Last Train to Gloryhole (76 page)

‘And how do you figure that out?’ asked Llewellyn.

‘Because the weed-sellers are what the government calls small businesses, that’s why.’

‘Funny. We’ve always called them joint enterprises,’ the burly officer told him, grinning.

‘You’re funny, Llew,’ said Jack. ‘Anyway we’re all entrepreneurs, yeah? So therefore we’re self-dependent, and no burden on the welfare-state. Look - I can avoid tax as well as anyone if I want, and some of the buggers are devious. Some bloke told me the other day, that if you want to find out who the best tax-avoiders are, you just get on your computer, go to Google, and -’

‘And just stay there. Yeah, I’ve heard it,’ Llew replied, smiling. ‘Can I ask you one final question, Jack?’ the burly constable asked him.

‘Of course you can,’ Jack answered, checking his watch.

‘Say - why did you never get a job? You’ve been unemployed for almost three decades now, mate, according to our computer.’

‘Then you need a new one, don’t you, bach?’ Jack retorted sharply. ‘Listen, I can do you a good deal on a second-hand computer if that one you’ve got has started playing up.’ He grinned at this. ‘Listen, big boy - I’ll have you know I can’t possibly be
unemployed
for the very good reason that I have never really
been
employed,’ he told him. ‘I’ve worked my whole entire life, so I have. If you trust that record you have on me, then you need to add on it that never in history has an unemployed man been as busy as I currently am. I mean, look at last Christmas, Llew. When I took over that bus-shelter in Pant I was bleedin’ run off my feet with business, so I was.’

‘Yeah, but almost all the gifts you had in your sack had instructions in Russian, and that Santa outfit you were wearing didn’t suit you at all. Black’s your colour, Jack. Always has been.’

In the room next-door D.I.Dawson decided it was time he assumed control. He looked into Sergeant Foley’s eyes and said, ‘O.K., now’s the time for us to take charge of the kidnap investigation, Merlyn. Trust me, Jack Belt is about to tell us every single thing he knows.’

‘But we’ve had him in custody for hours now,’ the Welshman told him. ‘And he hasn’t come out with a damn thing we didn’t already know.’

Detective Constable Shah moved closer to them. ‘Look, Sergeant - the man has said enough in the short time
we’ve
been watching him that could have him put away for months,’ he said. ‘I believe he needs to be told this up front, even if it’s us just being optimistic.’

‘And you don’t bake a cake without breaking a few eggs, right?’ added Dawson, grinning. ‘Look, I’ll go in there and break the bad news to the man. Vic - as usual, you play good cop, O.K.?’ The detective gave out a beaming smile. ‘Let’s just see what transpires, shall we, chaps?’

It was ‘flying-ant day,’ thought Rhiannon, but this time she had forgotten to get a card - to swipe them away with that is! Giggling to herself, she recalled how she must have killed well over a dozen on the same occasion the previous August, having that day armed herself to the hilt with an assortment of cards, when she set off from home to go shopping in town with her friends. She sat up on the grass and flailed her two arms about wildly, but to no avail. ‘Chris - help me!’ she screamed, but her dreamy, love-drained companion slept on, his sun-hat draped over his sleeping head, seemingly held captive somewhere between the Kalahari Desert and Christmas.

The young couple had lain together in the long grass that clothed the mountainside for well over an hour, and, after replacing their discarded clothes, which took far longer than expected, they soon felt that it was high time they descended into the wooded valley once more, and drove their little yellow car away from their waterfall base, and so continue their search for Carla. Above them the bright blue, afternoon sky now bore no trace of aviation craft, not even a lofty vapour-trail; instead it seemed vast, and calm, and but lightly streaked with loosened, cirrus cotton-buds and curls.

This time Rhiannon chose to drive, and she held the car in third-gear all the way back to the fork in the road where the wooden sign-post pointed off left for Talybont to the east. She turned her car in the same direction and was suddenly overtaken on the narrow, country road by a white Vivaro van, doing well over sixty, on the back of which was emblazoned a picture of a gap-toothed, growling, one-eyed pirate. ‘
Captain Morgan’s Sandwiches’
it broadcast colourfully, but gaudily.
‘Is my driving good? Bet it’s not a patch on our sarnies - Arrh!’

Then coasting gently along beside the bubbling stream, a white Escort SRi with the words ‘
Attention Whore’
emblazoned across its windscreen soon approached them on its way back to Merthyr, and seered by them at stupendous speed, its passing very like the slap of a white-water wave against Rhiannon’s frail, yellow dinghy. Taken aback by the sudden arrival of fast, noisy traffic once again, she changed down and turned off the road onto a narrow track which led uphill into the trees, and before long brought the car to a halt at a small fork.

