Last Train to Gloryhole (82 page)

‘But, Carla, don’t you realise they plan to kill you if he doesn’t pay them the half-a-million quid they’ve demanded. And now that your father’s dead, then I guess he won’t be able to.’

‘You sound like you’d be awfully sad to see them do that to me, Jake,’ she told him, smiling.

‘I don’t want to see you get hurt,’ said Jake, touching her arm. ‘If your dead father is tele-porting around the place, and returning to tell you all the crucial stuff that you will need to know, then - then Volver’s plans are plainly doomed, and no mistake. And, if only for that reason, I certainly don’t want a part in them.’

‘Really? So are you going to help me then?’ Carla asked him.

‘You know, Carla, I don’t see how I daren’t,’ he replied. ‘I mean, he could quite easily fly down here right now and destroy the two of them across the road with a - with the kind of weapon that nobody on Earth will ever have seen before. I know I would.’ Jake let the dusky singer take both his hands in hers and shake them with obvious excitement. He looked into her laughing eyes and knew within himself that he was making the right choice, both for hmself, and for her. How this would play out he didn’t know, but even if the two armed guys huddled together outside were planning to desert him, or even to do for him, he felt that he now had ‘
the old man with the gift’
on his side - the man who had conquered death to return to reassure his lovely daughter, and so would clearly also wish to protect whomsoever was committed to protecting her.

Outside the vehicle the distinctive whirr of a helicopter crossed the morning sky above them. Unable to view it, however hard she tried, Carla turned and looked out of the window at the two evil men who stood together across the road, and who now shaded their eyes with their hands from the harsh morning sunlight as they peered upwards in its direction.

‘It’s the police!’ yelled Steffan.

‘But it can’t be. After all, it’s orange, not yellow,’ shouted Volver, the volume of the craft rising sharply as it scooped down low from the north, and banked, as if to pause for a moment to gaze at them all, and then spun itself round, and carried on threading its way southwards through the wooded, mountain vale, finally rising up high again into the azure sky, and then flying off in the direction of the southern of the two reservoirs, and towards the villages of Pontsticill and Vaynor and the town of Merthyr that lay some way beyond that.

D.I. Dawson parked his car at the rear of the police-station, crossed the yard, and peered in through the open window of Sergeant Foley’s police-car, quickly noting from his hang-dog expression just how tired the Welshman seemed to have become of wearing his famous, iconic black uniform with the shiny buttons. ‘What’s afoot, Sherlock?’ the Londoner asked Foley with a smile.

‘Oh, about twelve inches,’ Foley replied. ‘You know, I’m very surprised you didn’t know that, Jeff, to be honest. I thought you must have had some knowledge of what life was like pre-decimalization, even if you weren’t born ‘til after it.’ Then, spotting the cockney detective’s Asian side-kick so close by he could easily have kicked him in the side, added, ‘What is it you guys actually get up to in that London then, when you aren’t detecting stuff I mean? And don’t tell me terrorising innocent black folk, phone-hacking, and working incognito for the Sunday tabloids, because we already know about all that.’

A Polish registered Micra, with its carbon-footprint trailing out of its exhaust-pipe, suddenly turned the corner and sped past them. The three officers turned and watched it go for a few moments, then, turning back and regarding each other afresh, resumed their conversation.

And it was Sergeant Foley who hadn’t finished. ‘Listen, chaps, I reckon I owe you an apology,’ he began. ‘I’m awfully sorry we went and let you follow Jack Belt into that storage-unit up in Dowlais. I mean you two weren’t to know that it was un-staffed and had a timed gate, were you? Or that Jack was going to swipe his card in the machine, circle round the yard once, count to nineteen, then leave your sorry arses locked up inside.’ Constable Thomas, sitting beside him, guffawed at the words his sergeant had just expressed, which hardly resembled an atonement.

The two Londoners turned and gazed at each other in an effort to share, and perhaps somehow, dilute, the embarrassment each felt at this un-solicited speech the sergeant made.

‘But, you know, if we three hadn’t gone off and left you there for the next couple of hours,’ Foley added, ‘then I feel sure we would never have caught up with old Jack, would we? That camper-van might look slow at first sight, you know, but it’s almost super-sonic going downhill.’

‘So what finally stopped Jack in the end, then?’ asked Dawson.

‘He collided with Steve Davies’s ice-cream van just below
The Guest Club,
didn’t he?’

