Last Train to Gloryhole (84 page)

‘Yeah, would you care to amend that now?’ asked Dawson.

‘I won’t amend a word I said,’ Foley told them. ‘If you want my opinion, Dyl Cook is the sort of bloke you’d definitely bank on in a tight spot, and even in a dangerous, unpredictable situation like this.’ Dawson and Shah turned and stared at each other in disbelief, but constables Llewellyn and Thomas gazed across at Foley and nodded their agreement with their superior’s assessment. ‘You know, boys, it could easily be a foot-chase he’s involved in, for all we know.’

‘Well, if it is, let’s hope the ‘copter can tell us as much before very long,’ said Dawson. ‘Because, apart from further west, there’s nowhere else they could have gone, is there? Unless they’ve all vanished down a bleedin’ rabbit-hole with Alice.’

‘Alice!’ said the two Welsh constables in unison.

‘Or maybe the Pied Piper of Merthyr waltzed them all off into the mountain,’ said Shah, smiling at his senior officer.

‘But until we hear from the air-cops again, then I suppose the only thing we can do is sit down here and wait,’ Dawson told them, turning about and parking his backside on a boulder.

‘Yeah, and twiddle our thumbs, maybe,’ said Shah, sitting beside him, and contemplating attempting the queer action he had just suggested.

‘Or count to one-thousand,’ said Llewellyn. ‘Considering we could be here a while.’

‘A million, more like,’ said Thomas, grinning.

‘Yeah? Well just do your best not to fall asleep, guys, that’s all,’ remarked Dawson.

‘Fall asleep! My boys? Why the hell would they?’ Foley asked him.

‘Yeah, why would we?’ asked Llewellyn, raising his big head aggressively, and proceeding to stare out the two cockney officers who were now beginning to get on his wick.

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ said Dawson. The man spun round, and pointing, told them, ‘I reckon there’s enough bleedin’ sheep up here that, if you counted them, they’d be bound to send us all into a coma.’

As I pulled and dragged and twisted myself, on my elbows and knees, along the dark, narrow limestone passage that seemed to slope ever downwards, all that I could make out before me were the tiny, muddy heels of Leone Lewis, and those only when Chris elected to stop and flash his torch back along the line. Most of the time I crawled blind, then halted to take a few deep breaths, then endeavoured to crawl some more in an effort to catch up again.

On occasions I could hear Chris’s voice ahead of me telling us how, though we still weren’t able to turn our bodies round, the cave seemed to be getting a little wider, but in all honesty that wasn’t my experience at all, and was most likely the boy’s method of trying to keep all our spirits up. In truth I felt that, if anything, the passage seemed to be getting tighter, and, the way I looked at it, we seemed to be gradually decending from the broader trachea into the narrower bronchus of some great black lung, whose multi-branched, ever-tightening bronchioles still lay ahead of us and no doubt deeper still, and where, ironically, and before too long a time elapsed I feared, we would all four most likely asphyxiate and die.

When I caught sight of Chris’s torch-lit face in the gap ahead of me I was quite shocked, not least because this could only mean that he had at last managed to turn his body round. I waited until it was my turn to reach him, and then looked up and saw that the two girls had now squeezed past him, and were seated together in a small round chamber with their backs to the crusty, crinkled wall, looking ruddy-faced and excited, but rather weary.

‘Perhaps we should rest here for a while,’ I told them, being suddenly conscious of my age and of my questionable condition. ‘Is this where they’ve taken Carla, then? Is it, girl?’ I asked Leone. She shrugged her shoulders in response, then let her head fall back and rest on the rock-wall, as if it was her intention to take a nap.

‘You can stay here by all means, Dyl,’ said Chris, ‘but I need to be sure whether we’re in fact heading the right way, or if this is just a wild goose-chase.’ With that he turned and set off crawling along one of the two tunnels that branched off from the chamber we currently occupied. It wasn’t long before we realised that, without the only torch we had to light us up, which was of course his, we would soon resort to counting down the seconds until his return. But, if a count took place, then it couldn’t have lasted for long, because the girls and I all quickly fell asleep where we sat, and so, when Chris returned again and roused us, we had absolutely no idea how long the boy had been gone.

‘Hey - there’s a pool down there!’ Chris yelled as soon as he had flopped down beside us.

‘Well, I hope you haven’t been in it,’ said Rhiannon, her mouth agape.

‘Of course not,’ he replied. ‘But you’ll never guess what I found beside it.’

