“Fleming’s job was to keep an eye on the ore being loaded on the ships and check it against the official dockets. These were smuggled in every day by Marco Gravelli, the quarry manager, who was actually working for the Italian security service. In the evenings, Fleming had to make contact with the workers, and that was where Dylan came in, of course. By now, he knew everybody in the cafés around the port.
“Everything went well until the day before we were supposed to leave. Brigit had already gone back to Florence with the children. Caitlin and Fleming were out dancing somewhere. Dylan, Waldo and I went out for dinner and ended up in the Bar Karl Marx, just off the Via Pascole. The bar’s still there. It’s a mecca for the old-guard communists. There’s even a photograph of Harry Pollitt addressing the Durham Miners Gala. His daughter married someone from Elba, you know, a pastry cook from Lacona.
“Anyway, Dylan was talking about going home, moaning about having to live in Oxford again. These men came in, miners. They grabbed Dylan and shouted ‘Churchill spy!’ Wrong Prime Minister but we got the message. They took us outside and bundled us into the back of an old American jeep. Gravelli the manager was in there, too, badly beaten up, and shackled to the seat.
“We were driven out past the Appiano tower into the hills. I really wasn’t aware of very much. I was worried stiff for Waldo. Dylan was sitting quietly, looking very gloomy. Doing a bit on the side for MI6 must have seemed very glamorous to him, and well paid, but this was a different matter. We must have travelled for about an hour up a mountain track when the jeep stopped. Gravelli was unshackled and pushed out onto the ground. I could hear them dragging him through the bushes. There was a terrible scream and then a gunshot. The men got back into the car, and we carried on up the mountain.
“Eventually, we stopped again. They pushed us out, and told us to start walking along this tiny sheep track. I thought the end had come. Waldo was crying, more from hunger than anything else. We came out into a clearing, a kind of quarry I thought, where there was another man waiting for us, not Italian going by his looks, and he seemed to take charge. They marched us over to an old stone building. Luigi Berti was inside. We sat round a table. Berti passed some bottles of beer to Dylan. ‘You English people... your wife sleeps with Giovanni, and also goes dancing with Signor Fleming. You go out to dinner with Signora Fleming and her baby. We watch you. You are old friends. The baby has your nose...”
“‘The English bond very quickly in foreign parts.’
“‘I was very muffed to be deceived,’ said Berti. ‘I asked these people to welcome you.’
“‘Miffed,’ replied Dylan.
“‘There are no pedants in the graveyard, signor.’
“‘Why have we been brought here?’
“‘They say you are a spy not a poet.’
“Dylan opened the bottle with his teeth, spat the cap onto the table and said: ‘I’m Dylan Thomas from Swansea, my father was a coal miner who wore a white muffler and was miffed that he couldn’t write poetry but I most certainly do, boyo. And what’s more,’ he said, puffing out his chest like a bull frog, ‘I’m a member of the National Liberal Club’.
“Berti shrugged his shoulders. ‘Dylan Thomas is a poet, a very good one, but are you him?’ He reached into his bag and took out a newspaper clipping. It was the South Wales Evening Post. ‘Look, you are Signor Daniel Jones, composer and Bletchley Park spy, and moonlighting – is that your expression? – with MI6. This man here in the other photograph is Dylan Thomas.’
“‘They’ve got the bloody captions wrong,’ screamed Dylan. And they had. The Post had run a story on the Kardomah Boys and had mixed up Dan and Dylan. Not the first time it had happened.
“Berti passed some sheets of paper across to Dylan. ‘Write,’ he said. ‘Show me proof.’
“Dylan looked furious. ‘I cannot and I will not write to order.’
“‘Either that or you both join Signor Gravelli’.
“‘And the baby will go to the orphanage’. This was the new man speaking for the first time. Almost faultless English but not quite.
“Dylan got up and stamped around the table. ‘I’ll need more beer and cigarettes. Food for the baby. And these boys out of here.’ I was amazed at how cool he was. I was shaking all over. I wasn’t sure that Dylan could write poetry any more. He hadn’t written anything for more than two years, not since he’d been in New Quay. And remember, Berti was no fool. He knew his English literature, he’d translated Henry James and Virginia Woolf.
“Dylan wrote until the sun came up. Berti sent for coffee and panini, took the sheets of paper from Dylan and started to read. The tension in the room was awful. Our lives depended on Dylan’s words, it was a kind of literary Russian roulette.
