The Dylan Thomas Murders (13 page)

I called to the farmers on the bridge, who ran down the slope into the field. We hauled the body from the river and laid the man on the bank. Leeches clung to his bloated face, and more huddled together in the folds of his neck. We stared nervously at him but Ogmore Stillness could not stare back. His eyelids had been stitched together with rose thorns. Nor could he hear the river washing by or the wind in the trees, for someone had sliced off his ears.

Rachel had run back to the house and phoned for the police. A car arrived within minutes. I took the constables across the field, showed them the corpse and left them to it. The lane was soon blocked to traffic, as more police vehicles and an ambulance arrived. Two officers were climbing into their wet suits on our lawn, holding onto the flowering cherry for support as they hopped from one leg to the other. Some of their colleagues struggled to carry a large canvas tent across the muddy field, complaining loudly about the state of their boots. Locals were arriving, lured by the sirens and numbed quiet by the awesome prospect of a big event in the village. All this we watched from our back room that looked down across the field to the river.

Some time later, I was interviewed by an Inspector from Aberystwyth. I told him that I had met Stillness in the pub some days ago, that he was with his family renting a cottage nearby, and that they had been looking at properties in the area, including Fern Hill. He asked me who else had been in the pub, and I told him. He informed me that a long-handled spade had been found on the bank near the floating body. Did I know whose it was? It was mine, I replied, and he said that it would be taken away for examination, bearing in mind the nature of the injury to the deceased's head. I was too bewildered to take in the implication fully.

We stood at the window for the next hour or so, watching the comings and goings in the field. Gradually, the crowd of sightseers on the bridge dwindled to a little boy and his grandfather.

We took the car, drove to the coast and walked across the sands to New Quay. We had a late lunch and afterwards walked along the cliffs. Most of this we did in silence. A cold evening wind forced us inland, and we returned to the car through narrow country lanes. We were exhausted but we had walked the shock out of our systems.

On Sunday, Rachel went to her Quaker Meeting and I walked up to the Post Office for the papers. I was surprised at how little interest was shown in the murder. I suspected that the village would have been more affected if the body had been found on dry land. That would have meant the killer was probably a local person. But Stillness could have been killed anywhere upstream, more likely, said some, in the rough spots of Talsarn where things could get very boisterous on a Friday night.

Rachel arrived back just before lunch. Usually she returns from Meeting in a tranquil or elated state, the effect of sitting in silent worship for an hour, or of particularly uplifting ministry from one of the group. She was always buoyed by the support she found in the closeness of the circle. Occasionally she came home angry, but never did she come home looking, as she did now, as if she had been to the dentist. She was pale, and looked troubled.

I scrambled some eggs with tarragon and bacon bits chopped in, and we sat in silence around the small white table in the garden room. I made a pot of tea, and then another. I washed up, still waiting for the moment. I dried the dishes. I put them away. I cleaned the kitchen counters. I swept the floor. As I rounded the corner into the passage-way, the broom brushed up against her feet. She was leaning against the doorpost, her arms folded, looking at the floor. I sensed the time was right and said: “Well?”

“We were in Lampeter today.”

I nodded. Quakers don't have churches, they have Meeting Houses. But Rachel's Meeting was peripatetic and twice a month they met in the library in the Philosophy Department. On the other Sundays, it was held in the sitting room of a remote farmhouse up in the hills, where the only philosopher on offer was a barn owl who usually sat for the entire Meeting on a bird table outside the window.

“I was on the door, welcoming people in, and on the look-out for any newcomers. There were seven people already in the room, and I didn't really expect any more. I was about to go in, when the front door opened and a gust of wind blew down the passage, blowing the papers off the table. I waited but nobody came. I walked back up towards the front door, and there was a man there, sitting on the canvas chair, shaking and trembling as if he were freezing to death. ‘Have you come to Meeting?' I asked. He nodded, without looking up. ‘I'll show you the way,' I said, and cupped his elbow with my hand. He got up and walked beside me down the passage. ‘Have you been to Meeting before?' He shook his head. I gave him that little leaflet on Quaker Worship that we give to newcomers, and he stuffed it in his pocket. We reached the door and I said: ‘Come on in.' We stepped inside. ‘I'm Rachel, by the way.' And then he looked up. That was the first time I'd seen his face. ‘Waldo Hilton,' he replied, and he walked across the room to the far side of the circle and sat next to Dot.

“Now it was my turn to shake, my legs were so wobbly I could hardly get to my seat. No, I know what you're going to ask, but I just couldn't tell whether he was the man who killed Mably. I was terribly twitchy and agitated but then somebody stood up and did this nice little ministry about finding a well, and how he tried to get it going again, and all the foul, black stuff that poured out of the tap for a week and then suddenly the waters ran clear. That made me think of Dylan. I looked at Waldo and he was crying, and Dot was holding his hand to comfort him. Somehow, that settled me for the rest of the Meeting, though I wasn't completely calm because I felt as if Waldo was staring at me, but when I opened my eyes and looked across at him, he was looking at the ground, and sobbing still. I can't explain it. Anyway, we all shook hands at the end of the hour, as usual. I saw Dot talking to Waldo, and then he disappeared.”

“What did he say to her?”

“I'm here slinking from my mousehole.”

“That must have fazed her.”

“It's from Dylan's poem, ‘Lament',” explained Rachel. She reached for
Collected Poems
, and opened it for me to read. “It's about sex,” I eventually said, not noticing Rachel's withering look. “It's about Dylan's declining sexual prowess.”

“He's only using sex as a symbol, to lament the ascendancy of body and flesh, of earthly things, of matter over spirit. Look
at the last stanza, there's so much joy there, something's happened, someone's helped him to crawl out of the mousehole.”

