Last Train to Gloryhole (68 page)

‘Apparently,’ answered Volver, looking all round him to work out just how close they were now getting to the farm’s location. ‘An accident with a fire-arm, I understand.’

‘So listen - how the hell can we be going there?’ Carla asked him, biting into her lip, and believing that, even if she thought about it for just two or three seconds, she would be sure to know the answer. ‘And at this time of night, too. Does the owner know we’re coming? I mean, who owns the place these days?’

‘Who owns it?’ repeated Volver. ‘Who do you think owns it, Carla? Why, I do, of course,’ he said, turning to face her again. ‘You didn’t know that, did you? Well, of course you wouldn’t, would you? I mean I didn’t exactly go out of my way to publicize the fact, did I? Would you?’

‘Well, I don’t sell class-A drugs like you do, do I, Abram?’ she responded fiercely.

‘No, but you’re still thoroughly hooked on them, aren’t you?’ he told her, grinning. ‘I mean, I happen to know that just now you’re still taking a whole variety of them. Of course I could never blame you for it. I’d be a complete hypocrite if I did that. But
now
, Carla, I gather you’re sharing your drugs with under-age school-boys, of all people. Not very clever, that, as it goes. Don’t you agree, Carla? Not terribly wise with the - with the sort of profile you’re desperate to maintain, anyway. If word of that ever got out, girl - well, I mean, it could have serious repercussions for your career, don’t you think? Our Carla - back in the pit
yet again.
’ He shook his head about.

Carla was beginning to see where all this was heading, and she felt her body shiver much more deeply this time, but still decided to do her utmost not to let them see it.

‘Take a right turn soon after this second big lake, Jack,’ said Volver. ‘Then, in the dip near the stream, straightaway take another. You know, boys, what I especially like about the place we’re going to be staying at is its complete and utter isolation. Don’t you agree, Carla? Up here in the wild, green foothills of The Brecon Beacons even a shrieking owl won’t ever wake a soul.’

‘And how would you know that?’ Carla asked him. ‘City boy that you are, I mean.’

‘How do I know? I’ll tell you how I know, girl.’ said Volver. He then forced his hand into his coat-packet and took out a revolver. ‘I know because last night I found I couldn’t get to sleep for the second night running. The evil, hooting bastard! So, naturally, I had to go out and kill one.’

Tossing his head back, the Afrikaner’s abrasive laugh rang out loudly and raucously from the passenger-window. Scanning the grassy slopes on both sides of her, Carla pondered how, to the sheep who lived out there, the man’s voice must surely sound like the harrying sound of a goshawk, a buzzard or a falcon, selfishly intruding on their lifetime pasture. In fact, she mused, one could be forgiven for thinking that that was precisely what the evil man was, as it was likely he had only come to Wales to pursue her, but that while here he certainly wasted no time in doing his utmost to wreak havoc on the people living in the peaceful communities round about.

The van turned right at the junction, and drifted silently down into the narrow valley, then made its way up the opposing slope again, soon disappearing into the grey mist that was, by this time, fast gathering for the chillier than usual August night that Carla felt must surely lie ahead.

A valid argument need not be a sound one. All dogs have four legs -cats have four legs - therefore all dogs are cats. Er - I don’t think so, somehow. Either way, although invalid, unsound, and well wide of the mark, I quite naturally, no, forgivably, assumed that Chris, although almost fifteen years her junior, was, in fact, the step-brother of Carla Steel, who was presumably the daughter of Drew, that refractory, half-English, Cardiff-reared, mad-arsed, loose-cannon of an Art teacher at
Pennant School
. There had, you see, long been rumours that, some time before his marriage to Anne, Drew had fathered another child with some other woman while living alone in the Welsh capital, but, for some reason that I simply can’t explain, I had always assumed the child to be male.

But, mistaken though I later found out I was, it certainly did appear to me that ‘Drew-the-Art’ - as parents and pupils at the school frequenly called him - was the father of the young woman whom the whole world admired, even loved, and knew as Carla Steel. Well, I concluded at the time, the pair of them were both artistically inclined after all, and so I wasn’t persuaded to even question the sudden discovery I had made, even though I still decided not to share it with another living soul, not even my daughter Rhiannon, no, especially not Rhiannon, at least until I had myself confirmed its veracity.

