The Dylan Thomas Murders (15 page)

Then out of the blue Cressida Lovewhich telephoned. We talked a little about Yugoslavia, and then I told her everything I knew about Waldo, and my worries. She said she would ring back after she'd had time to think about it. About a week, she said. Later, I e-mailed her the notes I had made of my conversations with Rosalind.

And what a week. On Tuesday, the police made an appointment to see me. I spent two days as nervous as a dancing duck but they only wanted to return my long-handled spade, which had been eliminated from their enquiries.

On Thursday, Waldo turned up, unasked and uninvited, to the launch of Rachel's second collection of poems. We'd invited friends to lunch in the village hall. Rachel's parents came down from London, bringing salt beef, gefilte fish, spiced carp and a boxful of bagels and onion platzels. Other guests brought food, too, and we provided the wine. I noticed Waldo slipping in just before Rachel started reading some of her poems. Of course, she was delighted to see him, as were the others from her Meeting, but I was angry. It felt like an intrusion. What was worse, he spent the whole time taking photographs of Rachel. Not just during the readings, but whatever she did, wherever she went, inside or out.

Cressida phoned on Friday morning. “I've been taking this seriously,” she began, “because someone's been murdered. How often does that happen in your village? What was the motive? Not robbery. Was he murdered because he was an obnoxious Englishman?”

“Most unlikely,” though, as I said that, I thought of O'Malley. That's what a murder does in a small community – it makes you think the worst of the most unlikely people.

“A random, chance killing in the countryside?”

“I wouldn't have thought so.”

“Now look at Waldo. Here's a man with a mental health problem. And he's the only one in the whole story who has a connection to Stillness. Did you tell the police about that?”

“No.”

“Isn't that odd?”

“It would be a breach of Rosalind's trust. Everything I know about Waldo has come through her.”

“You're afraid to tell the police in case Rosalind takes back Dylan's papers from Rachel.”

“It's not enough to go to the police with, not enough to break someone's trust.”

“What if somebody else is killed?”

I recalled the seminars I taught on the ethics of sociology. Should the researcher respect the anonymity of his informants in all circumstances? Was there any difference between the sociologist and the priest in the confessional? Wasn't the sociologist (and especially one turned private detective) entitled, like the journalist, to protect his sources?

“You could be seen as withholding evidence.”

“I'm withholding conjecture.”

“So what do you want from me?”

“An understanding of Waldo.”

Cressida sighed with exasperation. “Not a definitive analysis,” I continued, “just a few pointers.”

“Whatever's wrong with Waldo,” she replied, “he's going through it on his own – didn't you say his wife made off with the fertiliser rep?”

“She did, but I don't think Waldo was ever married to her.”

On Sunday, Rachel came back from Meeting and told me that Waldo hadn't turned up. Quakers always notice when someone doesn't come to Meeting, partly because numbers are small so it's obvious who's sitting in the circle and who's not. But Quakers are also good at cherishing others. It's even in their Rules and Regs – “Remember that each one of us is unique, precious, a child of God.”

After lunch, at which we talked mostly about Waldo, we went to our local animal sanctuary, which had phoned us to say they had a young collie for sale. We drove out through the village, and turned onto a stony track that led down into a hidden, wooded valley. As we reached the bottom, cats and kittens came rolling out of the long grass onto the track in front of us, like circus tumblers. On our left was a field of chickens and ducks, and beyond it, one with donkeys and ponies. To the right, a ploughed morass of mud, home to a group of black pygmy pigs abandoned, so local gossip told us, by a discontented wife who'd been given them by her husband as a present on their wedding anniversary.

We pulled into the yard. A tall, red-haired woman in patched jeans, and an over-sized sweater almost to her knees, came striding across, hand out-stretched. I wondered if she raided her own charity clothes bags. “Let's go inside,” she said, opening the door into an old mill house. We went into a circular room, with white-washed walls and honey-brown beams. On the chimney breast hung a huge mosaic triptych, like the stained glass panels of a church window. “Cleo Mussi,” she said in explanation as she saw Rachel looking in admiration. “Made from broken cups and saucers.” We crossed to the kitchen at the side of the house. A black and white collie came skidding across the granite floor, its tail in extravagant semaphore, burying its teeth into Rachel's boots. “Meet Bedwen. Welsh for birch tree.” The pup raised its white-socked paw in greeting. “The only one of five to survive. The whole litter put in a sack and thrown in the river. I'm sure you'll be happy with her.”

“Can we look around?” Rachel was a sucker for animals. She carried a trowel in the back of the car. Every time we came across a squashed animal, she'd stop the car, scoop the remains off the road, and take it home to give it a decent burial. It often took us a long time to get anywhere.

“There's a jumble sale at three, so I'll leave you to yourselves.”

We wandered around the animal pens, with Bedwen pulling on the lead as if she wanted to get away as quickly as possible. Rachel became engaged in a discussion with one of the volunteers about whether it would be kinder to put dogs down rather than keep them for months on end locked up in their little cages. I edged off towards the square of trestle tables that had been set up for the jumble sale. I bought some raspberry jam and a bottle of elderflower champagne, and then found myself at a table piled high with books. I became immensely irritated because no-one had sorted them into useful categories. I looked round for Rachel but she was nowhere to be seen, probably buying a one-eyed, broken-backed cat to take home with us. So I tied Bedwen to the table leg, and set to, sorting the paperbacks from the hard backs, and then gradually working out the best categories for the paperbacks. I'd just finished sorting the fiction into various genres when Rachel appeared, thankfully without cat or any other creature. She flipped through the poetry pile and said: “There's more than a dozen books here by Eliot, or about him.”

