The Dylan Thomas Murders (7 page)

“It's
Milk Wood
, isn't it?”

“Sort of.”

“Beynon the butcher?”

“No, Pugh the poisoner.”

The day started with slaughter.

I try to let our hens have as much daylight as possible so that they give us lots of eggs in return. I get up about 7-30, and whilst the tea is brewing, I put on my gumboots and walk down to the poultry sheds in my dressing gown and night-shirt. I scoop feed from the bins, and spend a very happy five minutes whilst the ducks, hens and geese scrabble around me fighting for food. And then back for the tea, and upstairs to bed for another hour or so, depending on the weather and the time of year.

I usually let the small birds out first so that they have time for a fair share before their big sisters come running in with their aggressive shrieks and needle-sharp beaks. I opened up the Seebrights, and they came tumbling out of their pop-hole like wild flurries of snow. I unlatched the door to let out the Welsummer bantams but, surprisingly, they didn't emerge. I knelt down and peered into the coop. The five hens lay headless on blood-spattered straw and the young cockerel had wedged himself up near the roof. No fox could have entered the coop so I guessed a stoat had found a small hole in the wire. Not a rat, because rats just chew away at the neck and the eyes, leaving most of the head intact. Stoats and their various relatives, on the other hand, eat the whole head and neck, leaving behind a perfectly formed headless corpse.

No amount of rational argument would persuade us to eat poultry that had been killed by a predator, so I gathered up the hens and put them in a plastic bag, ready for the rubbish collection. I prised the cockerel away from the roof of the coop, and when I put him on the floor I noticed his leg was broken. I would have to kill him.

I went back to the house, poured the tea, and went upstairs where Rachel was already sitting up in bed reading. I told her about the Welsummers and she simply said “Waldo.” I said I didn't think so, and explained how the head had been cleanly taken off. No human could do that, I said, but I immediately remembered an incident in a pub in Oxford when I'd seen a student bite off the head of a pigeon as cleanly as any stoat would have done.

Then the phone rang. It was Rosalind Hilton. “I'm coming round to see you,” she announced, “it's extremely important.”

I was in the shower when she arrived. I heard the bell ring, and then the sound of Rachel and Rosalind talking excitedly together. When I came out, they were in the garden room. Rosalind was sitting on the settee with a bulging plastic bag at her feet, and Rachel was laying out a small breakfast of
pain chocolat
, fruit, and coffee. They were discussing writing and self-discipline, and Rachel was describing the poetry workshop she went to each week.

“Dylan would have found a workshop useful,” said Rosalind. “All he had was Vernon.” She put down her cup and reached into the plastic bag. She took out a letter and put it on the table.

Rachel recognised the small, cramped handwriting immediately. “It's Dylan,” she exclaimed.

“I was lying in bed last night, going through the
Collected Letters
. It made me very angry. It's so unbalanced, just a mere handful of the letters he'd written to women.”

“But they were the important women in Dylan's life,” I replied, realising too late that that was not the most diplomatic thing to have said. “Caitlin, Edith Sitwell...”

“I've decided to put the matter right,” interrupted Rosalind. “This bag holds all of Dylan's letters to me, plus one or two to Waldo. There's also about twenty poems which have never been published, love poems, sent to me, and a few children's stories written for Waldo, though I must say they are a little imperfect and mostly improvised with Waldo on his knee. How you sort them out,” she said, looking at Rachel, “is entirely up to you.”

“Me?” said Rachel, rather lamely.

“I'd like you to prepare Dylan's letters, and the poems, for publication, as one collection. You're a good poet, you know his work, and I believe you are honest – most Quakers are. And you're Jewish, I like that.”

“And your role? asked Rachel.

“You prepare the collection, and we'll work on an introduction together. I can't pay you anything, but you and Waldo can share the royalties.”

“And the letters? What's to happen to them?”

“The National Library can have them.”

“And time scale?” asked Rachel.

“One that's suitably speedy for an impatient octogenarian who may pop her clogs at any time.”

“But why now, after all these years?”

“You're the right person, in the right place, at the right time. Besides...” Rosalind paused and looked across at me “...the conversations with Martin have stirred up too many memories. I need to put a few ghosts firmly in their place.”

Rosalind's reply was plausible but I wasn't convinced. I felt that we were being used for some purpose that was being kept from us. Perhaps this was an unworthy thought, but I felt uneasy and certainly not as pleased as Rachel clearly was.

“Here's one I thought you would be particularly interested in,” continued Rosalind. “From Dylan's first American trip.”

Rachel took the letter, read it with obvious enjoyment, and passed it to me.

Hotel Earle
Washington Square
New York
16th May 1950
Oh Rosalind,
I can't begin to tell you how tired I am, & sick like an old dog with mange, sick of this country, sick of trains, sick of planes and Spillanes, sick of poems, sick of not hearing from you, sick in my shoes when I hear my voice in the audit-orium (sic), because my lines are an abacus, and Brinnin counts the money. Did you get the last cheque from Detroit, an awful city where they make motor cars? Did Waldo get the postcard from Seattle? I loved San Francisco! I ran guiltless from the readings to a pub on the water-front called Leprecohens, run by a Jew from Dublin, & read Yeats to fish-oiled sailors who told me stories about Al Catraz. The sea is awash with sardine fleets, and the hills with whizzing cable cars. There is so much to eat, & more to see, in a wonderful clear sunlight, all hills and bridges, slipping down to a bold, blue, coldblew boat-bobbing sea.

