The Dylan Thomas Murders (21 page)

The maggot that no man can kill
And the man no rope can hang
Rebel against my father's dream

I pushed open the door, and stepped inside. I saw everything at once, registering every detail, recalling how the room looked the last time I'd seen it, noticing the differences now. There were gaps in the bookshelves, like missing teeth. The photograph of Dylan was gone. The pot of pencils was empty. Crumpled sheets of paper covered the floor round the desk. The chair on which I'd seen Waldo sitting, trying to write, had been turned to face the door. Monica Sahlin's painting had been slashed.

The air was thick with the urine smell of cooking kidneys.

The dried herbs had been taken down from the wooden beams. The mattress had been replaced with a bed made up with white sheets and a pale blue duvet. The bottles of stout were gone.The bowler hat was missing from the nail over the mirror. A smeared apron hung in its place. The table was covered in newspapers, stained with blood. A butcher's cleaver lay on its side.

I rushed into the kitchen.

A large stew pot gurgling away on the stove letting off sweet, sickly puffs of steam making me gag. The battered head of a corgi on the work surface, its eyes still bright. Bones split open with a pair of nut crackers. Pieces of red flesh and dog hair everywhere. Intestines slithering across the floor like great rivers. Blood dripping from a chopping board into the kitchen sink.

All this I saw, and then ran, out into the yard to the stone barn. I kicked open the door, seeing nothing in the flickering flames of the burning torches, shouting as I ran across the room.

Rachel was naked, spreadeagled across a cartwheel propped against the wall beneath the
perllan
. Her hands and feet were tied to the wheel with orange baler twine. Her shoulders were strewn with daisies. A hammer hung from her neck on a silver chain. Carpenter's nails covered the floor. Smoke from the fire pit had blackened her legs.

There was no pulse. There were no eyes, just slits stitched closed with rose thorns. There were no fingers on her writing hand. There was no hair, just a crudely shaved skull and a lopsided wig.

A note on the cartwheel said:
Golden in the mercy of his means
.

The forensic examination of Rachel's body showed she had been poisoned, though with what remained unclear. A wren's egg was found in her vagina, and a finger, that was not hers, stuffed in her mouth. Her own fingers were never found. There were other mutilations which the police, out of kindness, refused to tell me about.

Rachel was cremated at a private service, and her ashes scattered under the great redwood at Tyglyn. I attempted to exorcise one ghost by returning Dylan's letters to Rosalind Hilton with a note saying that I would be happier if she completed the project on her own. The parcel came back a few days later, undelivered. Mrs Hilton, said Basset the Post, had left the village, and her cottage was up for sale.

Waldo was the main suspect for the murder. I told the police everything I knew about him, and handed over the tapes of the interviews with Rosalind that would link him to the death of Ogmore Stillness. The police searched extensively for Waldo, but he was nowhere to be found. He had completely disappeared from the face of the earth, or at least those parts of it where police inquiries had been made and photographs circulated. I gave them the address of the foundation in New York that had supplied him with money. I also suggested they tried looking on Elba. Neither led to anything. The foundation declined to confirm or deny if Waldo was its principal beneficiary; and the police on Elba seemed uninterested in the case. They had no record, they said, of a man called Waldo Hilton entering Italy or being on Elba.

I had spent months in misery and depression, weighed down by loss, police incompetence, and my own powerlessness in bringing Waldo to justice. Cressida continued to be very supportive throughout. Her work overseas had finished, and she visited me quite often. I turned Rachel's office back into a spare bedroom so that Cressida could feel at home. It seemed quite natural that two old friends who had lost their partners should find help in each other's company.

Then something happened that changed the way I'd been responding to Rachel's death. Late one afternoon, an express delivery van drew into the yard, setting off the geese and the dog into a raucous turmoil of aggressive posturing. I took the small packet into the house. I'd been expecting a delivery of organic seeds so I had started to open it without any doubts about the contents. It was tightly sealed with brown packing tape that only the kitchen scissors could remove. I pulled out a white envelope. The words on the outside were Dylan's:

Light and dark are no enemies
But one companion.
“War on the spider and the wren!
War on the destiny of man!
Doom on the sun!”
Before death takes you, O take back this.

Inside, wrapped in tissue paper stitched together with rose thorns, was a shrivelled finger.

Waldo was not prepared to let me be. Leaving me in peace, leaving me alone to build a new life was not on his agenda. Rachel's finger was more a threat than a taunt. It made me realise that I was very vulnerable if Waldo chose to return. It felt as if the finger was pointing at me.

Before death takes you...

That evening, I decided to go to Elba. My intention was simply to find Waldo and breathe life back into the police investigation. I was concerned only with self-preservation. I didn't think through the details or the dangers of confronting someone who had already killed two people. Waldo's package had made me realise that doing nothing invited far more danger.

Rachel's finger was also a wagging finger, accusing, reproving, reminding. Had I played any part in bringing about her death? Perhaps I should have taken Waldo's threats more seriously. I had been shocked about how passive I'd been as matters unfolded. It was learned passivity, Cressida told me, dating back to my childhood. Some children never recover from first realising how helpless they are in the face of events in the adult world. Rachel's finger said wake up! I felt the first heat of anger, though I had no thoughts of revenge.

Cressida was extremely unhappy with my decision. She thought it foolhardy and tried to persuade me not to go. But I was determined, for I was certain I would find Waldo in Elba. I travelled up to Heathrow, first calling in at the Public Records Office at Kew, where I knew there might be some useful information. Many of the confidential files from the last war were now open to the public, including some on the secret services.

