The Dylan Thomas Murders (24 page)

“Time to take you home,” she said, coming across to my chair.

“We must stop him.”

“Old Chinese saying: man with one arm can't tie tourniquet. He won't get far. By the way, this is Bissmire Junior, Daddy's new driver, ex-paratrooper, obviously a bit rusty now.”

We heard the engine of the Edsel start up. “He'll pass out before he reaches the bottom,” said Bissmire, in such a matter-of-fact voice that I looked up in surprise.

“Go and make sure. Follow him down.”

Cressida cut the thongs that bound me to the chair, and brought towels from the bedroom. I held one over my nipple to staunch the flow of blood, whilst she poured pitchers of cold water over my hair. “Let's clean up this room,” she said when I looked respectable enough for Rio, and had a plaster on my ear.

“Were you going to kill him?”

“I had to make some pretty tough decisions in Africa,” she replied, throwing me one of Waldo's shirts. “This was easier.”

Cressida set about scrubbing the floor. I wiped down the table and chair, and took the blood-soaked towels outside. Bissmire was coming back up the track. “The car went over the edge,” he said. “Gone up in flames.”

We went into the house. Cressida had placed a half-empty bottle of grappa on the table, and was searching for a glass to set beside it. “Let's go home. I've had enough of Italy.”

The track down was strewn with pieces from the Edsel, and a whole bumper had come off on the first sharp bend. Not long after, we found the break in the wall where the car had finally gone over the side. It had fallen to the bottom of a small ravine, and was still burning fiercely, standing end-up against a small cluster of carob trees.

“Bissmire and I will take the next ferry out. You stay and settle up with your landlady, say goodbye in the Karl Marx, just do the normal things.”

“And the police?”

“It'll be weeks before they find what's left of Waldo.”

“No reason for them to think it wasn't an accident,” added Bissmire.

“Which is exactly what it was.”

“One grappa too many on a treacherous mountain track.”

We've been living together now for many months. When we arrived back in Ciliau Aeron, Cressida insisted she stayed until my injury was properly healed, and she has never left. I think she was more interested in my emotional trauma than the breast wound because she treated me like a patient who needed to talk things through. I resisted jumping onto her Freudian couch, but we got into bed instead and made love for only the second time in all those years since we'd first met. The only therapy I felt I needed was to shave off my hair, which Dai Dark Horse did on a wet Saturday morning when there were no fishermen pestering him for bait. But it didn't work and the smell of Waldo's blood was as strong as ever.

Cressida found a job, working with special needs children in the county. She learnt conversational Welsh very quickly, and even joined the local Women's Institute. I gave up private sleuthing, and started to write a book on T.S. Eliot and his connections with Cardiganshire. It won't be about Rosalind and Waldo, but about the poems Eliot wrote whilst staying with the Fabers in Tyglyn Aeron. I found a long-neglected archive in the National Library which shows that ‘Burnt Norton' was inspired by Ciliau Aeron.

And then we had a baby, a lovely girl who we've named Rachel. She turned out to be the final block in re-building relations between Cressida and her elderly parents. Naturally, they were worried about the future of their baronial pile when they died. Cressida's their only surviving child, and will inherit everything. We haven't told her parents, but when the time comes we plan to turn the mansion into a home for war orphans from Afghanistan. This would be a much quieter revolution in the fortunes of the estate than Cressida planned all those years ago when she was a Communist.

Of course, all they care about at the moment is their new, and only, grand-daughter. They're already talking about private nurseries and prep schools and setting up a trust fund, but we've firmly told them that Rachel will be going to the village school, and will be taught in Welsh like everybody else. But we did accept a loan from them to buy a house. A new relationship, we decided, needs a fresh start. So we bought an old farm on the other side of the village, where we are now comfortably settled in, with all the packing boxes cleared away and the books in their proper places on Billy Logs' pine shelves.

Mother and baby were fast asleep upstairs, after a long and exhausting night. Having a baby in middle age is wonderful but sometimes I worried about whether we would cope with it physically. I poured myself a gin and tonic, and began to open the presents that had come for Rachel, most from Cressida's friends all over the world. There was one parcel from Spain that particularly intrigued me. It was addressed to “Baby Rachel” which I thought strange, because the name wasn't really known outside the family.

I'd started to take off the wrapping paper when Cressida knocked twice on the floor, the signal for a pot of tea. I took some up, clucked over our beautiful baby and came back downstairs. I found some scissors and cut away the rest of the brown paper, revealing a red plastic lunch box. It gave off a strange smell, pungent, like burning, yet sickly sweet, too. Smoked artichokes, I thought, sun-dried and dunked in olive oil and peppers, but what a peculiar present for a baby, though her parents would certainly enjoy it. I peeled back the lid.

Inside were the charred remains of a man's hand, and a black-bordered card that said:

Before death takes you, O take back this.

Disturb no winding-sheets, my son,
But when the ladies are cold as stone
Then hang a ram rose over the rags.

The Sergeant knocked on the Inspector's door, and went straight in. “There's something new on the Rachel Pritchard murder, sir.”

The Inspector looked up with a welcoming but wary smile. There'd been no progress on the case for months, and the
Cambrian News
was kicking up a fuss. “Sit down, Sergeant.”

