Last Train to Gloryhole (85 page)

He rose and tentatively approached a shadowy corner in which lay an object he seemed very reluctant to let Rhiannon see. I joined him. ‘It’s a white, American-style, pocket t-shirt,’ he told me,’ and there’s blood all over it.’ I looked into his eyes. ‘It’s Carla’s,’ he added, gritting his teeth. ‘She told me she would be wearing it to the gig at
The Railway
, the night she got abducted. Dyl, I can’t hang around here a minute longer, I really can’t. I’ve got to swim on further, and right now.’

‘Well, you’re not going on alone,’ I told him, clamping my hand on his shoulder. You take the lead as you’ve been doing, and I’ll do my best to make sure that we all keep up.’

Once more we waited until Chris rerturned from under the submerged arch which sat ahead of us, and then, on hearing him state that our next planned movement was achievable, we three swam through in single file, not long after re-surfacing in an even larger chamber again. But this new arched room I saw was very different to the others we had already travelled through in one important aspect - it contained a large number of crates and boxes, stacked in a corner to one side, each one closed tight, and bound, in the form of a cross, with a long, thin chain and padlock.

Rhiannon dashed over and began examining them. ‘What can be in them?’ she asked.

‘I’ve got a fair idea,’ I told her.

‘So have I,’ said Chris, using his hands to push a chain to the side of one box, so that he could flip open a corner and examine the contents. ‘Wow! I don’t need to delve any deeper inside,’ he told us. ‘The smell is enough.’

‘Is it drugs?’ my daughter asked him.

Chris nodded. ‘It’s literally tons of cocaine,’ he told us. ‘This must be the stuff that Volver wanted the local lads to start selling for him. But why on earth would they store it up here?’

‘Well, it’s relatively secure, isn’t it?’ I replied. ‘And they probably take it out of here a box at a time, and, since they’re wooden boxes, and as long as they’re not too full -’

‘Then they could probably float them out,’ said Rhiannon, smiling.

‘But that’s a long way to transport a large box, don’t you think?’ asked Chris, pointing upstream. ‘I mean, just on our own, and carrying nothing at all it must have taken us a good hour or two.

‘But they wouldn’t be taking the boxes upstream, would they?’ I told him. ‘Unless there’s a much bigger cave opening back there. No, my guess is that they follow the natural stream-flow, and take the drugs out into the valley somewhere below us, and wherever this cave-system eventually comes to an end.’

Minutes later we were all ducking and diving beneath yet another submerged archway, then swimming slowly and carefully downstream, for what must have been a considerable distance, along a tunnel where we could only surface safely at selected points, chosen by our leader Chris, where isolated air-pockets existed above the, still clearly rising, water-level.

When we had reached as far as our energy-levels would allow, we rested for some minutes, by hanging onto a half-submerged wall of limestone, then swam on a little further again until we reached a point where Chris suddenly popped his head up, and commanded us to be as quiet as we could possibly be.

‘There is a light just ahead of us,’ he announced. ‘So I had to turn round and swim back.’

‘Then It has to be them,’ I told him. ‘Listen - don’t go doing anything rash now, Chris. Remember they are most probably armed, while we haven’t even got a chisel. And there’s just you and me, while there’s three of them.’ Chris nodded. ‘I reckon we had better decide our next step very, very carefully.’

‘Yes, but we can’t very well stay here, can we?’ said Chris. ‘There isn’t anywhere for us to sit for a start. We’re just treading water and getting more and more weary. We had better go back a way I think.’

So that is what we did, and, minutes later, we pulled ourselves up onto a narrow ledge just above water-level, and a proper discussion then ensued about what we should do next. But quite soon we were to discover that our hand had been forced: as the level of the rushing water in the cave-system could now be clearly seen to be rising to alarming heights, and we could tell that, unless we elected to swim on into the lit cave downstream of us then we would unquestionably be drowned.

And so beneath the arch we three dove, and quite soon we resurfaced again inside a vast chamber where we were thrilled to be able to climb out of the swirling water and walk around, for the first time in a long while, on a broad, solid, rocky floor. We saw there was a lamp hanging from a hook in a corner, which cast sufficient light for us, and so Chris decided to switch off his torch.

