“From the maniac's tongue pours deathfilled singing.”
“You've lost me there, sir.”
“Browning, the wife,” responded the Inspector, sighing loudly. “We have a murderer who knows his poems.”
“And is a bit of a butcher.”
“To whom does the ear in question belong?”
“Can't say, sir. We've checked the hospitals and doctors. Nothing missing from the mortuary, either.”
“No pub brawls or dirty work in the scrum?”
“Not that we've been able to ascertain.”
“And no-one's come in and reported their ear's gone missing?”
“No, sir.”
“Or that of a close relative?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, Sergeant, you'd better start looking for a body, then.”
“Murder, sir?”
“Foul play of some kind.”
Rachel woke up late and grumpy. I made some tea, let out the poultry and got back into bed. When I started talking about Waldo, yet again, she sharply reminded me I had a fledgling business to attend to. I left her reading
Lives of Great Quakers
and headed into Lampeter. The office was much as I'd left it, though the cleaner had piled the junk mail onto my chair, and pinned the Diana Dors photograph above the desk. There were three messages on the answer machine. The moral philosophy tutor wanted to know what progress I'd made in finding Dylan's shed. A young woman from Cardiff asked me to search for her husband whom she'd lost on the coastal footpath several years ago. An Action Group in a nearby village wondered if I would discreetly investigate a local farmer. I rang the secretary. She told me they were worried that he was running trials on genetically modified rape. They wanted to know who his financial backers were. They couldn't pay me but promised a turkey for Christmas.
As I put the phone down, Waldo walked through the door. He looked much better, but I could see he was angry. I offered him a seat. He pushed it away, and leaned across my desk. “What the hell you up to?”
I moved my chair back to escape the foul smell on his breath. “I'm trying to find Dylan's shed,” I replied, wondering what he'd been eating.
“Bugger the shed.”
“It belongs to you.”
“So do his letters.”
“Your mother wants them published.”
“I can do that myself.”
“The decision's been made.”
“Over my dead body.”
“You don't understand...”
“But I do. Your wife wants a bit of fame at my expense.”
“It's a labour of love. She's not being paid.”
Waldo looked at me intently. He reached in his coat pocket, took out a little pearl-handled knife and started digging the dirt from behind his nails. “Love's labours are sometimes better lost,” he eventually said. “Too many tears, too much bloo...”
“It's too late,” I interrupted. “They're in the National Library. Rachel's working from copies.”
“You had no right.”
“They belong to the nation now.”
“You've robbed me of my past.”
“It could give you a future.”
“It's not what I want at my age,” he shouted angrily, banging his fist on the desk.
“I think it's time you went.”
“I think,” he replied, as he moved towards the door, “it's time you started taking me seriously.”
He left, slamming the door hard behind him. I sharpened a few pencils and called my brother at New Scotland Yard, and asked him if there was anything on the files for Rosalind and Waldo. He coughed and spluttered, and muttered about losing his job but eventually promised to do what he could. In fact, he rang me back almost immediately. A good deal on Waldo, he said, from an early age: truancy, stealing, fighting, driving and taking away, grievous bodily harm, and damaging property in the National Library of Wales. Rosalind's âform' was altogether more interesting. She'd been arrested with Ian Fleming in a high security zone outside a sensitive military establishment. They'd been enjoying themselves on the back seat of Fleming's Lanchester. Fleming had punched the security guards but strings were pulled and no charges were brought, though both were closely questioned by Military Intelligence.
“When did this happen?” I asked.
“Summer, 1950.”
“Anything else?”
“There are a couple of Special Branch cross-refs. Visits abroad, I think, but I daren't check.”
“Any advice?”
“Stay well clear.”
I rang the National Library. Oh, yes, they certainly remembered Waldo Hilton.
“A voracious reader?” I asked.
“Not quite. He came in about two years ago, asked for a day ticket, and ordered all of T.S. Eliot's books. The Reading Room was almost empty, it was August, and the staff weren't watching the security monitors. It was our fault, really. Anyway, he took out this package, put it on the table and started slicing it up with a scalpel. To be fair, someone on the desk did eventually see it and she was just about to go and tell him that food wasn't allowed in the Reading Room, when the phone rang and she forgot all about it. Except it wasn't food. It was a giant turd, which he was slicing up and putting between the pages of Eliot's books. It's all on the video tape, if you want to see it. We use it for induction training all the time.”
I decided it was time for a drink and drove back to the Scadan Coch. The pub was quiet, unusually for the time of year. Billy Logs was sitting on the bench next to the bar, cleaning his chainsaw whilst he waited for his food. Miss Price Rose Cottage was sitting opposite, feeding peanuts to her dog and occasionally throwing some across to Llewela, though I doubted that this was a proper snack for a miniature llama. Next to Miss Price sat Dai Dark Horse, who ran the fishing and barber shop in the village. This had always struck me as a curious combination and it wasn't always clear what customers were waiting for. Someone asking for a Number Two could just as well be referring to a type of hook as to a cropped haircut. When Dai asks “Anything for the weekend?” the answer is as likely to be a can of worms as a pack of condoms. It's certainly disconcerting to be sitting in the barber's chair when a customer asks for maggots. Dai puts down the scissors and goes into the back room where the tubs of maggots are stored. I know he wears rubber gloves and washes his hands but it's still a very uncomfortable feeling when he comes back to work on your hair.