She pulled up a chair beside the desk, and laid a single piece of paper in front of him. “It's a fishing circular from Interpol, sir. Apparently, our previously unhelpful colleagues on Elba are asking for a little assistance.”

The Inspector pushed the chair back from his desk, and nodded thoughtfully.

“They've found a burnt out car up in the hills. Belonged to someone,” said the Sergeant, pausing for effect, “called Waldino Chiesa.”

The Inspector nodded again. It had come through his in-tray some time ago but he'd given it very little attention before passing it down. “Sounds more like a distraction than a new lead.”

“They found blood traces in his cottage, and bloodstained towels buried in the garden.”

She noticed that the Inspector was hoisting his trouser leg up and down his white shins, a sure sign of increasing irritability. “It did strike me as odd, sir, that we've been looking for a Waldo Hilton who may have been on Elba, and then we get a message from Elba about a person called Waldino who's gone missing from there.”

“Is that all?”

“My auntie told me that Chiesa means ‘church', and our Waldo is a Hilton, which is a hotel, if you see what I mean, sir?”

“Frankly, no.”

“Giovanni Chiesa was Caitlin's lover, sir...I've been doing my homework, you see. And he ran a hotel on Elba. It's an odd coincidence.”

“Have you looked into it?”

“I've checked Births and Deaths, sir.”

The Inspector looked up in astonishment at the Sergeant's initiative. “And what did you find?”

“Born in May 1948, sir, in the John Radcliffe, Oxford. Birth certificate says ‘Waldo Chiesa Thomas'.”

“Not Hilton?”

“No, sir. Caitlin Thomas was the mother.”

“So the father could have been Dylan or...”

“Most likely Chiesa, sir.”

“And where were Caitlin and Dylan living when the baby was born?”

“South Leigh, sir, just outside Oxford, after they'd come back from Italy.” The Sergeant looked nervously across the desk. “I went up there last week on my day off, sir. To see what I could find. We were sitting by the village pond when...”

“We?”

“My auntie and me. She was very keen to come, sir. We were on this bench, as I said, by the pond, when she noticed that one of the seats had a little metal plaque on it. Couldn't believe my eyes –
In memory of Waldino Chiesa, 1942-l948.
”

“But you just said he was
born
in 1948, not died.”

“That was Waldo Chiesa, sir. The name on the plaque was Waldino.”

“So the man who's gone missing from Elba died in 1948,” said the Inspector sarcastically.

“I was just as puzzled as you are, sir. A bit later, we went across to the pub for some lunch. My auntie started talking with some of the old boys in there. Apparently, Caitlin and Miss Hilton had gone up to London one day to buy clothes for the baby that Caitlin was expecting. They left Dylan in charge of Miss Hilton's little boy...”

“Who was called?”

“Waldino, sir. Waldino Chiesa,” replied the Sergeant with a quiet sigh of exasperation.

“But I thought Miss Hilton's son was called Waldo. He's the one we want for the murders, Sergeant.”

“I'm coming to that, sir. Dylan took the boy with him down to the pub, and what with the beer and the darts, he forgot all about him. Waldino wandered off, fell in the pond and drowned. I've seen the death certificate, sir, no doubt about it.”

“Then who is Waldo Hilton?”

“My theory is, sir, that when Caitlin's baby was born a month or so later, she gave it to Miss Hilton. Perhaps she didn't want it anyway, but maybe it was an act of love, sir, a recompense, if you like, for Dylan letting Waldino wander off like that. We'll never know, sir.”

“So Miss Hilton brought up Waldo as her own, a replacement for Waldino?”

“It looks that way, sir. Easy enough after the war to sort out the paperwork – especially if you had the right connections.”

“And the consent of the natural mother.”

“I feel sorry for him in a way – he never knew who his father was...”

“And now it turns out that the woman he thought was his mother actually wasn't. We'll probably have to tell him all this when we collar him.”

“I wonder how he'll take it?”

“I should think he'll be very, very upset. Anything else, Sergeant?”

“Just an odd coincidence, sir. When we were in the pub, one of the locals mentioned that somebody else had been in a few days earlier, also asking about Waldino and the drowning. A man with one arm, sir.”

The Inspector shuffled impatiently in his chair. “Why should that interest us?”

“Arrived in a taxi with a little baby. Couldn't feed it himself, had to ask the landlady to hold the bottle. And she changed its nappy as well, she said.”

The Inspector looked at his watch, and stood up. “Time to move on, Sergeant. Perhaps we'd better ask Mr Pritchard to come in for a chat about all this.”

“I'd thought of that, sir, but his phone's been off the hook for days.”

“Keep trying.”

“I'll call round this afternoon, sir. See what's what.”

With special thanks to Stevie Krayer for ‘Held holy and scuffed', and Mary Overton for ‘For Francesca i.m' (originally ‘Witch Penny'). And to Mick Felton, Liz Welch, Manon Hellings, Siân Hurst, Andrea Bianchi, Silveana Siviero, and the Dylan Thomas Estate and David Higham Associates for permission to use ‘Find meat on bones' from
Collected Poems 1934-1953
.

Written with the help of a Writer's Bursary from the Arts Council of Wales.

David Thomas is also the author of
 
Dylan Thomas: A Farm, Two Mansions and a Bungalow
 
and
 
The Dylan Thomas Trail.