The Dylan Thomas Murders (9 page)

“By which you mean?”

“Why did they fall for each other?”

“We can only guess, the Cut-Glass letter tells us nothing on that score. De Walden and Florence were much younger than DJ, of course, who was entering middle-age. In fact, he'd been middle-aged most of his life, bald at twenty-six, sitting down to meals in his hat, and even going to bed in it. De Walden, on the other hand, was not only young but well-travelled. He'd been on a late-Victorian version of the Grand Tour and could regale Florence about Florence, and all the other cities that she had heard about from her father. And they could do all this in Welsh, which DJ had become more and more reluctant to use.

“Then there's the question of sex. Both DJ and Florence had enlightened views on that. When they married, she was already pregnant, but the baby was lost soon after. Then Nancy was born but it was another eight years before Dylan came along. Was there something amiss in the marriage bed? Was Florence desperate for another baby? Who can tell?

“It was often said that DJ had married below himself, and I'm sure Florence thought so at times. Catching de Walden must have been a great confidence-booster. It was also a way of thumbing her nose at DJ for his insufferable superiority. He may have thought she was only good for warming his slippers, but she now knew she could get on with the toffs, and even fall into bed with one.

“I suspect she found a kindred soul in de Walden who didn't despise her gaiety and simple love of life in the way that DJ did. I think she wanted affection, she wanted respect and, of course, a more sociable life than DJ could offer. She only really came into her own after DJ and Dylan had both died. She blossomed, showing the tourists around Laugharne, being Dylan's Mam. She loved meeting people, telling the stories about Dylan, making fun of the Americans, showing where the grave was, because that was all the Japanese wanted to see...poor Flo, she lost her husband, son and daughter all within the space of eleven months.”

“But she was chapel. Would she really have allowed herself to fall for de Walden?”

“The Welsh weren't so prim and proper, you know. That's what made Carodoc Evans so angry, the hypocrisy, the chapel elders, Bible in one hand, the key to Rosie Probert's bedroom in the other, and heading for the backroom of the pub on Sunday nights.”

“But a Lord and a schoolmaster's wife? Chirk Castle and number 5, Cwmdonkin Drive?”

“Since when has a contumescent man enquired which school one has been to? Did Eliot worry about screwing a Jew? Did he make his excuses and leave?”

“But...” I stumbled, shaken by the power and frankness of this old woman's language.

“No buts. You know all this. Weren't you the one who wrote a thesis on the sexual behaviour of the British aristocracy? And what did you find?”

She was right, but I was rigid with shock. How did she know? I'd written that thesis in 1968, in between times, whilst I helped organise the Vietnam war demonstrations at the London School of Economics. How could she possibly have found out? And why had she bothered? Waldo's puppy tails were nothing to this.

“Anyway, she let de Walden know that she was pregnant but that she wanted to hear nothing more from him whatsoever, and certainly never to see him again. DJ apparently assumed the baby was his, and perhaps it was. Who knows? But de Walden did write once, just to say that he had written an opera, that it was called
Dylan, Son of the Wave
, and might the opera be dedicated to the child, if it were a boy, as a token of de Walden' appreciation of the friendship and hospitality he had received in Swansea? The letter was addressed to both DJ and Florence, and written, I imagine, in the most circumspect terms. Florence wrote back on behalf of DJ and herself. Her husband, she said, had no views on the matter of a name, but she herself would be delighted, if it were a boy, to call him Dylan.”

Rosalind stopped, and went to the kitchen to make some tea. I sat in a rather sombre mood by the fire, still puzzled by her reference to my thesis. She was quite right, of course. There had been a considerable weakening in the economic position of the aristocracy in Victorian times. They had compensated by marrying their children into the new wealth of industry and finance. Partly as a result, social conventions became much less exacting. Peers and their sons were permanent fixtures at theatre doors, and they were marrying singers and actresses by the score. What happened between de Walden and Florence at the Grand Theatre, I mused, was not an extraordinary event, but an insignificant moment in a process of wider social change.

I heard the sound of someone sobbing in one of the bedrooms upstairs. It sounded like the crying of a young child in a hospital ward late at night. Not the tears of pain or neglect, but loneliness.

Rosalind came back into the room carrying a tray with tea and some food. “Imitation sausage rolls,” she said, putting the tray on the table between us. “Dylan came unexpectedly one day, and I had nothing to give him. So I invented these. Not real sausage because you couldn't get that in the war. Just cold haricot beans, put through the mincer with a bit of cold meat, a rasher of bacon, lots of pepper and sage, some herbs, and then well pounded.”

I thought of Mr Beynon and Mr Pugh.

Rosalind passed the plate across. “I hope you like them, Martin.”

I looked at the plate. There were two rows of thin sausages, not sausage rolls at all, because they had no pastry. “You made them the right size for me.”

“Go ahead, you must be hungry.”

“No, please, after you. I'll have some tea first.”

She took a sausage from the row nearest to her, and put the plate back on the table so that the full row was closest to me. “Now, where were we?”

“How did you find out about my thesis?” I had meant to ask why had she gone to so much trouble but she understood what I was really after.

“You think I'd have these talks with you without first doing my homework?”

“But it's from such a long time ago.”

“It's all on the Net.” She let the pause tease me. “Don't look so surprised. This old lady knows how to surf.”

I heard the creak of a bed. I wondered if it would be polite to ask who was upstairs.

“You still haven't had a sausage.”

“In a minute.”