‘Not the snooker player, I hope?’ said D.C.Shah, smiling.

‘Good heavens, no,’ said Foley. ‘Our Steve is anything but forgettable, or boring, or ginger. For a start he’s completely bald, generally only plays Frank Zappa through his loud-speaker on a normal day, and his strawberry-splits and ninety-nines are legendary.’

‘Well, at least you caught him,’ said Dawson, deciding it was now best to draw a line under the matter. ‘Although I take it neither Carla Steel nor anyone else was in the back of his van.’

‘No thanks to you, I gather,’ replied Foley. ‘Didn’t you hint that you’d struck a deal with the fella before you told us to let him go?’

‘O.K., so we did,’ the cockney detective replied. ‘And, in hindsight, perhaps we might have been better advised to have held onto him a bit longer, or at least put a tail on him following his release.’ He watched as Shah nodded in agreement. ‘So what is Jack saying now?’

‘Nothing yet. But we’re going to interview him again very soon,’ Foley told him. ‘Only this time we’re going to do it the Welsh way, O.K.? And threaten to lock him up for a few days without even a biscuit for grub. Never fails. So now that you two unfortunate souls have finally made it back, why don’t you come up and join us, eh? There’s even some sandwiches left over from earlier today, if I remember.’

‘But look - you’re a rooster one day, a feather duster the next,’ said Rhiannon. I laughed, but when I looked to my side I saw that Chris didn’t seem at all happy with my daughter’s comment.’

‘But you haven’t met the man,’ he said to the girl he loved, and who presently sat bouncing around on his lap. ‘If he’s a rooster, then there’s never been one like
him
, I’m sure of that,’ he told her. ‘If you ask me, that man is as used to crushing souls as - as a judge on X-Factor. And with Steffan there to help him, well, I’d say he is capable of doing just about anything for the stack of money that Carla Steel could potentially bring him. And I reckon he’s sure to have done this sort of thing before, or worse, maybe. Why do you think the man is so wealthy, Rhiannon?’

‘Aye, Chris is probably right, girl,’ I told my daughter. ‘What did my old chum Balzac tell us?’

‘I wouldn’t know, Dad,’ replied Rhiannon. ‘I haven’t really met a lot of your drinking friends.’

Chris laughed hilariously at Rhiannon’s reply to me.

“Behind every great fortune there is a crime,’ the Frenchman told me one evening over a pint of bitter in
“The Butchers,”
I said, smiling into her blue, flashing eyes, then steering sharply to the right, to avoid flattening a ewe that was rolling awkwardly over a cattle-grid, but was finding the manoeuvre a lot more difficult, indeed more perilous, now that she had been sheared. ‘God! That was a close shave,’ I said.

‘Well, they get one every summer round here, don’t they?’ said Rhiannon.

‘I didn’t actually mean it like that, love,’ I told her. ‘My girl’s a genius, don’t you think, Chris?’ I proffered. He didn’t reply. ‘Say, kids - how many were in the SUV that we’re after?’ I asked them.

Rhiannon raised a hand and began counting on her fingers. ‘Well, let’s see - it had to have been Carla in the back, squashed between Steffan and Jake, and then, of course, the Volver man himself driving. So I suppose that makes four altogether, right Chris?’

‘But didn’t you see there was someone else sitting beside him in the front?’ Chris asked her. Rhiannon looked non-plussed. ‘Well, there was, babe,’ he told her. ‘Although I didn’t get a decent look at them. In fact, I think he was probably ducking down when they accelerated past.’

As we coasted round a bend a slow farm-vehicle virtually halted our progress. I realised that it would almost certainly have slowed down any vehicle that preceded us too, and so I decided to be absolutely sure about the fact. ‘Chris - jump out and ask the driver if any cars have squeezed past him in the last few minutes, would you?’ I asked him. Seconds later the boy was back telling us that the driver had verified that no vehicles had even approached him from behind, let alone overtaken him, and so I halted straightaway and turned the van round.

‘What are we going to do, Dad?’ asked Rhiannon.

‘Well, they must have turned off somewhere, mustn’t they, love?’ I replied. ‘So don’t you think it makes good sense for us to go back a way and see whether we can discover where that was?’

From the brown sandstone outcrop on the highest point of the plateau the unsheared, hoary old ram could see for miles in all directions. Master of all he surveyed, he bleated out loud basso profundo. He knew his home well; in the summertime he expected sun, green grass, wind, and a quantity of warm, showery rain, and in no year that he could recall had he ever been disappointed. On the high slopes he expected his belly to be full and his annual rut to be awesome. But what the great-grandfather of thousands certainly didn’t expect up there was a motor-car.

