The Dylan Thomas Murders
Seren is the book imprint of
Poetry Wales Press Ltd
Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales
© David N. Thomas, 2002
ISBN 1-85411-639-0 (EPUB edition)
A CIP record for this title is available fromÂ
the British Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.
The publisher works with the financial assistance of theÂ
Arts Council of Wales.
Cover photograph:âGeorge Logan
Ebook conversion by Caleb Woodbridge
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For Stevie, Siân and Danny
Dylan
Thomas
Murders
David N. Thomas
Out of a bower of red swine
Howls the foul fiend to heel.
I cannot murder, like a fool,
Season and sunshine, grace and girl,
Nor can I smother the sweet waking.
The Sergeant leaned across the table, and switched on the tape machine. “Now then Les, the bloke had his head bashed in, the crows were pulling out his brains like worms.”
And Les, still dreaming of topless gypsy dancers, and wondering if he'd caught anything from a tasselled Andalucian nipple dunked in his wine glass, said: “The first time I saw him I was in Miss Hilton's front garden, cutting the heads off in the borders, that's what she asked me to do. A car pulled up, a big red Volvo, with a black roof rack, and National Trust stickers, not local. He got out, there was no-one else in the car with him. He came up the garden path. He had to go past me to reach the cottage but he didn't say a word. Miss Hilton answered the door. âStillness,' he said, holding out his hand. âAcquisitions and Disposals.' I couldn't see her face but she sounded very surprised. âGood heavens,' she said. They went inside and I carried on in the border.
“Yes, definitely Stillness. No, I didn't catch his first name.
“Ten minutes later, Waldo turned up, angry, black as thunder, nostrils wide like a dog outside the butcher's. He sniffed round the car, not bothering I was there, then he emptied this plastic bag over the windscreen. Jesus, guts everywhere, blood and slime, and big rolls of intestines which he wrapped round the wipers. Then he went to the back of the car, took something from his pocket, and jammed it hard on the exhaust pipe. A rabbit's head, fresh too, by the look of it.
“No, I didn't say anything, it's not my place. We know he's not always right in the head, but we look after him as we can. He's one of us, and that's good enough for me.
“Dylan Thomas? I know nothing about him and Waldo.
“Anyway, Waldo ran off across the fields and I thought I'd better get out of the way, so I went round the back. Next thing, this Stillness was marching across the lawn, shouting and swearing. I told him I knew nothing about it. He threw a punch and I hit him back solid in the stomach, and he went down, just a bag of wind, nothing to him. He fetched up and I fetched the bike. I went up to the square to sit with the lads. He came past later, driving like fury, but I don't know how far he'd have gone with a rabbit's head on the exhaust.”
And the Inspector, who'd once known the real Polly Garter down in New Quay, pulled out his notebook and said: “Dylan Thomas wrote wonderful poems.”
“Isn't it funny,” remarked the Sergeant, “how most poets die young.”
“My father said it was the biggest funeral he'd ever been to.”
“My auntie says he died of AIDS in New York.”
“I believe,” said the Inspector, dreaming of a Ferris wheel in which Dylan aficionados turned forever, “that the CIA had him put down.”
Rachel and I had moved to west Wales into very early retirement. We'd spent the first two weeks unpacking our books. We would start after breakfast with good intent but within minutes we'd each find some old favourite and we'd spend the rest of the day reading. In the very last box, I found a pamphlet,
The Forensic Examination of Stomach Contents
, written by my uncle Jack, sometime a Chief Superintendent. The cover was splattered with faded blood stains, but Jack would never explain how they came to be there, though he wasn't slow to tell you the pamphlet had come first in the King's Essay Competition in 1948.
There have always been policemen in our family. My brother is a detective specialising in Internet fraud. Though my father hadn't actually been a policeman, he'd been a personnel manager at Butlins, which was much the same thing. His cousin Will, the shabbiest man I had ever seen, had been in Special Branch, and collected Victorian typewriters. We didn't talk much about him. He had once seduced my step-mother whilst my father sat sozzled on the sofa downstairs. My step-mother was good at that sort of thing. She'd even worked in a Bloomsbury hotel, renting out rooms to blue movie makers, and starring in one or two herself. “Iesu mawr,” she said a few hours before she died, whilst I was wiping her bum, “those boys had willies down to their knees.”
Leaving London for the countryside was all very well, Rachel had said, but I would soon need an interest, capital letters, and it was finding my great-uncle's pamphlet that gave me the idea. I had policing in my blood, a good intuitive sense about people, and a sociologist's eye for the quirks of human behaviour.
“How about private investigation?” I said one evening, having searched through Yellow Pages and found a dearth of country gumshoes.
“Good idea,” she replied, without losing concentration on the bacon omelette she was making. “You'll be very good at it.”
So that night, as enough rain fell for a year and the river burst its banks and took away our seed potatoes, I planned a different kind of future. I rented an office under the town clock in Lampeter, put ads in the papers and filled in a card for the noticeboard at the supermarket. I phoned the local solicitors to tell them I'd started up, and one sent me a good-luck present the next day â a desk, three odd chairs and a wooden filing cabinet containing a photograph of Diana Dors with a pencilled-in moustache. I sat in the office for two weeks and my only callers were the postman with his circulars, and shoppers asking the way to the discount store. Then one day a plump and rosy-cheeked woman came in, whose grey hair swirled round her head like smoke. She was wearing a hand-knitted, bright blue cardigan that waterfalled from her shoulders, stopping within a ragged inch of the top of her black wellington boots. A farmer's wife, I thought. She sat in the chair facing me, folded her arms and leaned across my desk: “Mr Pritchard? Mr Martin Pritchard?”