“There's some sorrel in them and one or two things from Fern Hill.” She took another sausage from her side of the plate. She fixed her gaze on me, willing me, or so I felt, to take one. “All that trouble I took to make them.”

I could hear crying again from upstairs. Either Rosalind heard nothing or she was determined to ignore it and pretend everything was normal. She stood up, and went to the kitchen to re-fill the tea-pot. I snatched up a sausage from my side of the plate, and put it in my jacket pocket. She came back into the room with the fresh tea. “That was lovely,” I said, smacking my lips, “best sausage I've had since O'Malley's.”

“Let's get back to
Under Milk Wood
.”

This is
Milk Wood
, I thought.

“You see, it hasn't got much of a plot, it depends totally on character revelation, and Dylan didn't see the characters until he'd seen the identical ambiguities of his own and Waldo's conception. And that's precisely where the play comes unstuck. It's hopelessly unbalanced...”

“Too much sex...”

“No, that's what they all get wrong. Dylan was obsessed with
paternity
.”

I heard the bed creak again, followed by the sound of someone shuffling across the floor.

“You may not have realised...” pausing as if telling me to brace myself for some startling information, “...but
Milk Wood
contains six menage à trois, numerous fatherless babies, three loose women and even more looser men, all neatly tied symbolically together in Mr Waldo's many paternity summonses.”

“And Dylan saw himself as both Mr Waldo senior and little Waldo his son?”

“Yes, the bastard who begot another.”

“And Lord Cut-Glass, whose letter made the genius flower?”

“The time lord, tending his sixty-six clocks, one for each year of de Walden's life. The clues are there if you want to find them.”

I heard someone upstairs quietly clearing their throat.

“And DJ's in there too, the tidy, anal, bullying personality, the obsession with cleanliness, the refusal to allow visitors into the house...”

“Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard.” I said confidently. I decided it was time to explore another path: “You mentioned Caitlin's abortion earlier.”

“Dylan had great trouble with
Under Milk Wood
. The news about Florence and de Walden started the ideas flowing, but it only really fell into place after Caitlin's abortion in 1951. Beynon the butcher was really Beynon the abortionist, that was the name of the doctor who did it. And that's how Caitlin described it, like being in a butcher's shop. The foetus was six-months, a perfectly formed baby. The doctor had to cut it up to get it out, pulling the baby out in chunks, Mr Beynon's chops, bits of leg and arm everywhere. The awful thing was Caitlin only had it done so that she could go with Dylan to America.”

“It's a bit shocking, killing a six-month foetus like that.”

“At least
Milk Wood
was born of it even if the baby wasn't.”

There were footsteps on the stairs. This time, Rosalind heard them. “Don't worry, it's only Waldo. He's been rather poorly, since I told him about Rachel doing Dylan's letters.”

I imagined him quiet on the stairs, crouching low to catch the conversation, like a small child listening to the grown-ups talking late at night. The latch of the stairwell door clicked open. Rosalind looked across and said: “Come in Waldo, it's only Mr Pritchard.”

I looked apprehensively across the room. Waldo was standing at the foot of the stairs, hunched up inside a voluminous dark blue night-shirt. He seemed to have shrivelled, and shrunk so small that he wasn't the man I had seen at Fern Hill. I remembered his dark, wavy hair that night when I had watched him at his desk, but now it was greasy and matted, and stuck out like spikes from his head. His white face was puffed up in blotches, and his nose was covered in spots of blood as if he'd been scratching it in his sleep. His left eye was bloodshot and the skin below badly bruised. He looked distraught, and stared helplessly at his elderly mother who at that moment seemed twenty years younger than him. She radiated energy whilst he looked empty and pathetic.

Rosalind beckoned him to cross the room. “Come and meet Mr Pritchard, Waldo.”

I forced a smile that said hello. Waldo stared at me, his bloodshot eye watering down his cheek.

I got up from my chair and took a few steps towards him, stretching out my hand. “I'm pleased to....”

“Must the hawk in the egg kill the wren?” he asked.

“Sorry?”

“Will the fox in the womb kill more chickens?”

There seemed no point in staying. I drove home and parked the car outside the house. I felt in my jacket pocket for the key to the front door, but my fingers found only Rosalind's sticky sausage. I withdrew it carefully from my pocket and threw it on the ground, and next door's cat came rushing through the hedge and carried it away.

Rebel against the flesh and bone,
The word of the blood, the wily skin,
And the maggot no man can slay.

“This ear that you're worried about,” said the Inspector, pushing the last corner of an egg sandwich into his mouth.

“It's gone to forensic, sir.”

“Who actually found it?”

“Mrs Watkins Kingdom Hall,” replied the Sergeant, politely turning away as the Inspector scraped bits of bread from between his teeth with the sharp end of a paper clip.

“And where exactly did she come across it?”

“In the pull-in by the Scadan Coch.”

“And whose ear is it?”

“A man's ear, sir. Right side.”

“Any distinguishing features?”

“Someone's taken a large bite out of it.”

“And how was it detached from its owner?”

“Sharp blade, sir, like a razor.”

“Anything else?”

“This was pinned to it,” replied the Sergeant, passing across a stained post-it note wrapped in a polythene bag.

“
Before death takes you, O take back this
,” read the Inspector. “Mean anything to you?”

“Afraid not, sir.”

“Perhaps we should call in the Poet Laureate, then. To get the case going, to set things in motion,” suggested the Inspector, knowing it was wasted. “Doesn't your auntie have any views on the matter?” he asked, trying to soften the bite in his voice.

“She always said that God has the hymns, and the Devil has the poetry.”