The Abraham-of-Sheep was used to dogs, large and small, eluding their slack owners, and noisily giving chase to him and his tribe across the broad, verdant pastures, and the practically indiscernible, methane-rich marshes of this, his promised land; and, as ever, with insufficient sense to suppose the main-course they sought for their dinner might not be the least bit scared of them, and might instead elect to spin round at any moment and sniff what the breeze might recommend, rather than meekly take to his two-toed heels and flee. Yes, out of bitter experience Abe anticipated the unexpected incursions that were made into his kingdom, and, more often than not, relished, the defensive campaign that swiftly ensued. But what the ovine patriarch could never in a month of Sundays have anticipated was that a bullet would ricochet off the rock he was currently resting his ancient loins upon, then spin off it to land, smoking off its excess powder, in the short, stubby grass that he had, just seconds before, been chewing.

‘Lamb of God! It’s those blasted humans again,’ Abe cursed, this time vacating his stony throne, and, after thrusting up a cloud of grassy soil with his hind feet, galloping a dozen or so yards to a less lofty ledge, where he could now view the brainless invader askance from out the corner of a broad, blood-shot eye, and liberally berate the same in male baritone sheep-speak.

The Afrikaner of the very same name strode ever closer to him up the high, slippery slope, his black, gleaming, chariot-of-fire roaring like a lion, yet, strangely, now as still as a boulder, far behind him on the lower. He viewed the ram before him as an enemy rather than a dinner, and soon halted, set his feet, and steadied his rifle accordingly. Eyeing the animal’s solid form intently through the metal sight, and already picturing him dead, the man fired. When the bullet went right through the beast, and it failed to have its gaze disturbed, let alone drop, he could be forgiven for not knowing that the shot he had dispatched had simply pierced his shaggy fleece.

‘You mean you missed!’ screamed Steffan, bravely castigating the South African from afar, then hurrying up the slope to do the same again, this time with a choice facial expression or two.

‘The bastard must have moved!’ yelled Volver, watching as the ram now turned to face him square-on, and half-fearing that he was about to charge. His poised hands now visibly shaking, the second shot he fired missed the ram’s eye by less than a centimetre, but was, without question, another abject failure. ‘Christ! Now I’ll have to re-load!’ he told the Welsh boy.

‘Hey, let me have a go,’ said Steffan, approaching the Afrikaner from the side, and touching his shoulder so as to make him aware of his presence. ‘I reckon I’m sure to hit him.’

‘Get off!’ Volver told him, re-loading. ‘This has never happened to me before, I swear. Steffan - tell me if the bastard decides to charge us, yeah?’ The South African carefully took aim again.

Steffan stood back a yard, and, covering his ears, waited. Seconds later he spoke. ‘You know, mate, I reckon you keep missing because you’re not used to your target threatening you back.’ Then, sensing the ironic humour in his, otherwise innocent, aside, he began to chuckle loudly.

Volver ceased aiming, and turned and stared at Steffan with pure venom in his eyes. ‘What the fuck are you trying to say?’ he asked the boy.

‘Fuck all!’ said Steffan. ‘Why? What do you think I’m saying? God - man. Anyone can miss, can’t they? Jake missed that apple in the tree yesterday and he was practically touching it.’

‘Yeah, but I’m not Jake, am I? Jake is a cock,’ Volver told him, beaming a malevolent stare at the boy who was, of course, the cock’s best friend.

The shaggy, old ram, most likely bored, awaiting, what must have seemed forever, his imminent slaughter, and understandably having other things in life he wished to be doing, promptly turned and scampered up over the summit of the hill, and down into the dip on the other side. The two humans watched him go, and soon began laughing at the sight, yet each one for diametrically opposite reasons.

‘Listen - we’ve got far more important things to do than chase sheep,’ announced Volver, shouldering his weapon, and spinning round to gaze anew into the far distance. ‘Just a mile or so more and we’ll be there, you know. You did bring all the wet-suits, didn’t you?’

‘Yeah, but we’re one short, remember,’ Steffan told him.

‘No, we’re not,’ replied Volver, his top lip soon curling up into a sadistic sneer. The two males stood and studied each other. Then they began emitting a second, hearty laugh, but this time for the very same reason.