‘A deck-chair,’ suggested Leone, seemingly being serious.

‘Not that sort of pool, silly,’ he told her.

‘A whale,’ I suggested, smiling.

‘Yeah sure. Let’s free Willy, shall we?’ he continued, laughing aloud.

‘A fish,’ my daughter proffered.

‘Well, not quite,’ responded Chris, teasing her with his eyebrows raised.

‘So I’m close then?’ she enquired.

‘Sort of,’ he said. ‘It’s now in my jacket-pocket, so how about that?’ Rhiannon seemed none the wiser. Chris smacked its location with his hand, then he squeezed the object with his fingers.

‘Eugh! That’s disgusting,’ said Rhiannon, sniffing deeply. ‘A fish in your pocket!’

Leone chanced her arm. ‘A wrist-watch in the shape of a goldfish,’ she told him quietly.

Chris stared at the girl. ‘That’s exactly what it is,’ he announced, taking the gleaming object out of his pocket and showing it to us. ‘So I guess Carla must have let you see it then, Leone?’

‘No. No, I saw it on the chair beside her bed when she went - when she was asleep,’ Leone told us. ‘Even tried it on once, I did. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? She must have taken it off to save it - to - oh, I don’t know.’

‘From getting wet,’ I suggested, gazing over at Chris and seeing him nod. ‘She left it behind to save it from being destroyed as they forced her along, didn’t she? You see it’s a sixties’ time-piece,’ I told them, holding it between my fingers, and twirling it round in the narrow beam of light which emanated from Chris’s torch, and that instantly seemed to transform its golden-orange form into something wondrous and alive. ‘And they didn’t make watches water-proof back then, you see. I know because I ruined a fair few of them by stupidly soaking them back in the day, and not all of them mine, too.’ I handed the orange timepiece back to Chris, who wrapped it up very tightly inside a polythene bag.

‘Didn’t Mam once have one just like that, Dad?’ Rhiannon asked me. You know I’m sure I saw it in that photo she has of her and - you know.’ I knew exactly who she meant, but decided just to nod my aquiescence rather than talk about who she was referring to.

‘Sarah?’ asked Leone. ‘Is it Sarah you mean?’ Rhiannon looked at me, then turned back and stared at the black-haired girl, and nodded to her ever so slightly. ‘Then that’s who gave it to Carla then. When they shared a place together up in London. And I happen to know that Carla loved the woman. And so that’s who she got it from, you see. Volver - Volver told us all about it.’

‘Told you what exactly?’ my daughter asked her. ‘Do you mean - you don’t mean about my half-sister?’ I gritted my teeth and winced, as I felt I knew what was coming.

‘Yeah. The two of them were lesbians, you know,’ announced Leone. ‘It’s true, girl - I swear.’

Chris leaned forward and handed me the wrist-watch. ‘You look after it, Dyl,’ he said to me with a smile. Then he turned his body round and told everyone, ‘Carla happens to be bi if you want to know, girls. She told me a long time ago. And, you know, I reckon that that’s what makes her such a fantastic artist, to be frank. It follows, don’t you see? I mean, to have experienced all that she has - her schooldays in Merthyr, her formative times in Oxford and London, her amorous relationships with people of both genders, her mother’s sad death, I mean everything she’s ever been through, including her substance-abuse, and even, in recent days, her dad’s terminal illness - and to be able to make it
real
for us, in the most - in the most poetic, powerful, visceral way possible. Few could surely have achieved musically what Carla has.’

I carefully tucked the twisted polythene-bag that held the wrist-watch inside my waistband, then watched as Rhiannon looked lovingly into Chris’s eyes, then laid her head gently on his lap. I inhaled deeply and smiled at the pair of them, sitting sweetly as they did before me. Just then I felt so utterly glad that the boy who had said those profound, heartfelt words, and who had bravely led us deep inside the bowels of a mountain, in pursuit of a madman who had kidnapped a legend, clearly loved my daughter every bit as much as I knew I did myself.

While the police search for the kidnappers moved off towards Trefechan and Cefn, and the even smaller villages that lay further off to the west, we four, who knew next to nothing of this, and who sat in the heart of a nameless cave-system on an inglorious, unsung Welsh mountain-side, were the only ones who knew where the miscreants whom they sought had gone. But there was a world of difference between having that critical, new knowledge we had acquired and possesssing the means by which to follow after them, let alone capture them.