‘But you know I’m sure I know this place!’ exclaimed a wide-eyed Rhiannon.

‘Me, too,’ said Chris. ‘We came here once before, remember Rhi? Only back then there was no lamp or light of any kind in here, was there?’

‘No,’ Rhiannon replied, walking over to join him, and taking his hand in hers. ‘But the place was very like a fairies’ grotto back then, don’t you think? A kind of magic kingdom. Ethereal, you know.’

Chris nodded, then suddenly recalled how the pair of them had made love in the cave’s darkness, in the very shingle alongside the glistening pool that they were currently standing upon, and instinctively he looked down at it in awe, his bright eyes searching along its rippling contours for signs of their coupling, or their footprints even, and, seeing none remaining, closing them as tightly as he could, and trying hard to relive the intimacy of that moment, and that experience.

‘The sort of place lovers steal away to,’ I whispered, looking up, and glimpsing above our heads the lofty, arched roof of what might easily have been the crypt of some great chief’s, or monarch’s, mighty palace. The gleaming surface of the same was ribbed liberally with pastel-coloured stalactites, some short, some long, that dripped alternately, and that we could observe being repeatedly criss-crossed and bisected by streams and streams of endlessly circling, silently fluttering, bats.

‘Do you remember the way you got out of here?’ I asked the young pair a few moments later.

‘It’s that way, Dad,’ Rhiannon replied, pointing to where the water streaming from the pool we were standing beside slithered right, then left, before disappearing beneath the arched entrance to what appeared to be a low-roofed tunnel.

I decided to leave the others and wander off alone towards it. Peering down the stream’s narrow tunnel, I could clearly see a tiny circle of light some distance away, which I felt had to signify the outside world. But if that was true, I thought, and our salvation was so near at hand, then plainly we could be just as close to the dangerous, villainous man we were chasing after, namely Abram Volver. And it was more than likely, given what we knew about him, that the South African was armed with at least one fire-arm, I told myself; and, as I had once heard someone tell me in the pub, ‘if all you have is a gun, then everything around you is a target.’

Carla had spent at least half-an-hour trying to stymie the blood-flow, initially in a cave somewhere upstream from where she now lay, but now, for a second time, much nearer to the cave-entrance. Since no one else was prepared to help her back there, she had had to use her own t-shirt, and, very quickly saturated in blood, she had then discarded it on the ground.

Jake cried out again. ‘My best mate!’ he yelled. ‘How can your best mate just stab you with a knife like that?’ He winced with pain. ‘And I had no idea it was coming, either.’

Carla recalled how she hadn’t actually seen it happen - she was being forced to swim ahead of them at the time - but soon after they had climbed out of the water, Jake had rushed up to her, much as a boy is inclined to do to his own mother, and had shown her the wound in his side that Steffan had just inflicted. The blood was simply pouring out from it, and Carla suddenly had this feeling that, if Volver saw it, he would most likely shoot the boy, if only to save himself from the hassle that this would now create for him. And so she took Jake off to a shadowy corner to see how she could help him, soon tearing off her own t-shirt to use it as a makeshift tourniquet.

And now, lying alongside him in only her bra and jeans, and on a hard, but dry, platform of rock, hidden away, six or seven feet or so above the swelling stream that ran on noisily towards the cave-entrance close by, Carla felt that she might possibly have saved the unfortunate boy’s life.

‘God! I should have noticed how eager Steffan was to swim last,’ Jake told the singer, sobbing heavily, and still grasping Carla’s arm for dear life. ‘And do you know he was only inches away with his second thrust!’

‘Hush! Don’t think about it any longer, Jake,’ Carla told him. ‘You’re going to be O.K., I swear.’

‘But how do you know that?’ asked Jake. Then much quieter, ‘The very next moment they wonder where we’ve disappeared off to, and climb up here looking, could easily be my last, you know.’

‘But they’ve got more important things to do right now,’ said Carla. ‘They’ve gone outside to check that the coast is clear so they can make their getaway. And anyway, where is your faith, Jake?’

‘At home with her mum, I hope,’ he replied.

‘I think you could be getting a little delirious,’ Carla told him, stroking the boy’s cold temple.