‘Why did we come up here?’ asked Chris angrily. ‘There’s bugger all up here that I can see but squirrels and trees and fallen logs.’

‘I know but isn’t this the sort of place you’d take Carla if you had kidnapped her and wanted to keep her out of sight for a long while?’ she asked him. ‘Just look - the tree-cover is so thick up here that it probably seems like night-time for the best part of the day, I shouldn’t wonder.’

Chris suddenly climbed out of the car and began to walk to the left, up the steeper of the two tracks that lay before him. Puzzled, Rhiannon tried driving along behind him, but soon she found that the hill’s gradient had become too steep even for her to make any progress in first gear.

‘Park up and join me!’ yelled Chris above the thunderous roar from the Fiesta’s engine.

Rhiannon turned the car round, pointed it downhill, then switched off, and secured the hand-brake with the gear set in reverse, just as her dad had always shown her she should do when parking on a steep slope. Locking the car, she got out and asked Chris why he had chosen to venture up the steeper of the two tracks.

‘I’d like to get well above the tree-line if we can,’ he told her. ‘We could barely see the flippin’ helicopter above us when we were down in the valley earlier, let alone any of the farms and barns and other buildings that are dotted round the place here. You see, I have a feeling that, in the end,
they
are where we shall need to focus our search.’

‘Say, this climb could take us a while,’ said an already puffing Rhiannon, doing her best to keep up, ‘but I’m up for it if you are.’

‘Let’s go,’ said Chris, taking Rhiannon’s hand in his and forging ahead.

Clinging firmly to each other even when the going got tough, the young pair set off up the slope, and, on rounding a fern-tangled bend to the right, soon discovered that the track they were following was becoming progressively narrower, eventually terminating as a routeway altogether, instead becoming a barely visible path, which zig-zagged madly between trees, then rocks, then trees again. After clambering across a rushing stream by way of its scattered rocks that supplied a sort of make-shift causeway, the couple finally reached the summit of a high, grassy hill that could only support the growth of long, parched grass and a few stunted trees.

‘Oh, bloody hell! I forgot my binoculars,’ said Chris, angrily, turning to Rhiannon.

‘No, I have them here,’ Rhiannon told him, smiling. She took the case from her shoulder and handed it over to him, and watched as Chris dashed a few paces from her, and, clambering up onto a large boulder, and with the field-glasses pressed tightly to his head, began to survey the undulating landscape that encircled them, and with which neither of them was at all familiar.

‘What can you see?’ asked Rhiannon, eventually climbing up onto the same boulder. ‘Where’s the nearest building? Can you see any?’

‘No, I can’t see a single one round here,’ he told Rhiannon, handing her the binoculars so that she could try her luck. ‘Apart from the forestry-sheds, I bet there are only a few scattered sheep-farms within a square-mile of here.’

‘Despite what you’re telling us, Jack, we happen to know that your van has just returned from the Beacons
,
’ said D.I.Dawson.

‘But I swear I haven’t been up that way,’ the straggly-headed man in the macintosh told him.

‘Oh, yes, you have,’ the officer continued. ‘Our forensic chap confirmed that your tyres are covered in red-sandstone soil, for a start. And I gather you can’t pick that up round here.’

‘
I
could,’ said Jack, grinning. ‘I can pick up anything at all. White goods, metal goods, plastic goods, rubber goods. Car-tyres even. Red soil wouldn’t be a problem. Car-tyres with red soil on - a piece of cake. How many do you want?’

Dawson slapped his forehead in frustration. ‘You know, I think it’s over to you at this point, Vic,’ he told his young friend. ‘Mental health issues aren’t my strong point, I’m afraid.’

‘Yes, I see the man’s answers are about as meaninglful as a Sanskrit limerick,’ the young Asian detective replied, smiling. He slowly approached Jack’s seat and, placing his plate of white and brown sandwiches on the table to the side, gazed down at him. ‘Look, Mr. Belt,’ he began.

‘Jack - please,’ the man shot back.

‘Jack,’ said Shah, watching the Welshman turning his head nervously so as to eye his food.

‘God, there’s a fine tan you’ve got there, boy,’ said Jack, smiling. ‘From Swamsea, are you? No, hang on. It’s got to be further west than that, right? I can tell by your accent, see.’