“Berti read the first page in complete silence, but then he started to chuckle. Dylan winked at me, and picked up Waldo to give him some breakfast. For the first time, I felt things were going our way. Then Berti called in the men from the other room. ‘Grappa, please, for a great poet.’ And he came across and shook Dylan’s hand, and gave me a kiss on the cheek. ‘This will make Dylan Thomas a famous man’.
“When the men were seated, Berti started to read:
“‘To begin with the beginning... Per cominciare dal principio
“‘It is a summer, moonless night in the small sea town of Elohesra, starless and coal black, the cobbled streets silent, and the crouched, chestnut woods toppling invisible down to the slow black, low-backed, black as a bible sea.
“‘Notte d’estate illune e senza stelle, nera come il carbone, nella cittadina di mare de Elohesra, silenziose le vie acciottolate, e un bosco di castagni accovacciato si getta invisibile nel lento, indolente nero, dal dorso basso, mare di color Bibbia.’
“And so it went on. The miners loved every word. When Berti finished, there was a loud round of applause, and more grappa. Berti turned to Dylan: ‘This Elohesra with its milky wood and little harbour, this is a Paradise, no? A Miltonian allusion, I think.’
“‘Oh, no,’ said Dylan quickly. ‘It’s Rio Marina.’ That seemed to make everyone even more happy. Then there was a silly argument about which of the town’s quarries Signor Waldo and Signorina Garter made love in. Of course, it wasn’t the whole of Milk Wood, just the first twenty pages or so. The men were amazed that Dylan had only been in Rio a fortnight yet knew all the goings-on in the town. They couldn’t believe he knew about Signor Verni the tailor up on Via Pini and Signorina Luzi of the gelateria, who sent love letters to each other every day but could not marry because her father was a Stalinist, and he hated Signor Verni for making suits for Trotsky.
“And that was that. We were back in Rio for lunch and caught the ferry to the mainland.”
“And Caitlin and Fleming?” I asked.
“Fleming was far more resourceful, as you might expect,” replied Rosalind. “He and Caitlin swam out into the harbour, stole a fishing boat and got away to Piombino.”
“So Milk Wood started on Elba?”
“In a way, but it had been in Dylan’s head since New Quay.” Rosalind paused and called Leno Conti across to pay the bill. “You should visit Rio Marina some day. Waldo goes back every year. It’s just like it says in Milk Wood, the little town beneath the wooded slopes, the harbour, the quarries, the fishermen. And Rio’s postman did actually open the letters. He was the official censor for the Party on the island.”
“What happened to those twenty pages of script?”
“They’re in the Museo dei Minerali, on the Piazza d’Acquisto.”
“Let me pay the bill.”
“Ah, Leno, i ricciarelli erano squisiti.”
“Questa, cara signora, e una bellisima storia.”
“And Marco Gravelli?” I asked.
“We were caught between a rock and a hard place. We said nothing, though I believe Fleming reported the matter when he returned. But they were not times for justice.”
“Only of the roughest kind.”
“Count your blessings, Marti
n. We got Milk Wood. Read Dylan’s letters. He loved Elba. A world by itself, he said. Happiness in a world that never was. More important, Caitlin was happy. She had the sun, the dancing, the swimming, the good food and Brigit to look after the children. And Giovanni, of course. Milk Wood was born in Caitlin’s smile that summer.”
We got up to leave. “By the way,” I said, escorting her to the door. “We noticed there aren’t any letters from Dylan before May 1949.”
Rosalind looked flushed and confused. “We probably saw too much of each to bother writing,” she replied unconvincingly.
“There’s not even a post card from Italy. He was there five months. You’d have thought he’d have written.”
“They probably got lost in the post,” she said, and walked off down the High Street.
* * *
I remember the morning was glim – Rachel’s word for a grey day when the clouds were settled on the tree tops, and the drabness squeezed so much energy from you it was barely possible to make a cup of tea or answer the phone. White sky depression it’s called here, and it especially blights the lives of incomers who’ve usually seen Wales only in summer sunshine as they make their decision to buy a house and move here.
