrub she had brought home from the garden-centre, and was now pointing in the direction she was encouraging it to grow. At this quirky, outlandish, but erotic thought Chris chuckled deeply to himself. Taken aback by it, he knew only too well that his brain was on fire, and so he turned his head to the side and allowed his face to bask in the warm glow that the late-morning sun threw down upon him.

The blow that suddenly struck Chris on the side of the head spun his trunk round in a full circle, and caused him a pain the like of which he had never before experienced, even at the bottom of a ruck. Finding himself face down in the grass, he shot his right hand up to his temple and was shocked to find hot blood freely gushing out. Turning to face towards the sun again, and seeing two great, dark figures looming over him, Chris realised that he needed to get up right that instant and run, but he wasn’t at all sure that he had the strength to bring it off.

‘You went and shopped him didn’t you, Clicker?’ said Steffan, clumping Chris a second time with the baseball-bat, but this time in the guts. The heavy-set boy grinned widely as his hapless victim doubled up beneath him.

‘Who - who are you talking about?’ asked a wincing Chris, turning onto his side, breathing heavily, and clutching his lower abdomen with both hands.

‘My older brother,’ said Steffan. ‘Don’t go pretending you don’t know now.’

‘Brynmor, you know,’ said Jake, clearly not as one-hundred-per-cent certain, as his friend clearly was, that they had found the right culprit. .

‘Do you mean they found your farm?’ enquired Chris, climbing onto his knees in preparation for standing up. But his words and his actions clearly weren’t to Steffan’s satisfaction, and the third, and final, strike he received from the solid, wooden weapon landed flush across his jaw.