But, as luck would have it, in the end it was my daughter herself who, one quiet evening, settled the issue, and so dispelled my supposedly well-considered conclusion, (wholly without knowing of it herself,) by informing me that Carla Steel was living slap next-door to her school-friend Chris Cillick, and so therefore not in the same house as him. Well, I was genuinely glad to hear that, I can tell you, because I wasn’t at all sure I wanted my seventeen year-old daughter, through the auspices of young Chris, consorting with someone known right across the world, not just for her musical talents, but also for the kind of social behaviour that I hoped and trusted Rhiannon would continue to shun for the remainder of her life.

And then one Sunday morning I had occasion to pay a visit to the tiny village of
Gloryhole
, not to call at the home of my one-time lover, Anne, but the house two doors down, since I had to drop off some building-supplies for the owner of the house that stood on the other side of the one where Carla’s dad lived. There was, of course, nobody living there at the time, but a married couple from Merthyr, that I met through Zeta’s husband Martin, were then in the process of renovating it, with a view to hopefully moving in there permanently some time in 2012.

There I was in the process of re-locking the front-door of the property, with the intention of going off right away on a separate call, when I happened to hear a deep, male voice scream out. At first I thought it might have been the sound of an animal of some kind being attacked in the vicinity of the viaduct at the rear of the property, but the second scream, which followed soon after the first, told me that it was coming from the house in the middle of the three, called ‘
Coral
.’

I hurried round to the front of the terraced property and rapped at the door. There was no reply, so I rapped again. This time I thought I heard a voice from inside calling out ‘God Help me!’ or perhaps just ‘Help me!’ Well, I didn’t require a second invitation. Trying the door and finding it locked, I put my shoulder to its upper portion and burst the little lock right off. I dashed inside, then through the ground-floor into the back-kitchen. It was there that I found the prostrate man - the aged, skeletal-framed father of Carla Davies.

Lying face-down on the linoleum-covered floor, and dressed only in striped pyjamas and a loosely fitted robe, the bare-headed gentleman turned his neck round and spoke. ‘Dylan!’ he called out. ‘Why, it’s you, my man.’

‘Yes, it’s me,’ I retorted, thinking fast. ‘But I’m sure I don’t know you, old boy, do I?’ I told him. ‘Except that I understand your daughter is staying here with you, so you must be her father, Mr. Davies, Sir. What has happened? Tell me.’

‘I don’t really know,’ he replied. ‘Carla’s not here, and I very much doubt she’ll be returning.’

‘Oh, why is that? Has she gone back to London, then?’ I enquired, kneeling on the floor beside him, and trying to assess the ailing man’s physical state.

‘She’s been taken off to the hills,’ he stammered.

‘Do you mean on a day-trip?’ I asked.

‘No, no. Totally against her will, Dylan,’ he told me. ‘She was performing at
The Railway
last night, you see. Playing her music, I mean. But now she
and
her guitar have been whisked away.’

‘You don’t mean - surely you don’t mean
kidnapped
?’ I asked.

‘Well, what do
you
think?’ he retorted, laying his head back on the hard floor, and looking up into my face. ‘She didn’t come home last night, you see, and she was supposed to.’

‘But that’s hardly proof, is it?’ I told him. ‘Your daughter is a grown woman. She might have made other plans. She might even still be there.’

‘Well, I don’t know about that, I’m sure,’ he answered glumly.

‘Either way, I can see that you definitely need medical assistance,’ I said. ‘Where’s your house-phone, Mr. Davies?’ I enquired, looking round.

‘I’m Tom,’ he replied. ‘It’s out in the lounge. But don’t leave me, Dylan.’

‘Dyl.’

‘Dyl. You see - you see I know that this is the end for me now. Oh yes. And, you see, I always knew I would be on my own when it - when the time came. That - that I was going to die alone.’

‘But you’re not alone,’ I told him. ‘And very soon there’ll be some other people here too, to help you. Just you hang on now.’

‘No, no,’ he urged me. ‘Please don’t go ringing them, Dyl. Promise me that you won’t. The last thing I want is for someone to start banging me on the back and pumping on my chest singing songs by the blasted
Bee Gees
.’ I had to smile at this. ‘When I need to go I’ll go, right? And anyway, I’ll be gone before anybody gets here. I’ll be gone just like - just like your brother.

‘Sam!’ I exclaimed, taken aback by this.

‘Left to be run over -’

‘He wasn’t run over,’ I told him.

