Last Train to Gloryhole (81 page)

‘Wow, what a memory you’ve, got girl!’ the Afrikaner told her. ‘I see now there are things I should never have shared with you back then, Carla dear. When you were my bed companion as well as the love of my life. Well, one of them anyway.’

‘Which fact I very soon gleaned from Jackie. Yes, she found out a lot about you for me when she worked in that lap-dancing club you ran in Hammersmith as a cover for your drug-empire.’

Volver gritted his teeth. ‘But still I got my revenge, I guess,’ he snarled back.

‘Yes, you certainly did that, didn’t you, Abram?’ replied Carla. ‘When you and that ape you consorted with at the time killed our best friend Dave Cronin, the only man I can say I ever truly loved. And then, years later, poor Jackie herself. Christ, you went and murdered a young, black mother over a few bags of dope, leaving her young daughter an orphan. Wow! That must make you feel very proud, eh? You’re a low-down scum-bag and you know it, Abram Kronfield.’

‘Ah, but there was a principle involved, wasn’t there?’ Volver retorted. ‘And anyway, Jackie wasn’t just a dancer and an addict, was she?’ said Volver. ‘Your Jackie friend was a common-or-garden prostitute. And let’s be honest, she wasn’t at all particular where she did it, was she? On the common, or in the garden.’ The South African bellowed out his loudest laugh yet.

‘You sound pathetic trying to slander the name of an innocent young addict,’ retorted Carla. ‘The mother of your daughter, too. And now she’s just another of your long list of dead victims.’

‘Yeah, so you say,’ said Volver. ‘And anyway Dave Cronin was her pimp, plain and simple. Let’s be honest - the pair of them were the scum of the earth, and killing them was probably doing a tremendous service to the good folk of west London. A sort of ethnic cleansing you could say, only without the ethnic.’

‘Oh, it was
ethnic
all right,’ snapped Carla. ‘The wonder of it all is that you haven’t had Leila, your daughter, killed too, her skin being the colour that it is.’

Volver ignored her comment and, thinking fast, sped the SUV round a bend. ‘Incidentally, Carla, your dad is certainly taking enormous risks with your safety by refusing to meet our demands, wouldn’t you say? I mean, he’s had our ransom-note for days now and we still haven’t heard a word. Are you sure the man even loves you?’

Carla considered for a moment how she should reply. ‘My dad is a very sick old man, you know,’ she told him. ‘If he’d finally passed away, do you think you guys would even get to hear about it?’

‘Oh, now surely you’re not telling me that missing you for a few days is likely to finish the old boy off, are you?’ sneered Volver. ‘Do me a favour, Carla. I mean how many years is it since you were last back here to see the old codger? Ages, right? He probably loves his budgie more.’

Carla suddenly recalled the chilling moment that her dead father had appeared to her in the upstairs-room where she had been incarcerated. Eerie, and incredibly sad, though it clearly was, the strange event seemed to offer her a hope that she felt desperately in need of just then. Gazing at the light gleaming on the great lake to her left, she quickly thanked God for the same.

A mobile-phone started ringing in the front of the vehicle. Volver picked it up and answered it without slowing the vehicle. ‘Who’s that?’ he called out. ‘Jack? Jack - where are you? The police have stopped you! Really? Good. Well, that’s why we decided to send you on ahead, isn’t it? How the hell else could we get a clear passage?
Who’s
dead?
Who? Dead!
Don’t fuck with me. You’re fucking with me, Jack.’ Volver glanced up into the rear-view mirror and, quickly clocking Carla’s feigned lack of interest in the news he was receiving, began suspecting that she almost certainly must have known that her father’s life had come to an end.

The South African halted the car on the roadside, secured the hand-brake, and spun his leather-jacketed body right round. ‘You two get out of the car now,’ he ordered Steffan and Jake. ‘No - wait! Jake - you stay there with Leone. And don’t you take your eyes off Carla, O.K.?’

Leaving Carla in the middle of the rear-seat, sat next to Jake, Steffan climbed out of the car and followed Volver across the tarmac to the other side of the road. They stood looking across at the Range Rover and the three people who were still sitting inside it, and began discussing the news that Volver had that minute gleaned from Jack Belt.

‘You know, I can tell that Carla already knew that her dad was dead,’ said Volver. ‘And it wasn’t you or me that told her, right? And Leone just about knows what day of the week it is, so that leaves just the one possibility, you get me?’ He locked stares with Steffan. ‘Yeah, it had to have been Jake, right?’