“How can I help you?”
“They tell me your wife's a poet.”
I nodded, too surprised for words.
“You'll need her help to investigate this.” She drew out a copy of the
Cambrian News
from her shopping bag. She thumbed through the inside pages, found what she was looking for, folded the paper in half, and edged it across the desk for me to read. I put on my glasses and read the report: a shed had been stolen from a field near the Scadan Coch pub.
“I should be interested in this?”
“It's part of our cultural heritage.”
“A shed?” I was incredulous.
“Would you mock the Boat House at Laugharne? The Muse sailed well enough from there.”
I picked up the office diary, and made a show of flicking through the pages, distracted by tiny red flames at the front of her mouth. Not lipstick on her teeth, because she wore none. I wondered if her gums were bleeding.
“You won't have much in there,” she said.
“Can you meet my terms?”
“Don't you think,” she asked, looking scornfully at me, flashing more fire from between her lips, “that the satisfaction of putting the record straight is worth more than money?”
“I'll find the shed, in between other things...”
“Take this.” She passed across the desk a double rabbit's paw, stitched back to back with gold and silver thread. “Now, be care-ful...” She smiled. I stared. She held her smile. I kept on staring, mesmerised by the red dragon etched across her front teeth.
I found out later that she was the only child of a prosperous abattoir owner, and taught moral philosophy at the university.
* * *
Rachel has a habit of saying: “If you're hungry, go look for a bagel.” Fed up with waiting for nothing to happen, I took her advice. I locked the office and drove to Ciliau Aeron. The Scadan Coch was at the end of the village, next to the church. I'd been there many times before, for although we had only just moved in, we'd been holidaying in the area for years.
The landlord was a one-legged, two-fingered Irishman called O'Malley, who'd once been a leading light in the Free Wales Army. He was also part of Ciliau's pink community, which made many local young farmers apprehensive about using the pub. “We're all poofters at heart,” he was fond of telling them, “but some of us have the pleasure of it down below as well.” Many thought him handsome, but his face was round and his head as bald as a goose egg.
It was usual for only Welsh to be spoken in the bars, and any persistent transgressors were often asked to leave. “There's nothing like a good thirst to help a man find his tongue,” O'Malley used to say. He was famous for his prejudice against the English, but he took to them if they had soft voices, blended with the wallpaper and tried to learn Welsh. “What I can't stand,” I once heard him say, “is the weekenders, all turbo cars and turbo boats and bloody turbo voices.” The pub's pride and joy was a miniature llama called Llewela, who was trained to spit at anyone with a loud English accent.
O'Malley was behind the bar polishing the pumps. I asked for a pint of Brains. He pulled it gently into the glass, placed it on the counter and handed me some olives and a laverbread dip.
“That missing shed,” I said. “How long's it been there?”
“First world war, off and on,” he replied over his shoulder, as he went across to serve another customer. “Lorry full of turkeys going to market, pulled out of the car park and hit a wagon carrying timber. The village salvaged the turkeys but Dai Fern Hill took the wood and built the shed from it. That's the story, handed down, like.”
I dipped another Crinkle in the laverbread and asked: “What was it used for?”
O'Malley passed across some bubble-and-squeak rissoles. “Dai killed his pigs in there. Strung them up by the back feet from the rafter, sharp knife in the neck, and a bucket to catch the blood. They say you could hear the squealing from the top of Surgeon's Hill.”
The rissoles were delicious, made with potatoes and wild garlic. When I'd finished, I paid O'Malley, and walked down the road. I soon found the sign for Fern Hill Farm, painted in white on the side of a rusty milk churn. A piece of blue slate on the wooden gate warned: “Loose Dogs. No callers.” The gate was chained and padlocked.
I was wondering what to do when Basset the Post arrived, a man so lugubrious that the rims of his sunken eyes seemed to fall down his cheeks and rest on his droopy, always-damp moustache. “Wouldn't go down there, if I were you,” he murmured dolefully.
“How d'you deliver the letters, then?”
He nodded towards a wooden box next to the churn. “He don't get much, just bills, and letters from abroad sometimes.”
“What's he like?”
“Bitter,” said the mournful Basset.
“About what?” I tried to lighten up the question with a smile but Basset wiped it from my face with a melancholic sigh.
“His woman got pregnant by the fertiliser man.”
“And?”
“They ran away to Slough.”
“And now his shed's gone missing.”
“It meant a lot to him, that shed.”
I jumped over the gate and walked apprehensively up the track. The trees on either side had not been cut for many years, and their branches intertwined above the track, blocking out much of the daylight. I came to a second gate, also chained, and guarded by something more sinister. A line of dead birds were tied to the top rail with orange baler twine. The three thrushes I cared little about, but it upset me to see the red kite. Someone had broken its neck before tying it to the gate by its legs. Flies were buzzing in and out of its empty eye sockets, whilst little coffee-coloured maggots burrowed through the flesh. As I clambered over, its razor beak caught the inside of my trouser leg and made a small tear.