I went across to the jumble organiser and asked her if she remembered who'd brought the Eliot books. She said that they'd been left in a plastic bag outside the gate a week or so ago. Had there been anything else in the bag? Odds and ends, including a malacca cane, back copies of
Boxing News
, and a spanner. I found the cane and the spanner on the bric-a-brac stall. I unscrewed the top of the cane. There was a discoloured tooth inside. The spanner was heavy and beautiful. The steel handle was inlaid with brass art deco designs, and the head had been curved to suggest the arching neck of a dragon. I paid five pounds for the cane and a tenner for the spanner.

“The murder weapon,” said Rachel, coming up behind me, teasing me with a smile.

“The only thing we know about this spanner is that Dylan opened his beer bottles with it.”

At home, we spent several hours nest building with the puppy, then went to the pub for dinner. Ringle the coxswain was behind the bar, and warned us not to expect too much from O'Malley, only scrambled eggs and smoked salmon, which sounded good to us. We could hear O'Malley in the kitchen but he sounded less than his usual ebullient self. “Shagged out,” explained Ringle, “been down the tennis courts.” You have to be careful in west Wales if you're told someone's been playing tennis; it's how local people refer to the giving and taking of bribes. Sometimes they talk about an outing to Wimbledon. In either case, they mean back-handers.

“Tennis?” I asked tentatively.

“Sponsored match for Barnardos, a new community project in New Quay.”

O'Malley was a fanatic for supporting children's charities. Over the years he'd taken part in some amazing fund-raising events, including making a one-legged parachute jump, eating sixty boiled eggs in an hour and speaking English non-stop for three days. We knew that O'Malley's father had walked out on him, weeks after he'd been born. “What was his mother like?” I asked Ringle. A sociologist can never stop being nosey.

“Not much cop.”

“Brought him up badly?”

“Didn't bring him up at all. Handed him over to his grandmother when he was six.”

“To look after him?”

“His Granny did fine to begin with, then the booze got her. Had to sell the house they lived in, to pay for the drinking. They went into a one-room flat, near the steelworks. She started working the boys in the blast furnace, just to pay for the drink. She sent him round the works, looking for trade, and she'd have them in the shed behind the slag heap, while he stood outside.”

“How old was he?”

“About eleven,” said O'Malley, emerging from the kitchen, carrying a plate of artichoke and palm hearts. He put them on the counter in front of Rachel, and put his arm round Ringle's waist.

“Someone reported her to the NSPCC. I was in care for years. Army catering corps after that, and the rest you know.”

Ringle had tears in his eyes. He turned and gave O'Malley a big hug.

“Any news on the Stillness case?” I asked, feeling a little embarrassed.

“They've taken Les Prop-Forward in for questioning,” he replied, looking down over Ringle's shoulder, a bald gargoyle stranded for a moment on the collar bone of love.

Les was the odd-job man around the village, retired early from working on the farms because the farmers had become fed up with his going to the Crown in Aberaeron every lunch time and evening. It wasn't the drink he was after, but the landlady. For ten years he had stood resolutely at the bar, never moving from opening to closing time, trying to win her affections. Hence his nickname. One night, she stumbled down the cellar steps. Les tried to resuscitate her, and that was the closest he'd ever come to the kiss he had so diligently courted, though it is doubtful that she felt the touch of his lips. Her neck had been broken and she died in hospital the following day. I couldn't quite see him as Ogmore Stillness' murderer. I felt a small surge of guilt, and heard Cressida Lovewhich saying: “And now you're subjecting an innocent man to the trauma of police questioning.”

We came home from the pub, tired and looking forward to slumping in front of the television. We found a house full of protests from a puppy mad at having been left alone. Bedwen had chewed the bottom of the fridge door, overturned the waste paper bins in every room and had climbed onto my desk to do her business on the keyboard. We cleared up and while Rachel went to the kitchen to make coffee, I fell asleep on the settee, with a chastened Bedwen cwched in across my lap. I was woken by the phone ringing, and I skipped like a stone into consciousness, sweating wet from a bottled Brains nightmare.

I had been travelling on a plane to a mansion called Gelli where Dylan Thomas had promised to cook me a curry underneath the yew tree. I had pushed the overhead button to call a cabin steward to radio ahead to tell Dylan that I didn't like prawns, but a huge Brahma bull came snorting down the aisle. I screamed. Someone from a seat behind touched me on the shoulder: “Leave this to me.” A nun came forward, carrying a red umbrella. She wore a tube-like coif that came so far forward that her features were invisible. She clucked soothingly at the bull, and then gradually manoeuvred it back down the aisle with the point of the umbrella, until it disappeared into the service area.

I climbed out of the settee, upending Bedwen onto the floor, and knocking over the standard lamp that seemed to occupy all the space between me and the telephone. It was Cressida. “I've read everything you've sent me and more,” she announced.

I was struggling to sound coherent, my head still full of a grinning Dylan shredding yew leaves into a spitting black pot, swearing blind they were only coriander.

“Most of us get through life because we know who we are,” she said slowly. “If that's uncertain, then we have the King Lear problem.”

“‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?'”

“Exactly. Each of us needs a clear identity, to feel good about ourselves, and understand how we fit into things, self-purpose, if you like. If this is absent or weak, then an ego-vacuum develops.”

“So we go around hoovering up affection.”

She ignored my comment. “We all have an ego-vacuum, to some degree or other. That's why we employ ego-filling devices. We buy things like cars or clothes or paintings and we use them to say ‘Look, this is me, this is who I am'.”

“But if the vacuum's extensive?”

“If we have no sense of who we are or what our purpose in life is, then we risk a complete psychotic breakdown. But that rarely happens...”