O'Malley was sitting on a high stool behind the bar, embroidering a sampler depicting the celebration in the pub on the night we voted for a Welsh Assembly. O'Malley's embroidery brought as many customers to the pub as his food, and most came just to marvel that a man with only two fingers on his left hand could embroider so beautifully. The pub walls were decorated with his samplers, as were the covers for the tables, each of which contained verses from his favourite poets. They were covered with heavy plate glass, and they gave the pub something of the atmosphere of a Dutch café.
O'Malley was too engrossed in his needlework to care much about his customers, so I went behind the bar, took a bottle of Brains and helped myself to some toad-in-the-hole made with sliced pigeon breasts. O'Malley grunted and pointed with his chin towards the end of the counter, indicating that the toad would not be complete without some beetroot jelly and a spoonful of pickled nasturtium seeds. He was right.
The discussion in the bar was animated. One of the area's striking characteristics is the large number of holly trees in the woods. The principal reason for this is that Billy Logs, like his father before him, refuses to cut down holly trees because to do so would bring a lifetime of bad luck and pestilential curses. Dai was teasing him about this but was making a serious point about the unbalanced nature of the local woodland. I tucked into my toad and listened to the talk, which is perhaps why I was the first person to hear the car.
Then O'Malley looked up, clearly not pleased with the prospect of further customers at this moment. We heard four doors slamming in quick succession, and the ostentatious click of central locking, followed by the beep of the alarm being activated. Just as the door opened we heard a small child say: “But
why
can't we go to Macdonalds?” Llewela instantly stood to attention. We waited nervously, because the level of English decibel at which she was likely to spit was never predictable.
The family that came into the bar were largely what I had expected. Mr and Mrs Volvo and their two children stood for a moment on the threshold. We stopped talking immediately because that is the respectful custom, is it not, when strangers enter a pub deep in the Welsh countryside. It's the polite thing to do, but people often misunderstand. Miss Price smiled, and the conversation started again.
Mr Volvo led the family to the bar. “I gather you serve food here?”
We waited to see how O'Malley would react. His prejudices were finely honed so he had no one particular way of dealing with English-speaking customers. He picked a response according to the occasion, the customer, how he was generally feeling about the world and whether or not his love life with Ringle, the coxswain from New Quay, was still intact. He put his needlework on the bar, glanced up but said nothing. Mr Volvo looked puzzled but it could have been irritation because the two children were tugging impatiently at his green and baggy corduroy trousers.
“Do you have a menu?” asked Mrs Volvo, raising her voice as if she were on the Continent. Llewela cocked her ear but stayed quiet.
O'Malley reached across with two menus. “
Croeso
,” he said.
The family retreated to the Philip Larkin table near the window. They read the menu, then read it again, and finally turned it over, looking for an English translation. “I suppose its lasagne and chips again, it's what they usually have down here.”
The conversation dropped a little and I saw O'Malley prise himself off the high stool. I knew he didn't care about the lasagne and chips, but he'd be furious about “it's what they have down here.” It makes you wonder why people come to Wales on holiday. Last month, a group of English tourists signed up for an evening of traditional Welsh song and entertainment at the summer
eisteddfod
. They walked out during the interval, complaining that it was all in Welsh, and demanding their money back. The organisers gave it to them. Some thought this was wimpish and said the tourists should have been ejected. But one of the marvellous things about the Welsh is their politeness even in the face of extreme provocation.
Mr Volvo got up and walked to the bar. “So sorry, but do you have an English menu?”
“This is a Welsh speaking establishment.”
Mr Volvo looked momentarily taken aback, but responded very heartily: “Don't speak it, old boy.”
Llewela twitched and O'Malley leaned across the bar. “What would you do in France?”
“My wife speaks perfect French.”
“In Italy, then, or Spain or Germany...”
Mr Volvo hesitated and his wife called across: “We'd have a phrase book, wouldn't we?”
“And where's your Welsh phrase book, then?”
“But you all speak English, for goodness sake.”
“So they do in Holland but you'd still take your phrase book with you.”
“Mummy went to Dutch classes last year,” chipped in the oldest child.
“Our anniversary, you know, had a wonderful fortnight in Amsterdam,” squirming all the way down from the neck of his Arran sweater to the soles of his Timberland boots.
“I wonder if you'd be kind enough to translate,” asked Mrs Volvo, leaving the table and joining her husband at the bar.
“That's another thing,” said O'Malley. “Abroad, you'd ask the waiter to translate, wouldn't you. But why not here?”
“English is the language of commerce, old chap.”
“Darling, let me deal with this...”
Fellow!
O'Malley heard the missing word as surely as the rest of us. Llewela stood up.
“Now look here, we've been hours on the M4, the children are starving...”
“Lobscouse,” said O'Malley.
“I beg your pardon.”
“A Danish stew. Beef, potato and bayleaf.”
“I'm a veggie, actually.”
“Then there's potato dumplings and beetroot in sour sauce.”
“And for the children?”
O'Malley turned, and looked across to the table where the children were sitting: “What d'you fancy?”
What a saint O'Malley could be!
“Chips,” said the younger child, smiling defiantly at her mother.
“With?” asked O'Malley.
“Lasagne,” replied her brother.
“You got it,” said O'Malley, disappearing into the kitchen, beaming with delight.