Everyone had heard of Carla Steel, the local born singer-songwriter who had achieved world-wide acclaim, but I had no idea that it was her aged father, called Tom, who had moved back to live in my home town of Merthyr. And what nobody but the old man knew was why it was that he had chosen to buy the house that backed on to the Seven Arches viaduct, and next-door to a woman called Anne, whom I had been to school with when we both lived down the valley, and who, like me, had been fortunate to have survived the terrible disaster that had befallen our village and its junior-school, and which had ended the life of so many of our school-friends. I was naturally shocked when I discovered that my daughter Rhiannon's first boyfriend was none other than Anne's son Chris, not just because she was still so young, and needed to focus all her attention on her school work, but because the boy had been known to me from the time of his birth, and, just as worryingly as it turned out, because he was known to take drugs.
Carla's arrival in the house beside the viaduct to care for her dying father was timely and understandable, but the arrival soon after of the evil man she had fallen foul of in London, nicknamed Volver, was certainly not. He it was who was the mastermind of a burgeoning drugs empire that was already beginning to dominate much of South Wales abd the west of England, and, with the help of two local drug-dealing accomplices, Steffan and Jake, both school-friends of young Chris, had succeeded in tracking the singer down there. The Afrikaner seemed to have two ambitions in life, to grow rich on the proceeds of his evil empire, quite naturally, but also to wreak revenge on the great Carla Steel, the beautiful, talented Welsh girl, whom he had one time seduced in the smoke, but who, so far, had managed to escape his clutches.