“Merle?”

“Merle as Quaker. Dylan found something special in the Meetings, a new inner experience, his soul found a sabbath wife, as he puts it, he pushed the beast behind him and saw an angel.”

“A lament for not finding God's love before?”

“Precisely.” Rachel gave me another disparaging look and said: “No woman would think ‘Lament' was about sex.”

I slunk back to my mousehole, sniffed around and came up with another question of more immediate importance. “And what's Waldo up to, coming to Meeting? Has he seen the light, like his dad?”

“Either that or he's trying to intimidate me.”

“Perhaps it's time I had another chat with Rosalind.”

I invited Rosalind to lunch at the Scadan Coch the next day. She arrived early, dressed in a white blouse and jeans, and wearing sunglasses. She looked more like fifty than eighty as she came through the door. The pub was already filling up. It was the start of the Ciliau Poetry Fest which O'Malley organised each year. Despite the quality of the poetry, I suspected that most people came for O'Malley's cooking, because on each day of the Fest he prepared menus inspired by Eliot's or Dylan's poems.

We sat at the Wordsworth table and read the menu. Rosalind dithered over Surprise of Sweeney Erect and Tagine Burnt Norton, eventually choosing the latter, a pot of lamb, apricots and rice, cooked long and slow with garlic and onions until a thick, black crust formed on the bottom. I went for Salad of Long-Legged Bait – scallops and cockles in a white wine sauce, vine leaves stuffed with laverbread and shallots, with mozzarella and chopped tomatoes on the side. I skipped the Brains and joined Rosalind in a bottle of Mumbles Pomeroy which O'Malley commissioned each year for the Fest. We made small talk. I didn't quite know the tactful way of saying: ‘Your son may have killed my dog and Ogmore Stillness, and is trying to frighten my wife.' So I said: “I hear Waldo's selling the farm.”

And she said: “I hear you found Ogmore Stillness' body.”

“You sound as if you knew him.”

“Not exactly.”

“I met him here in the pub last week. He was off to view Fern Hill.”

“The police have questioned Waldo, and the people in the other properties that Stillness visited, including me.”

I think my mouth dropped open, or the fork fell out of my hand, but Rosalind certainly had a look of triumph on her face. “You know more about this than I do,” I said.

“After his visits, Stillness had a phone call to go back to London.”

“That's where his wife assumed he was, while all the time he was floating in the Aeron,” said O'Malley as he put the food on the table. “And it wasn't robbery. His wallet and car keys were still in his trousers.”

There was no point in asking them how they knew all this. They were on the village intranet. As a newcomer, I wasn't.

“They were trying to buy a cottage down here,” I volunteered, as if this would astonish them, but it was the best I could do.

“No, they weren't,” said O'Malley.

“He was thieving,” added Rosalind.

“Not money, mind, just our literary heritage.”

I gave up. “You'd better explain.”

“Dylan's not just a poet any more, he's an icon.”

“No, I mean explain, as in start from the beginning.”

“They sell bits of his bow-ties for hundreds of dollars.”

“A single letter to Caitlin would fetch £6,000 at auction,” added O'Malley, sitting down beside us.

“And it was probably Ogmore Stillness who stole the shed. Worth a fortune in America.”

I looked at them both in desperation. O'Malley got up, filled our glasses, and went behind the bar. “Rosalind,” I said quietly, “I think you'll have to take this one step at a time.”

“Ogmore Stillness visited me, Fern Hill, Talsarn, New Quay.”

I saw some light. “He's a Dylan Thomas buff?”

“No, he's a literary scavenger.”

“He's a collector?”

“No, he works for an auctioneer specialising in writers' memorabilia.”

“So he wasn't buying cottages?”

“No, that's just one of the covers he uses.”

“What happened at Waldo's?”

“Waldo came back from the fields and found him inside the house. Stillness seemed unperturbed, said he'd heard the farm was for sale. Waldo threatened to call the police. Stillness took out a bundle of twenty pound notes. ‘Just the first instalment, old boy', was what he said. ‘Your mother wants you to sell me Dylan's papers.'

“When Waldo said ‘no', Stillness offered to introduce him to a newspaper reporter so that he could tell the world about Dylan and his love child. ‘They'll pay you a fortune, old chap.' Waldo saw the blackmail and threw him out into the yard. Then he noticed the photograph of Dylan was missing. He chased after Stillness and asked for it back. Stillness swung a fist, Waldo brought him to the ground and found the photograph in his coat pocket. End of visit.”

“And then Stillness came to see you?”

“Yes, but his manner was rather different. He was very polite, even charming. He claimed he represented a firm specialising in literary acquisitions. It was common knowledge, he said, that Dylan and I had been intimate friends. He wondered if there were letters and papers that survived? His interest was purely to cast new light on Dylan's character so that the image of the ‘drunken bohemian poet', as he put it, could be laid to rest. His firm were prepared to showcase Dylan in London and New York and pay for serious academic study of any new material.

“I told him that all of Dylan's papers were being prepared for publication – I didn't mention Rachel by name.”

“And who killed Stillness and why?”

“I'd rather not speculate – let's leave that to our clever policemen.”

O'Malley appeared from the kitchen carrying a large plate. “Milk Wood Gateau,” he said, putting it on the table between us. “Laced with
poteen
. Enjoy.”

I cut the cake and gave us both a slice. I wanted to get back to Waldo: “He attended Rachel's Meeting yesterday.”

“I know. He came to see me last night, so I wasn't surprised when you suggested lunch today.”

“But why Rachel's Meeting?”

“It's fifty years since Dylan first went to Meeting with Merle in New York.”