The Dylan Thomas Murders (6 page)

“We were on our way to drop me off, with plenty of time to spare for Dylan to get to the church, when Waldo had a seizure. This was the very first sign of something seriously wrong with him. It was the most frightening moment of my life, but thank God we were in London where there were plenty of hospitals. Dylan ordered the driver to take us to St. Mary's which he thought the nearest, though he was wrong about that. Directions weren't his strength, and he ignored the driver who said there was one much closer. Anyway, we were at St. Mary's all afternoon. Waldo settled down, but they wanted to keep him in for observation. I was distraught and Dylan refused to leave me. He had missed the wedding but he could still have gone to the reception. ‘Vernon will understand,' he said, and we both stayed near the hospital overnight.

“Vernon was devastated, Gwen was furious and all Dylan's biographers have been beastly about it since. Of course, he was never able to tell Vernon what had really happened because no-one, not even Vernon, knew about me and Waldo, and nor would they ever.

“After Waldo's seizure, Dylan spend a fortune on doctors. He wanted the best, and remember there wasn't much of a health service then. When he went to Prague, they told him about a special clinic for children like Waldo. Dylan paid for us to go there for three months. It must have cost a fortune, though it didn't help very much.

“You can see now why Dylan was always on the cadge. Even after the war, when he was earning quite well, he was always borrowing from his friends. Caitlin could never understand why he had so little money to spare.

“Christmas came and went, Dylan arrived on New Year's Day looking the worse for wear, and he spent most of the time in the rocker near the Aga, drinking milk and feeding himself and Waldo with the leftover plum pudding. In the evening, we sat in the parlour in front of a roaring fire. I was reading a book and Dylan was bouncing Waldo up and down on his knees. I remember Dylan saying: ‘What's Christmas without an uncle?' when a huge piece of coal fell out of the grate and rolled across the hearth onto some newspapers that we'd foolishly left on the carpet. They caught fire instantly. Dylan put Waldo in the cot, and rushed to the kitchen to fetch water. But the pipes were frozen. I started to stamp on the papers as best I could but without making much of an impression. Next thing, Dylan was racing back and forth with armfuls of snow and dumping them on the flames, looking for all the world like someone carrying a baby in swaddling clothes. I believe it was that piece of coal that started Dylan off on
A Child's Christmas
.

“Things began to go sour in the New Year, particularly with the shooting. You know the story?”

I nodded. It had been the most sensational event of Dylan's life. He'd escaped death by inches. There'd been a quarrel in the Black Lion in New Quay with a war-weary special forces commando called William Killick. After a brief exchange of blows, Killick had been thrown out of the pub by Alastair Graham, an old friend of Dylan's. Graham was extremely well connected, with friends in government and the royal family. He had come to live in New Quay after resigning from the diplomatic service. His bacchanalian house parties were a gay assortment of London friends, so much so that his mansion became known locally as Bugger Hall.

“Graham drove Dylan home to Majoda. We were playing some silly games when the shooting began. Then Killick burst in, and threatened to blow us all up.”

“But no-one was hurt?”

“No. Dylan was on his knees licking Caitlin's legs pretending to be her spaniel, and the rest of us were on the floor drinking beer out of cereal bowls – it was Dylan's favourite party game. The bullets went right overhead, thank God.

“Dylan was marvellous. He was the bravest of the lot, and took the gun away from Killick. And then he worked out the cover story for everybody. That's how Dylan became involved with British intelligence. Alastair was very impressed and arranged for Dylan to meet Ian Fleming.”

“As in James Bond?”

“Yes, though he hadn't written anything at that point. He was high up in naval intelligence, I believe. Anyway, Dylan played along, it was great fun for him, but he was flattered, too, and he needed the money. He went to lunch at All Souls, with Rouse I think, and that's where the deal was done, in the rose garden, early 1946.”

“I just can't see Dylan as a spy.”

“Intelligence was full of writers in those days – it was excellent cover.”

“What did they ask him to do?”

“They used him in the BBC at first, keeping an eye on the lefties. They were worried about a communist ring there. They sent him to Italy in 1947, and then to Prague, just sniffing around the intellectuals, and reporting back, pockets of resistance, underground press, civil liberties, that sort of thing.

“No, he wasn't strictly on the payroll, just cash in hand for each job and a small retainer. They used Margaret Taylor to channel the money to him. And it was MI6 who paid for the Boat House.”

“And the trip to Iran for the oil company?”

“Now that was rather interesting. One of MI6's agents in Iran had sent a message claiming he had a list of Soviet spies who had infiltrated British intelligence and the Foreign Office. His difficulty was, of course, that he didn't know who to trust with this information, so he insisted that they sent out someone known to him, and he suggested Dylan. MI6 knew that the oil company had plans to make a film, so it was just a question of making sure that Dylan was given the job of scriptwriter.”

“But why Dylan?”

“The agent in Iran was Araf Lloyd-Morgan. His father was an engineer from Laugharne, and his mother a local girl working in the accounts department. The company put him through school, he was very bright, and they saw quickly what an asset he would be to them. Araf went to the university in Tehran and then the company sent him to Oxford for a year, and that's where he met Dylan, and became good friends. But MI6 had spotted Araf's potential, too, and they recruited him.”

“So Dylan agreed to go and collect Araf's list?”

“Not at first. He simply refused. His marriage was in tatters, because Caitlin had learnt of his affairs in America. And he didn't relish the prospect of six weeks in the desert with nobody but oil men for company. But MI6 leaned on him, blackmail really. They had John Davenport intercept the love letters that had been sent to Dylan at his club.”

“I thought Margaret Taylor had done that.”