‘My accent!’ said D.C.Shah, grinning as he spun round to face his Cockney companion. ‘I’m afraid I hail from a place a lot further east than Swansea.’

‘Porthcawl, then, yeah?’ asked Jack. ‘My sister lives by the sea down there, but, try as she might, she can never seem to get herself a tan like what you’ve got.’

‘He seems convinced you’re Welsh, Vic,’ said Dawson. ‘And I must say, I can definitely hear a remarkable similarity between your Indian accent and old Jack’s here.’ He watched the young officer’s eyebrows droop. ‘Anyway, don’t let it bother you, lad. Crack on with your questions.’

Vic Shah turned back to face the strange man in the long mac and jeans who sat before him. ‘The penalty for selling drugs is normally jail-time, you do know that don’t you, Jack? Now you wouldn’t want to go down that road, would you?’ he asked him.

‘I certainly wouldn’t,’ said Jack. ‘One of my nearest neighbours went down for doing that, see. He had a big caravan up on the mountain, he did. Until they caught him, of course. Poor sod.’

‘Oh? Who was that then?’ asked Shah.

‘Humphreys, his name was. Though you’d no doubt know him as Inspector Humphreys. Nice man. Once a month I used to get him some Polish fags and viagara, you know. He was seeing my niece for a while, you see. She was his common-law wife, well, as she saw it, anyway. And blimey, that’s all she was left with when they came and took him away.’

‘What? The caravan?’ asked Shah.

‘No, the viagara. And a lot of good that is to you, I told her. So naturally -’

‘You sold it?’

‘Well, aye,’ he said. ‘And the fags. Though they’re a bit chesty, if you want my opinion. Say - you don’t know anyone who wants to buy a caravan, do you? ‘I reckon it could provide you with the sort of field-base you need in your search for Carla Steel. I’ll take five K. No - go on, four.’

‘Have you met Carla Steel, then?’ Shah asked him.

‘Who? Are you kidding? No, not at all. Never even seen the girl,’ Jack Belt told him, with an angry stare that seemed to the detective to wither within seconds of it being applied. Noticing this, Vic Shah chose this moment to go on the attack.

‘But you did attend the Sunday-night gig she took part in at
The Railway
, I understand.’

‘I never,’ retorted Jack. ‘Who the hell told you that?’

‘Then this isn’t you in the picture in The Merthyr Express?’ Vic asked him, proffering a large, shiny, printed photograph. Jack stared down at it, and the plate full of sandwiches alongside it, and licked his lips. ‘And your van wasn’t parked up on the pavement outside, so preventing the pub-manager from bringing up to the door the extra casks of lager he needed to unload.’

‘It had to have been another van completely,’ said Jack, handing the officer his picture back, only to be handed another, similar-sized image, that he once again studied carefully with ever more darkening eyes.

‘Do you know what ‘crank’ is, Jack?’ enquired Vic, calmly taking a bite from a cheese-sandwich.

Jack watched him closely, salivating with envy. ‘Crank, you say? Er - the noise my engine makes?’ he asked. ‘I can tell you straight it’s been mis-firing for years now.’

‘Skunk?’ the officer asked.

‘Now there’s no need to get insulting, now, is there, Mr. Shah?’ retorted Jack.

‘Blow?’

Jack’s mouth fell open. ‘Beg pardon, young man, but I hardly know you.’

‘White? Brown?’

Jack leaned forward, smiled, and shook the officer by the hand. ‘I’ll take the white, if you don’t mind, Mr. Shah. But I hope you’ve gone easy on the butter.’

‘No, no!’ said Shah, removing his sandwich-plate from the man’s clutches. ‘Brown and White happen to be drugs, Jack, as you very well know. And drugs that you’ve been known to be delivering in your van for very many months now, I understand.’

‘Me! You’re saying
I
do that! Says who?’ asked Jack.

‘Could you pass me the list,’ said Shah, turning to his superior.

‘No, don’t bother,’ said Jack, looking down. ‘Merthyr people are too honest for their own good, if you ask me.’ He grimaced. ‘Look - basically I’m stuffed, right, Mr. Shah? And, you can see very well I’m desperate for a sandwich.’ He looked up. ‘Or a chicken curry if you’ve got one.’

‘Funny you should say that,’ Shah told him, grinning. ‘You see my family happen to run an Indian restaurant.’

‘Really? Then I’m sure we could go into business together,’ said Jack, smiling. ‘I once delivered pizzas in my van, you know. Only I had to knock it on the head, you see, as I found they got in the way of all the perishables and - and all the goldfish.’