The plane came skimming into Grenoble, sliding down the mountains on a sheet of cloud to a runway surrounded by rabbits. My plan was to travel to Briançon and cross the border into Italy on foot. I wanted anonymity and time to get used to the ways of another country. A couple of days travelling down to Elba would give me both, and polish up my rusty Italian as well.

To kill time before my train left, I wandered round the Arab quarter, bought some kebabs, and then took the
Téléférique
up to the old fort. From here, I had a clear view to the southeast, where the
Route Napoléon
cuts through the mountain. This had been the way of his escape from Elba, as he headed northwards to his final defeat at Waterloo. I threw some coins tumbling down the wall of the fort, and prayed for a more successful outcome as I headed south to the island Napoléon had so desperately left.

I arrived in Briançon in the early evening, too late in this tourist-filled town to find a decent room. Even the hostel was full, and the information office was already closed. I walked down the
Grande Gargouille
, thinking I might find somewhere in the new part of the town, down on the plain. As I passed the church of Notre Dame, someone hissed at me from the shadows. An elderly, one-legged man stood on his crutches in the doorway of a boulangerie. “
C'est un lit que vous cherchez
?” he hissed again. It did cross my mind that I was being propositioned but it was more likely he was trying to help me find somewhere to stay. He came rapidly across the cobbles towards me. “
V'nez, V'nez
,” he insisted, and set off down the hill, pausing occasionally to make sure I was following, and urging me on with a sideways sweep of a crutch. Eventually, we passed through a narrow gate in the wall of the old town. I followed him down a marigolded lane, with fields on both sides which were themselves surrounded by the new town sprawling outwards from the base of the fortified walls.

We came to his tiny house. He told me to wait while he went inside. Then a woman appeared in the doorway, his wife I presumed, carrying a folding bed that she assembled in the barn. I asked her about food in the town. “
Non, non
,” she grunted, as she stuffed straw into a sack to make a pillow. “
Pas d'épicerie, pas d'hôtel, rien, rien
.” Later, the old man came back with bread, ham and a bottle of local brandy in a bag clasped between his teeth. He sat on the hay, and told me stories about the Germans stealing his calves to feed the hungry battalions who once occupied the town.

I slept fitfully through the night, thinking of the next few days and what lay ahead. It was to be a return journey, a healing pilgrimage, or so I hoped. Rachel and I had spent the first night of our honeymoon in Briançon, walking up into the mountains the following day. It had been a marvellous time but Rachel had sunstroke and a pounding headache for most of the walk. I'd brought her diary of the trip with me, and it recorded that I hadn't been at all sympathetic:

“Martin responded with a most uncharacteristic outburst: he was fed up with it; every day I had something wrong with me; there was no point in going on this walk if I wasn't strong enough; we might as well go back to London. All the way down the mountain I was a few hundred yards behind him snivelling...”

There was a lot to make up for.

The great long-distance footpath, the GR5, passes through Briançon. The next morning, I picked up the trail just below the
Fort du Château
and headed east, skirting along the river Durance in dark pine woods, soon part of a long line of walkers, all with little plastic bags dangling from their rucksacks with their bread and cheese inside. By early afternoon, I reached Montgenèvre, “a hideous conglomeration of tacky modern ski resort architecture”, as Rachel's diary described it. Here the path turns sharply northwards to the Col de Dormillouse, and I said farewell to the group of walkers with whom I'd spent the last few miles. I sat in a café eating hot dogs and olives, and when the customs man went home for his siesta, walked down the road to Italy. I caught the last bus out to Ouix, another ugly, sprawling town given over to skiing but now empty, save for its residents who were out in full force for the
passeggiata
. I found a room above a pork butcher's shop, bought some salami from her and wandered down to the station to find out the time of the first train to Turin in the morning.

The journey south was hot, boring and noisy. The Espresso pulled out of Turin's Porto Nuova with almost every seat taken by Piemontese undertakers and their wives going to a funeral services exhibition in Rome. By Genoa, I was fed up with their boisterous good humour and got off. I waited for the slow train to Pisa, where I patted the tower and bought a straw hat. I caught the Locale to Livorno, and just made the late afternoon ferry to Elba.

In Rio Marino, I found the Bar Karl Marx, and told them I was Welsh and that my father had known Aneurin Bevan. Soon I'd been found a room at the top of the town with a magnificent view of the bay. “
Che bel panarama, signore,
” said my landlady Signora Profetti, who warned me that there were 237 steps to the bottom of the town, and suggested I have dinner with her. She stewed some squid with garlic and vegetables, and told me of the time she had sung opera on the ocean liners to America. I wanted to ask if she'd met Dylan and Caitlin when they'd visited Rio but I was reluctant to say anything that might attract Waldo's attention. I just wanted to look like an ordinary tourist, interested in minerals, good food and the flowers of the
macchia
.

The next day, I bought sunglasses and a paper, and hired a moped which I left chained outside the shop. I strolled through to the harbour, and found a table on the outdoor terrace of Da Alfonso's, and decided it was as good a place as any to wait for Waldo. It had a clear view of the Banca Commerciale. If Waldo was here, he would need to come to Rio for money.

I sat in the café for five days before Waldo appeared. The time had gone quickly. There was enough to keep me busy just watching the locals and tourists going about their business. When the bank closed for lunch and siesta, I went off exploring on the moped. I also visited the museum and asked to see the script of
Under Milk Wood
that Dylan had written for Luigi Berti. I was nervous about this, in case it got back to Waldo, but it seemed silly to come to Rio and not see the script, if it existed – part of me believed that Rosalind had probably made the whole thing up. Yet I couldn't dismiss all she'd said – she'd known about the path that ran along the cliff from the watch tower to Il Porticciolo, and she was certainly right about the Bar Karl Marx.