“Did you ever think how a woman could enter a men's club and get hold of a member's letters? No, it was Davenport. So they told Dylan that they'd send one of the love letters each week to Caitlin until he agreed to go to Iran. Of course, he caved in, and he went out to make the film. Araf passed on his list to Dylan to bring home. And that's where it all went wrong.

“Dylan was supposed to take the list to Harold Nicolson, who would pass it to the Cabinet Secretary. But as soon as Dylan set foot in London, he went on the binge. He ended up in the Gargoyle with the usual cronies. Guy Burgess was there – he and Dylan had been great friends for a long time. He gave Araf's envelope to Burgess: ‘Give this to Old Nick – save me going into the office tomorrow.' Dylan was anxious to get back to Laugharne to repair things with Caitlin, and he caught the milk train that night.

“Burgess, of course, opened the envelope, and found his name on the list. Three days later, Araf was killed in a car crash in Tehran, not an accident, Philby's doing. It gave Burgess enough time to warn the others, and in June he defected to the Soviets, and the others went soon after.”

“It was Dylan's fault they all got away?”

“Oh yes. And they took everything with them. Nuclear secrets, lists of our agents, defence deployments, the lot.”

“You're saying that Dylan's mistake helped the Russians catch up in the arms race?”

“Yes, the final irony. He hated those bombs so much. He was devastated. Didn't write a line of poetry after that.”

“And no more work for intelligence?”

“Of course not. And in the end, they had to get rid of him. He'd worked out what the Americans were up to in Iran in 1953, and didn't like it. The CIA intercepted his letters to Bert Trick. The last straw was his suing
Time
magazine. They couldn't risk anything coming out. So the Agency leaned on the hospital.”

“You mean..?”

“A winking injection too far.”

“That's unbelievable!”

“It was the height of the Cold War. No chances were taken.”

I left Rosalind's, drove home the back way, and called in to see O'Malley. The pub was packed and I could smell why. There were plates of roulade on the tables, most likely spinach or chard, chopped garlic sausages, and slices of fried aubergine. O'Malley came across, with a Brains in one hand, and a small plate of sausages and roulade in the other. “You know something,” I said to him as I picked up the beer, “when my mother was alive, we always had thin sausages.”

She and my father ran an oil and hardware business. We had a shop on the main street of the village, and a green Commer van that toured the farms and council estates. Selling paraffin had been in the family for three generations. The business declined under my father's stewardship and eventually he was declared a bankrupt. This was largely because of his liking for long holidays in expensive hotels (where he called himself Wing Commander, though he had never been near a plane in his life), and by his thirst for whisky and late nights in the back room of the Wheatsheaf.

I was always eager to help on the Commer on Saturdays. Up at six, I would lay two fires and take tea to my parents in the middle bedroom, where it usually remained undrunk. Then I'd run to the yard where we kept the Commer and the stores. My job was to open up the old stable, and fill and cork two hundred bottles with parazone ready for the coming week.

I'd usually be finishing just as Sid the driver arrived, and we'd load the day's supply of parazone into the Commer on racks behind the passenger seat. Sid would drive us down to the shop. I'd grab some breakfast, and Sid would collect the leather money bag from my mother, who had by this time opened up the shop and taken bacon and eggs to my father upstairs.

We would finish around early evening, and the routine at the end of the day was just as well established. Sid would park on the main road outside the shop, and take the day's money into my parents. My mother and I would count it on the kitchen table, and it was my father's job to go out to the Commer and take a note of the paraffin gauges, and check inside to see what stock had been sold. The routine was changed one Saturday evening, and it was my mother who was killed, not my father as it should have been.

We were back much later than usual. A thick winter's fog was swirling in off the estuary and we had to inch along the lanes. We came in and found my father sitting in front of the wireless. He was filling in the scores on his football coupon, with a half a bottle of whisky on the table beside him. He refused to go out to the van until the results were over. Sid was anxious to get home, and he couldn't take the Commer to the yard until the gauges and stock had been checked. My mother said she would do the checking and that my father would move the van later.

She found a torch, pencil and paper, and went outside. I put the kettle on, went to the bathroom to pee, and chatted to my brother who was splashing about in the bath. I walked through to the front of the house, where I had my bedroom, overlooking the main street. I could only just make out the shape of the Commer, but I could see the fuzzy light from my mother's torch as she checked the gauges. Next thing, the headlights of a car came up behind her. I heard the screech of brakes, like fingers down a blackboard, and then a tremendous bang. The headlights went out, steam came gushing through the fog, and the torch come spinning up towards me.

I ran downstairs. My father was still in the kitchen. I screamed at him and ran out into the fog. I didn't think at all about what I'd find, but wondered what we would do at Christmas.

She was squashed flat against the paraffin tank, her face turned sideways, looking up at the house as if she had tried in that final second to ask for my help. I watched the blood dripping from her mouth, and heard someone retching in the gutter behind me. Neighbours appeared, splashing frantically through the leaking paraffin, and took me away inside.

“Christmas,” I said to O'Malley “was a disaster. He took us to a hotel in Cornwall but we ran away with the train tickets and went home. Not bad for two kids in short trousers.”

“And fat sausages for ever more?” O'Malley really knew how to put two and two together.

When I arrived home, the house was silent and gloomy. Rachel was in the garden room. I could see she'd been crying. I sat down beside her, and she handed me the
Cambrian News
.

“Page eight,” she said, so quietly it was almost a whisper.

At the top of the In Memoriam column was a picture of a black and white collie. The name underneath was Mably, with the words:
Caught in a spinney of murdering herbs
.

“Who could do such a horrible thing?” Rachel asked.