‘Well, I guess it must have been,’ Steffan told him. ‘Though how he could have found what had happened I really haven’t a clue. You know, I suppose Jack had to have told him.’

‘Maybe. Yeah, I think you’re right,’ said Volver. ‘Well, the pair of them can rot in hell now as far as I’m concerned. Listen - I’ll take care of Jake soon after we get there. But can I ask you to do the same for Jack the next time you see him?’ He made a shooting action with his right hand.

Steffan curled his lip for a moment as he considered exactly what was being asked of him, then nodded back his consent. ‘Don’t worry, you can count on me, boss,’ he declared.

‘That’s what I wanted to hear, mate,’ Volver told the much younger man, slapping him firmly on the back, fully realising that this would be the first time for Steffan to actually take someone’s life. He recalled the first time he had squeezed the trigger of a gun, as he pointed it at the back of a rival dealer in Shepherds Bush. It had taken an element of courage, yes, but in the long run, and in the wider realm of things, it had enabled him to take a much firmer grip on the control of the drug trade in that particular part of west London. ‘You know, you and I are going to come out of this well ahead, Steffan, don’t you worry, mate,’ the Afrikaner continued, feigning a smile.

Steffan gritted his teeth, then curled up his lips into a malicious looking grin that he soon noticed closely resembled the one he was staring at, and nodded his approval.

‘But I guess your old mate Jake has decided to betray the pair of us and play us both for fools,’ Volver told the boy angrily. ‘And for that, well, for doing something as traitorous as that, I’m afraid he’s going to have to die.’

‘Rams wrapped in thermogene beget no lambs,’ said Chris, throwing a piece of wood at the fearsome, horned creature who now stood blocking their path to the farmhouse-door. ‘Say - where did I read that?’

The queer statement was familiar to Rhiannon too, and she dipped her pretty head to properly consider the puzzle he had set her. ‘I think it must have been in that book we studied together for GCSE English, just before I got put back a year,’ she told him. ‘It was either by Lawrence or Orwell or Huxley, I believe. Though I’m not sure which.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Chris. ‘It might have been the latter, I guess.’

Rhiannon stepped back behind her lover just in case the ram decided to bolt towards them rather than run away. ‘You know, Chris, this horny old fellow looks like he might be related to the one we saw outside the railway-tunnel near Pant that night, don’t you think? That night we -’

‘Oh, yes, I remember now,’ Chris told her, recalling it well. He took aim and threw a second, much thicker, branch ahead of him, and this time it landed plumb on the creature’s head, and bounced away onto the ground before him. The ram seemed to ruminate over the meaning of this for a moment or two, then slowly walked off into the trees, no doubt with the extreme pain gradually overtaking his ailing brain.

The young pair gripped hands and walked gingerly up the grassy slope towards the, now empty, yard in front of
Cwm Scwt
, and then approached its peeling front-door. As they had expected, on reaching the farmhouse they found the deserted building locked. Chris turned and smiled at Rhiannon, then lifted a booted foot and, with just one single, upward swing of his heel, kicked in the wooden door.

Hand-in-trembling-hand, and more than a little nervously, the young couple entered the farmhouse, and then moved about it carefully, from room to shady room, in search of anything that would implicate the trio of men who had kidnapped Carla, and were now holding her against her will in an SUV that they had minutes before seen driving away from the location in a southerly direction. The couple had sincerely hoped they might find their stolen Fiesta, but soon discovered that it wasn’t anywhere around. They also discovered that the old building didn’t even have its own land-line, by which they had hoped they could phone the police and report to them what they had seen go down there from their warm, but fly-infested, nest amongst the trees.

With diminishing stride, and ever-shortening intakes of breath, I managed to stumble my way up the steep, grassy slope into the eerie shade of the scattered spruce-trees, and became immediately confronted with a wooden sign-on-a-pole beside the track that announced that the farm some distance off to my right was called
‘Cwm Scwt.’
I turned and walked in that direction towards the open, disabled gate that I could see up ahead of me, which led the visitor into a grey-brown, stony yard, and soon saw the farmhouse loom up amongst the shadows to my left.

There was no one around that I could see, not even a dog or two to challenge my approach, and this fact I immediately sensed signified that the farmhouse might well be vacant, or at least vacated. Approaching the entrance, I soon found the front-door to be broken open, and so, a little tremulously I admit, I wandered inside and looked around.

