Last Train to Gloryhole (86 page)

‘They probably think they have, especially now that evening is setting in,’ she told us, hugging Carla tightly round the neck, then Rhiannon, as if they were long-lost sisters just returned from another land, and as if she had never even been involved in the singer’s abduction. ‘But that pilot showed me his big, heat-seeking camera, you know,’ she added, giggling, ‘and, boy, you couldn’t help but be impressed.’

The singer held up the extraordinary golden wrist-watch I had just handed her, and let the gold-fish embellished on its back catch the light. ‘Yes, it belonged to Sarah,’ she told us, smiling. ‘Isn’t it beautiful? It’s one of a great many things she gave me, you know.’ She raised her head and looked over at my daughter. ‘Your half-sister is a wonderful human-being, you know, Rhiannon. She really is. Although I can easily understand how you couldn’t possibly know that. You see, Sarah told me more than once that, when you were born, she felt quite - well, quite -’

‘Jealous,’ said Rhiannon. She bit into her lip. ‘You see, Carla, I’m beginning to understand now. Especially as I had a mum
and
a dad at home, while Sarah obviously had to make do with just a mum. And my mum has her moments, as I’m sure you’ve heard.’

The two girls smiled at each other.

‘And a step-father she couldn’t possibly feel close to,’ I added, rubbing my eyes with the towel I had earlier used to dry my hair. ‘She used to come back for holidays for a few years, you know,’ I added, ‘and on the few occasions I met her I tried to get to know her, of course, but it felt like I was just banging my head on a brick-wall. The girl is head-strong, and, in all honesty, I can’t say I blame her for deciding to go off to the smoke when she did.’ I felt myself beginning to fill up. ‘And after that even her occasional visits home came to an abrupt end.’

‘Do you know, perhaps that was when I first met her,’ said Carla, taking my hand and squeezing it. ‘For a very long time Sarah was my soul-mate, my lover, my friend. We went through so much together, we really did, that - that sometimes I felt she was the other half of me. But it became particularly bad when our closest friend Jackie disappeared, and poor little Leila was forced to look upon Sarah as her mother. Of course we weren’t to know that her mother had been brutally murdered, or that Abram Kronfield - an erstwhile friend of mine, whom you probably know better as Volver - was the man who engineered it.’

A haggard Sergeant Foley walked across the room from the filing-cabinet in the corner. ‘Well, he’s in custody tonight, Miss,’ he said, pouring the Welsh-born singer a second glass of whisky.

‘Yes I know,’ said Carla. ‘And I thank God for it.’ She looked around her. ‘And do you know that it was in this very room that my father managed to locate Jackie’s body.’ She shook her head. ‘Though sadly the discovery did cost one poor London bobby his life.’

‘And at the hands of a wicked old man called Michael Ryan, as it turned out, Miss,’ added Foley, ‘whom this Volver paid very generously over a long period to suppress his crime.’

‘Since the two of them had most likely murdered her together at Ryan’s almshouse home in Putney,’ said Vic Shah.

‘By the way, we have since heard that that Ryan man is currently on the run in the west of Ireland, and we’re confident that, with the Garda hot on his tail, and the fact that he’s travelling in a horse-drawn carriage, it won’t be long before he’s captured.’ The police-officers all laughed.

‘Then you’ll need to add to Mike Ryan’s crime-sheet the murder of a fellow Irishman of his called Dave Cronin,’ said Carla, ‘whom Volver stabbed, and Ryan drowned and disposed of.’

‘Dave Cronin?’ said a pensive Jeff Dawson. ‘Ah, yes, I remember him. He had a very bad habit, he did. But what a terrific guitarist nevertheless. A sort of Irish Johnny Winter, as I recall.’

I smiled on recalling the talented albino musician from the seventies who was his prototype.

‘Yes, handsome, gentle Dave Cronin,’ Carla told him, dipping her head in the recalling. ‘Who sang to thousands every day on the London Underground, and spurned every one of the pleas that came his way from the reality-show circus. A dedicated musician and a man of principle. A generous man who serenaded me nightly in our little flat with a music that was truly his own.’

‘Rhiannon looked over at Chris and smiled that smile I’d seen her give him in the cave a number of times earlier that day.

‘And the only man I’ve truly loved,’ added Carla, leaving none of us in doubt that these words she spoke were the murdered man’s real epitaph.

‘You’re still very young, Miss,’ said Sergeant Foley. ‘You just haven’t found the right one yet.’

‘You may be right,’ Carla told him, raising her eye-brows suggestively, then stifling a burp. ‘I’m sorry, but I fear the whisky is making me rather hungry.’

‘Well, let’s all adjourn to Zeta’s, shall we?’ said Foley, swigging what little was now left of his whisky by the neck. ‘Their meat-balls are legendary, you know, and I’d say the very thing to take your mind off men.’

‘Oh, would you now?’ said Carla, flushing brightly. ‘Meat-balls! I beg to differ.’ At this everyone laughed.

‘There seem to be an awful lot of people in town tonight, don’t you think?’ said Rhiannon, as she walked up Merthyr High Street hand-in-hand with Chris and me, as we all made our way, behind Carla and the small group of police-officers that comprised her escort, towards
The Cafe Giotto
.

‘The last train from Cardiff has just come in, Miss,’ Sergeant Foley told her, turning about. ‘And a lot of them I reckon are Fleet Street paps that I fear, Carla, you’re bound to have to face tomorrow morning.’

‘But not all of them,’ Jeff Dawson told him, gripping his arm and winking.

‘No, not all. I never said that, did I?’ said Foley, grinning back at him.