Having now followed Chris down to the pool where he had found Carla’s wrist-watch, we four all stood, circled round it in the torch-light, wondering how the four we were chasing after had managed to progress beyond it.

‘They must have had wet-suits and ropes and oxygen and the rest, right Leone?’ said Chris, trying hard to form his facial features into a look that might frighten the Welsh girl into concurring. Unlikely though that appeared, it seemed to work.

‘Only for four people, though,’ Leone told him. ‘And Volver already knew I wasn’t up for it anyway - the deepwater diving, I mean - although that didn’t seem to matter in the end as things turned out, thank God.’

‘Well, I can tell you I’m definitely going down there,’ said Chris, pointing into the freshwater pool, whose unseen depth we could only guess at.

‘But you haven’t even got a swimming-costume, sweetheart,’ Rhiannon told him. ‘And it’s probably a lot deeper in there than it looks, you know.’

I thought about what my daughter had just said, and looked around me at the water trickling into the pool from the rounded walls of the chasm we were all standing in, and asked Chris, ‘Is the pool deeper now than it was the first time, do you think?’

‘Maybe a foot or so,’ he told us. ‘No, I’d say a little more than that. Two feet, perhaps. If it weren’t dry above ground then I guess we could be faced with a real dilemma.’

‘Then I think we all might need to take a decision right now,’ I told them. ‘You see it starting raining heavily just after you all crawled into the cave, and, if it hasn’t yet stopped, then I imagine this chamber could easily begin to -’

‘Fill up!’ yelled a horrified Rhiannon, her hand across her mouth.

‘Yes, I fear so,’ I told them.

‘Even more reason then for me to go down there,’ said Chris, ‘if only to see if I can surface again somewhere further along.’

‘Are you a nut?’ asked Leone. ‘How on earth are you going to be able to see where you’re going for a start?’

‘But this torch I’m holding is totally water-proof,’ said Chris, holding it aloft. ‘And I can hold my breath for two minutes on a good day, can’t I Rhi?’

‘Oh, yeah? And
is it
a good day?’ asked Leone, wobbling her little head about as if it mattered a fig. Straightaway she could tell that Chris wasn’t going to bother replying to her. ‘Girl - you should tell your boyfriend to wise up if you ask me,’ she told Rhiannon. ‘After all, who does he think he is? James Bond? God - isn’t he still at school?’

Chris quickly tore off his clothes and shoes, and then sat himself down on the rocky rim of the pool with his two feet dangling in the water. He dipped his torch below the surface to prove to us that what he had previously said was true, then he jumped in, and, inhaling deeply, dove straight under. I had a watch on, but I didn’t once feel inclined to count off the seconds, for fear Rhiannon would become even more scared than she already appeared. But once I was sure that two minutes had most certainly come and gone, I edged over towards my daughter and, wrapping my arm around her shoulder, gripped her tightly to me.

Finally, after what must have been at least a five-minute lapse, Chris’s head surfaced again.

‘The - the next chamber is much bigger than - than this one,’ he announced, between intakes of enormous gulps of air. ‘And the - and the roof is far higher, too, so it has to be much safer than where we are now. I suggest you all get your kit off and follow me. There’s no one in there, by the way, although there’s plenty of evidence that the kidnappers stayed there a while.’

Not wanting us to leave anything behind, I encouraged Chris to put his clothes back on, and when, like us, he was fully dressed, he leapt back into the water and led the way, showing us how we could best swim under the great neck of limestone that looked like it fully confined us, but which had simply obscured our view of the stream’s actual cave-system which lay ahead.

Around fifteen minutes later we had all managed to swim singly beneath through the submerged archway, and so succeeded in manoeuvring our way past what had at first appeared an impassible obstruction. Surfacing now in a new, much larger cavern, we each climbed out of the swirling water, and, sitting in a curved line on the rim of the pool, began to survey our new, albeit temporary, domicile.

‘Where’s Leone?’ I asked everyone. ‘Oh my God! It looks like she didn’t make it. I’m going to have to go back to find her.’

‘She told me she couldn’t do it, Dad,’ Rhiannon replied, taking my hand. ‘After you dived in I watched her crawl back up the tunnel. I nearly joined her myself, to be honest, when I saw how dreadfully hard it looked. She’ll be above ground again very soon, I’m sure.’

I considered this new situation. ‘Well, there’s very little we can do about it now, I suppose,’ I said, gazing at Chris. ‘Say - what is it that you found in here?’ I soon asked the boy.