‘I’m not,’ the boy replied. ‘Faith is the littlest of our cat’s kittens at home. And I wish to God I was with them right now, I can tell you. Hey - what’s that?’

The pair had heard a sound. Carla crept over to the top of the limestone chimney up which they had climbed to get their wet bodies into the dry, stone chamber in which they now lay. She could hear someone wading through the water six feet or so below her, and, anticipating Volver’s arrival, silently crept back to link hands with her terrified, supine companion.

Seconds later a head popped up before her, but, in the chamber’s gloom, she found that she wasn’t able to make out whose it was. Carla and Jake lay as still as death and waited for it to go. Then voices could be heard below in the water, and one of these voices belonged to a girl.

‘It’s Leone,’ whispered Jake.

Carla wasn’t convinced and shook her head. She got up and, edging her torso across the bare rock once more, looked down the chimney to where the afternoon light from outside the cave-entrance lit up a tiny sliver of the narrow channel down which poured the, now gushing, stream. She and Jake were barely ten yards from freedom, she thought, but she was just as convinced that they were still a very long way from safety.

A torch-light suddenly flashed up the limestone chimney towards her. Terrified, Carla ducked back inside, and lay still in a prone position on the striated, rocky surface, an arm across her injured companion, hoping and praying that the unknown intruder would fail to see them there and disappear down again.

As our group of three waded our weary way down the ever-deepening, final stretch of stream, towards the disc of light that signified the welcome end to the grotto’s cave-system, Rhiannon suddenly noticed a gap above her head. She pulled on Chris’s shoulder, and asked him to shine his torch up in that direction, and the boy duly halted, turned back a few steps, and obliged.

‘You’re not climbing up there, Rhi,’ Chris told her. ‘You could easily fall. Look - if you’re so inquisitive I’ll go up there myself and take a look if you like.’

I watched from ahead of them, as Chris handed his torch to my daughter to hold for him so that he might climb up unencumbered. Raising, then spreading his two feet wide apart, and using his elbows to lever his body aloft, he soon disappeared up into a narrow vertical space that none of us had previously any idea was there.

Not long after I heard a woman’s voice yelling, ‘Chris!’ Then, as my daughter and I stood together in the deep, churning water, peering up into the semi-darkness above our heads, we could faintly make out a conversation taking place. It was Chris who first leapt down again, and then, reaching his arms above him, carefully lifted down a boy’s torso, and supported him as he did his utmost to stand up, four-square, in the deep, swirling stream. When the boy spun round to face me, with the beam of light now full across his face, I could see clearly that it was Jake.

‘Jake!’ I yelled.’What the hell are you doing up there?’

‘I don’t really know, to be honest,’ he replied strangely. ‘But listen - Carla is up there with me!’

‘Did the two of them leave you behind then?’ Chris asked the boy, then staring up the chimney once again, in preparation for a second scaling. ‘And has she lost a tremendous lot of blood do you think?’

But, after listening to his puzzling words, Jake smiled thinly at his old school-friend, then swooned, and fell, head first, straight into the water.

Carla leapt straight down into the stream to help, and between the four of us we managed to raise Jake up to his feet, and walk him, very slowly and carefully, down the channel and out into the open air, the thickening clouds overhead suggesting that even more rain was arriving.

As we trudged wearily down the wet, narrow path that ran alongside the stream, a black-and-yellow helicopter could be seen circling in the valley to the south of us, and, on spotting our approach, it flew upstream in our direction, and hovered, noisily above us. A small carriage was soon lowered down towards us by which to lift Jake, but, as it descended, we could clearly see that someone, almost certainly a female, was already sitting inside it.

‘It’s most likely a nurse,’ I told the others, seeing the carriage collide with a tree and almost toss the poor woman out. But when it finally reached the ground we could all tell that it wasn’t a medical person that it had been transporting, but Leone.

‘They picked me up in the pouring rain back up on the mountain,’ she announced as she leapt out and joined us. ‘And so I told them where you had all gone to, and they seemed to have a fair idea where you might all come out again. And bloody hell, it seems they were right!’

We all helped Jake climb into the carrriage, and then sent him aloft to the helicopter that we knew would transport him straight off to hospital.

‘And what about Volver and Steffan?’ Carla asked Leone. ‘Have they got away?’