‘Run down, then, by a train that never even came his way, and so never even touched him.’

‘Why Sam died exactly they didn’t know - and now they’ll never know,’ I explained to him.

‘Young Sam heard a train coming, Dyl,’ the old man whispered.

‘You what!’ I interjected, my mouth suddenly falling open.

‘From the tunnel-entrance he heard the noise the train made as it got closer and closer, coming up the valley from the viaduct here, you see? And so - and so he naturally assumed -’

My head was spinning. ‘That it was going to proceed into the tunnel -’ I said.

‘Where his three friends had just minutes earlier tied him securely to one or more of the raised sleepers in the track. In jest, of course, Dyl, purely in jest. They never meant Sam any harm, I swear. They were all his friends, and it was his twenty-first birthday, after all, right?’

‘Yes, it was,’ I told him, the tears now welling up in my eyes, my breathing becoming laboured, the hands with which I gripped the old man’s shoulders now trembling with trepidation - with fear of the unwinding narrative he un-spun for me - the awful truth that he was revealing. ‘But wait! What about the horrible cuts and bruises they found on his torso?’ I asked.

‘Oh, don’t think he didn’t try to get away, Dyl, because he most certainly did, boy,’ Tom said. ‘Sam tugged, and pulled, and screamed, and pulled again at the tethers that held him, the wooden sleepers becoming tremendously shaken around by it all, and yet just too firmly fixed beneath the rails to come away and free him.’

I mulled over every single point that he related. ‘Yes, I recall now how one of the sleepers, where they found Sam’s body, did seem a lot looser than all the rest,’ I told him. ‘And yet the fact must have been deemed irrelevant by the police, since no rope was ever found there, nor did anyone even so much as suggest he might have been secured to the track. Rather that Sam was just discovered lying there, dead from a sudden heart-attack they concluded.’

‘You know, you and I can barely imagine the sort of colossal efforts that your brother made to break free, Dyl,’ the old man announced. ‘Such panic would do for most of us, I can tell you.’

‘I see. And his friends, Tom?’ I asked. ‘Surely they had to have heard him scream out?’

‘No, Dyl,’ Tom replied. ‘By then they had already run up the slope and along the path to the prince’s seat. You see that was where they’d parked their car, on the grass-verge by the double-bend. And then the driver among them drove it a little way further down the road so as to - to -’

‘To compound the joke they were all playing on him, right?’ I said.

‘Yes, I guess that’s what it was, Dyl,’ said Tom. ‘I ask you - how could they possibly have known that there would be a train coming up the line that day of all days? After all, there hadn’t been one up that way for ages had there? And so, when a train trundled up the valley from
The Seven Arches
, its whistle sounding shrilly, the noise of its engine and its wheels growing louder and louder by the second, then rounded the bend close to where Sam lay bound, the young man understandably feared for his life, and soon expired, knowing there could be no escape from it.’

‘Great God in Heaven!’ I cursed, visualising my brother’s terrible plight before my eyes.

‘But, you see, Dyl, he was never to know that the points were set the other way, was he? And that the train therefore would roar past the tunnel-entrance, just inside which his three best friends had trussed him up. All three of them loved Sam like a brother too, Dyl,’ he added. ‘Just as you did.’

‘You mean with ropes?’ I interjected. ‘You say they had bound Sam up with ropes?’

‘Yes, with yards and yards of coloured rope they’d brought along specially in the boot of the car. And of course poor Sam wasn’t to know of the playful prank they had planned for him.’

‘My God!’ I said, now shedding tears freely.

‘Very much as we might bind a birthday gift in loops and bows of coloured ribbon, Dyl,’ the old man added. ‘But, you see, the group had temporarily taken the car just a bit too far down the way from where they had left him to hear that any train was coming, and so sense danger.’

‘It just doesn’t bear thinking about,’ I told him, now able to see clearly in my mind’s eye the very scene that had occurred back then. ‘And I bet, even if they’d seen the train trundle past, they would never have guessed it could possibly have harmed Sam, would they? When, in fact, it killed him, as you rightly said, without even touching him - without even coming close to him.’

‘Quite so, Dyl,’ said Tom. ‘And then, perhaps just minutes later, when the group drove back to the prince’s seat, and parked up the car as before, and merrily trotted back down the slope once again to release their much-loved, birthday victim, they - well, they no doubt expected -’