I hoped to find some evidence that people had been staying there and, to my dismay, this I not long after discovered. My daughter Rhiannon’s monogrammed, handkerchief lay suspended from a hot-water pipe, barely off the floor, in a corner of the kitchen, and, in bending to collect it, I discovered Chris’s felt hat sitting on a chair nearby. A busted-up guitar, stuffed in a large bin in the opposite corner of the room caused me almost as much dismay, especially as it looked as if it could easily have been rendered like that by having been wrapped round someone’s poor head. Selfishly perhaps, I just hoped it hadn’t been Rhiannon’s.

It was when I began climbing the stairs that I heard the noise. My first thought was that it may have been a cat which was trapped up there, perhaps even too scared to venture down to greet a noisy newcomer. But hearing voices, then the sound of ‘Dad!’ being yelled out, told me instantly that my daughter Rhiannon and her boyfriend Chris were up there somewhere. She called again for me to join them, and, after rounding the bannister and walking down a dark, uncarpeted corridor, I soon found the two of them at the end of it, standing at the door of a bedroom, and holding up for me to see some items which they said they had just that moment discovered, and that proved that Carla Steel had been held against her will there.

‘But where is she now, then?’ I asked, hugging to me the pair of them, and no doubt shedding a tear or two at my good fortune at having been reunited with Rhiannon, the apple of my eye.

‘She’s been taken off by a really wicked monster, Dad,’ she told me. ‘His name is Volver, and, now that her dad is dead, and can’t supply him with the fortune in ransom money that the man wants for her, then he is almost certainly planning to do her harm. We really need to find her, Dad, before it’s too late. Can we go after them with you in the van?’

In the back of the Range Rover Carla looked across at Jake and decided that now had to be the time, and that she had nothing to lose by trying. ‘Can you lip-read?’ she asked him.

‘No - can you, then?’ the boy asked her nervously, his narrow mouth dropping open as he awaited her reply.

Carla couldn’t, of course, and decided she wasn’t going to lie to him, but still she felt disinclined to avert his fears that she might possess such a power. ‘Well, I can see it’s not me they’re gabbling on about, I can tell you,’ she said. ‘And just look how angry the pair are getting.’

‘Perhaps I’d better get out and join them then,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think?’

‘You know, Jake, I wouldn’t if I were you. Not right now, anyway.’

‘Say - is it true what people say about your father, Carla?’ he asked her. ‘That he has a gift?’

Carla nodded. ‘Yes, it’s true,’ she told him. ‘Had one, anyway.’

‘Had one!’ exclaimed Jake, a look of complete puzzlement on his thin, but swarthy face. ‘You mean you can lose it!’

‘No, you don’t understand, Jake,’ said Carla, slapping the boy gently on his thigh. ‘Mt father is dead now, you see.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Jake, without thinking.

‘His MS had become very critical,’ she announced, watching his eyes dart about as his brain sought to make sense of the information he was assembling. ‘He passed away two days ago.’

‘O.K. But how - then how would you know he’d died?’ he asked her, his eyes bulging.

‘Well, you see, my father came and visited me in the farmhouse,’ she told him, emitting the thinnest of smiles. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’

There was a three-second pause. ‘Sort of,’ Jake replied. She saw that he had begun to fidget around in his seat very much as if he had haemorrhoids. ‘So are you saying your dead dad came back to see you!’ exclaimed Jake, wobbling around worse than ever now.

‘You mean you don’t think that that’s possible, Jake,’ she said, witnessing the boy’s confusion, but knowing full well of the thrill it gave him to again have her speak his name.

‘Well, I do believe that tele-porting is possible,’ he replied. ‘Is that what you’re suggesting?’

Carla was tempted to tell him that, yes, it was. But resisting the notion, she declared, ‘No, I mean that his soul - you know, Jake, his spirit - returned to tell me something.’

‘What?’ asked Jake, trembling, a dribble of saliva leaking out of the corner of his mouth. ‘To tell you what?’

Carla suddenly realised that she was deceiving him with this comment, as her father hadn’t actually said anything to her, just nodded at her as if he wanted her to acknowledge his express departure to the other side. She felt that Jake didn’t deserve to be lied to, so she decided to let him know only the true facts of what had really taken place. ‘My dad flew in to me through the open window of my room upstairs,’ she told the boy slowly. ‘You see, he wanted me to know that he had passed, and - and that, despite my kidnapping, that - that everything would be all right.’