When we entered the restaurant I straightaway saw my wife Gwen sitting at the farthest table, chatting with our host Zeta, and with Anne, and some other women I vaguely knew who were seated alongside them. I must admit I was somewhat taken aback when Carla suddenly dashed across the room towards them, and leaned over and hugged a woman sitting across from Gwen, who seemed to have just arrived, and, like us, had yet to take her coat off. We made our way over towards them and, as she turned, I could clearly see that it was my estranged step-daughter Sarah whom the singer had greeted so warmly, and I swiftly guessed that the pretty, smiling, mixed-race girl sitting alongside her, and whose hand she tightly held, had to be Leila.

Despite the intense excitement and the understandable emotion in the air, before very long everyone managed to sit themselves down at the two large tables that our hosts had generously placed together for us.

‘Here’s to British Rail for getting you both here so fast,’ said Gwen, raising her glass of wine, and smiling at her prodigal daughter, and at the enchanting little girl who was sitting quietly beside her. Everyone raised their glasses, and nodded and smiled in agreement.

‘But Gwen - it’s not called that any longer,’ said Zeta. ‘Is it Anne?’

‘I wouldn’t know to be honest,’ Anne retorted, stroking Zeta’s new Siamese kitten as it sat placidly, purring loudly on her lap. ‘You see, these days I usually let the car take the strain.’

‘Well, how about we toast Jones and Trevithick then,’ Gwen suggested. ‘For they started it all, didn’t they? Trains, I mean. The original iron men those two were. Way back in 1804, and here in Merthyr too.’

‘Though my wife and I can’t actually remember that far back, naturally,’ I added, smiling.

‘To Jones and Trevithick,’ everyone cried, glasses held aloft and clinking.

‘Aye, wonderful half-backs they were, as I recall,’ said Foley, smiling. ‘But not the best.’ We all laughed.

‘No, that’s true,’ said Martin-the-Caff, getting what for him was a brain-wave. ‘To Gareth Edwards and Barry John,’ he exclaimed proudly. Gleefully, we all repeated that toast too.

‘Joe Calzhage and that gorgeous Johnny Owen,’ said his wife Zeta, raising her little fist and punching the air above her. ‘They’ve both been in here, you know, when they weren’t in training of course.’ A smiling Martin nodded by way of confirmation.

‘To David and Lloyd George - a fine Coalition!’ shouted a drunken man at the counter, who promptly knocked his change from off the surface and right across the floor, and swiftly set about chasing it, on his hands and knees, in the direction of the door. We laughed again, only this time with pure gusto at the sight of it, then slowly composed ourselves once more as the first plates of meat-balls began to arrive at the table.

Rhiannon lifted her glass and looked around. ‘To Carla and Sarah,’ she said, a tear clearly forming in the corner of her eye. Chris leaned over, smiled, then tilted his head and kissed her.

‘Yes, to Carla and Sarah,’ said Leila, in a sweet, high voice, who, sitting between them, very soon found herself getting tightly hugged to bursting by the pair of them. To the rest of us the genuine tender love that plainly existed between the three females was palpable and a genuine sight to see.

‘Say - where are we going to be staying, now we’ve finally arrived in Merthyr, then, Auntie Carla?’ the little girl asked, just failing to stifle a yawn, and twirling in her little fingers the red and green, Welsh-Dragon flag that Sarah had bought for her many hours before in the little shop on Paddington Station.

‘Why, that’s very easy,’ said Gwen, smiling across at them. ‘Isn’t it, Anne?’

‘That’s right,’ said Anne, grinning from ear to ear. ‘There’s a lovely house that’s just been cleaned afresh, with beds aired and everything. And I believe it’s called
Coral,
right Gwen?’

My wife nodded. ‘Yes, it is,’ she said. ‘
Coral
is the place for you three tonight and no mistake.’

The young girl considered the words the two women imparted for a moment. ‘And is it near here?’ she asked, now emitting a full-blown yawn. ‘Or do we take another train to get there?’

‘No, love, there are no trains that go through there any longer,’ Carla told her, a bright image of
The Seven Arches
suddenly flashing up before her eyes. ‘But it’s not far. It’s in a little place called
Gloryhole
, is where it is, sweetheart. And, you know, if you and Sarah really like it there, then I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t stay there for an extended holiday, or even - or even a little while longer perhaps.’ She reached over and squeezed Sarah’s hand below the pale -blue table-cloth, and mouthed a faint kiss to her.

Espying, with sleep-defying eyes, their timid embrace, Leila picked up the goldfish wrist-watch, and, sitting far back in her seat, twirled it round and round in her tiny fingers before her captivated, twinkling eyes. She soon turned and smiled at Carla whose watch she knew it was.

‘And that is a little present from me to you, Leila,’ the singer told her, smiling broadly.

The little girl’s brown eyes lit up. ‘Ooh! Thank you, Auntie Carla,’ she said, gritting her cutely spaced, white teeth together tightly in sheer excitement. ‘This is my bestest present ever for sure. Want to know cause why?’

‘Why?’ asked Carla, smiling at the simple, childish words which her tender heart had for too long missed.

‘Because I can see now how, like your daddy, orange is my favourite colour too.’ Her words and smiling countenance almost brought Carla to tears.

Then Leila had a bright idea, and, leaping to her feet, and lifting the bright, shining timepiece high above her, and opening her little mouth and whirring loudly like some high-pitched, tropical bird, she flew the magical orange object round and round about our heads, to loud, joyous whooping, and general acclaim. Then, finally, sweeping it down low once more at the end of her thin, brown, outstretched arm, and making it look for all the world like an African flamingo returning home once more to its vast, blue lake, Leila landed it, safe and sound, and with a timely whoosh!, in the very middle of our table.

THE END

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Copyright © Keith Price, 2013

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