I've seen lobsters bigger than cats, & crabs the size of space ships. Cockles are clams & soups are chowders, and women wear pads in their shoulders. I've sucked Baby Ruths and squeezed Tootsie Rolls but I miss Daddie's sexy brown bottles. But the American dream is a nightmare except that the people are not sleeping and will never have the relief of waking up. I have seen men without shoes, beggars without bowls, and Indians with not a bow and arrow between them. It's a moonless, deathfounded night in the back streets, where the eternal poor are spat upon and robbed. Yet I have travelled gloriously: I've met Eisenhower, kissed Ella, played cards with the Duke & heard a scratchy recording of Victoria Spivey, which made my flesh creep and my hair uncurl. I have been to Harlem and back, & wondered why I've never seen Tiger Bay.

Have I mentioned Merle before? Her cousin is a paediatrician, & runs a clinic that could help Waldo. I'm having cocktails with him tomorrow. I will ask Brinnin to put some of my money into an American bank because hospitals here run out of patience if their patients run out of sense. I was stopped in the Bronx last night by a boy no older than Waldo. ‘Gimme a dollar,' he said, ‘or I scream you to shitsville.' I told him I was an English poet. ‘What's so special ‘bout poetry,' he rasped, ‘just another way of making you poor, right?' I blessed the quality of American education, gave him my autograph and walked on. What a strange word autograph is! The rest of the world is content with a signature.

Merle took me to her Quaker Meeting last Sunday, & I've not been the same since. (Did you know that Caitlin's mother was a lesbian Quaker? Or was she a Quaker lesbian?) We sat down together in a little circle of comfy armchairs, no priests or creed or mumbo-jumbo, & not a cross or crucifix in sight. The silence seemed eternal. Then an old lady started to talk about peace and the coming war. More silence which I drank and drowned in all at once. Then a very intense Negro stood up and spoke for a few minutes about the fate of the Palestinians. As he sat down, he said: ‘A mill can't work on the water that has gone'. And that's exactly how I'd been feeling about my writing! How did he know? We all shook hands on the hour, & went off for coffee and gooey cakes in the room next door. They called each other Friend & so they were. If I hadn't had a hangover, I would have been inspired. I was more content than the bottom of a bottle of Buckley's. Do they believe in God? Who knows? Some do, others don't. But they all believe “there's that of God in everyone”, even in me! There's hope yet. When I return, I shall have a few more drinks in The Fox and Penn, and ask you how it's possible for a Jew to become a Quaker. Merle did.

I'm bringing a space suit for Waldo, and a hermaphrodite monkey that climbs up a string.
Love, Dylan.
PS. Did Tommy Herbert get the Negro picture magazines?

As I finished reading, Rosalind said: “I'm sure that you'll see this as a labour of love, but you will have to deal with Waldo. He may not approve of the collection, or of you. He's a very private person.”

“Have you discussed it with him?”

“No, but I shall inform him this evening.” Rosalind stretched out her hand across the coffee table. “Well, Friend, do we have a deal?”

“Let's shake on it,” replied Rachel.

I was dispatched to Lampeter to photocopy the papers. It was lunch time when I returned, so we sat outside overlooking the river and ate granary rolls and smoked venison. “I've been thinking about the revelatory power of anomaly,” I said between mouthfuls.

“Meaning?”

“Rosalind knew you were a Quaker.”

“So?”

“But how did she know? I've never mentioned it.”

“Why don't you go and kill that Welsummer. We'll have it for dinner one day.”

I did as I was told. The cock was still cowering in the coop. I picked him up and carried him outside so that the other poultry didn't see the dirty deed. I held his body under my right arm, gripped his neck with my left hand and twisted till I heard the snap of his neck. I tied some string around his legs and hung him upside down on a nail, and started plucking. It's easy and therapeutic work when the flesh is warm. When I'd finished, I scooped up the feathers and put them in the rubbish bag with the headless hens. I went inside and laid the bird on the kitchen counter.

I pierced the skin, and cut along the back of the neck, right up to the head. Rachel looked up from Dylan's letters and asked: “Can you do that somewhere else, please?”

“Why did she just suddenly turn up and ask you to work on the papers?”

“I was deeply honoured...”

“But you're a complete stranger. She only met you this morning, but she entrusts her love letters to you.” I cut the neckbone with the kitchen secateurs, and pulled off the head and the loose blood vessels, just as the stoat would have done using its teeth. Out came the neckbone. I put my hand inside, loosened the innards and pulled out the gullet.

“She knows my poetry, and she's obviously taken with you...”

“It doesn't make sense.” I turned the bird around, cut round the vent, slipped in my hand and pulled gently on the luke-warm intestines until they slithered out across the counter.

“You're too suspicious.”

“There's something strange about it.” I searched inside for the liver and heart and set them aside for stock. Finally, I pulled out the crop.

“I like her and I trust her.”

“I hope you know what you're letting yourself in for.” I made a small cut above the feet, snapped the legs down against the edge of the counter, and pulled out the tendons.

“I'll never get another opportunity like this.”

“You could get completely caught up in it, spoil your own writing.”

“I'll cope.”

There was no more to be said. I tied up the legs and wings, and pulled the thread tightly across the parson's nose.

I had arranged with Rosalind to have one last interview with her. When I arrived I asked her about Waldo and the letters that she'd given to Rachel. She had told him, and he seemed to have taken the news rather badly. He had tried to persuade her to change her mind. Some of the letters, he had argued, were rightly his, and he did not wish them to be published. It had been left that Rosalind would consider removing these letters but she wanted to discuss the matter with Rachel.

We sat down in front of the fire as usual. “I want to talk about Dylan and his father, because only then will you understand Waldo.”

D. J. Thomas, I remembered, was a school teacher for most of his life, contemptuous of his colleagues and pupils and disappointed about not getting a professorship at the university. He had wished to be a poet but in this, too, he was unsuccessful. Dylan bore no physical resemblance whatsoever to DJ, who was taller, and whose features were both more regular and angular.