Half way through the desultory morning, we forced ourselves to go outside and potter in the garden. Rachel began clearing the asparagus bed and I walked down to the small meadow that lay between the vegetable garden and the river. It was regularly flooded so growing vegetables was out of the question. But we’d planted two rows of willows to make a tunnel that ran from the gate down to Rachel’s poetry hut. I had a roll of string and some scissors and my intention was to tie in some of the bigger willows before they grew away from me.
The Aeron was full and swirling brown with silt from the hills. Along the banks were large mounds of creamy foam caused by chemicals leached out of the conifer plantations by heavy rainfall the night before. They bobbed up and down on the waves of the river as if children had thrown candy floss from the bridge. A swollen river also brought its share of swimming sheep, and a good number that were already drowned. These were swept downstream to the sea on the full tide, beaching on the stony shore to be scooped up by yellow-gaitered workmen from the Council.
Some sheep never made it to the sea, but were trapped by swooping branches or caught between boulders that came out like black snares from the bed of the river. There they might stay for weeks, stenching the air as magpies and rooks feasted through the carcass, till nothing was left but a frame of bones to bleach in the sun and slip gradually down to settle on the stones of the riverbed. It was best to remove these sheep before the feasting began, to push them out into mid-stream, where they would carry on down river for the Council to deal with.
I’d been working on the willow tunnel for about hour. Rachel poured some tea from the thermos, and while it cooled, I wandered aimlessly upstream hoping to catch a glimpse of something exotic, a kingfisher or the pair of escaped parrots that had made their home in the roof of an old stable on the other bank. I stopped near our only oak tree, patted its trunk and looked upstream to the bridge. There was a sheep caught on a branch that hung low in the Aeron. I could see a large rook sitting on its neck, pecking at the back of its head.
I returned to the garden, found my long-handled spade and walked back up the bank. As I got closer, I could see that the rook’s beak was deep in the sheep’s skull, and so engrossed that I had to clap my hands to persuade it to fly away. I was distracted by the noise of a tractor stopping on the bridge, then the sound of men’s voices. When I looked back at the sheep I realised it was a man face down in the river. I half-recognised the Arran sweater and knew instinctively this was Ogmore Stillness.
I called to the farmers on the bridge, who ran down the slope into the field. We hauled the body from the river and laid the man on the bank. Leeches clung to his bloated face, and more huddled together in the folds of his neck. We stared nervously at him but Ogmore Stillness could not stare back. His eyelids had been stitched together with rose thorns. Nor could he hear the river washing by or the wind in the trees, for someone had sliced off his ears.
Rachel had run back to the house and phoned for the police. A car arrived within minutes. I took the constables across the field, showed them the corpse and left them to it. The lane was soon blocked to traffic, as more police vehicles and an ambulance arrived. Two officers were climbing into their wet suits on our lawn, holding onto the flowering cherry for support as they hopped from one leg to the other. Some of their colleagues struggled to carry a large canvas tent across the muddy field, complaining loudly about the state of their boots. Locals were arriving, lured by the sirens and numbed quiet by the awesome prospect of a big event in the village. All this we watched from our back room that looked down across the field to the river.
Some time later, I was interviewed by an Inspector from Aberystwyth. I told him that I had met Stillness in the pub some days ago, that he was with his family renting a cottage nearby, and that they had been looking at properties in the area, including Fern Hill. He asked me who else had been in the pub, and I told him. He informed me that a long-handled spade had been found on the bank near the floating body. Did I know whose it was? It was mine, I replied, and he said that it would be taken away for examination, bearing in mind the nature of the injury to the deceased’s head. I was too bewildered to take in the implication fully.
We stood at the window for the next hour or so, watching the comings and goings in the field. Gradually, the crowd of sightseers on the bridge dwindled to a little boy and his grandfather.
We took the car, drove to the coast and walked across the sands to New Quay. We had a late lunch and afterwards walked along the cliffs. Most of this we did in silence. A cold evening wind forced us inland, and we returned to the car through narrow country lanes. We were exhausted but we had walked the shock out of our systems.
* * *
On Sunday, Rachel went to her Quaker Meeting and I walked up to the Post Office for the papers. I was surprised at how little interest was shown in the murder. I suspected that the village would have been more affected if the body had been found on dry land. That would have meant the killer was probably a local person. But Stillness could have been killed anywhere upstream, more likely, said some, in the rough spots of Talsarn where things could get very boisterous on a Friday night.
Rachel arrived back just before lunch. Usually she returns from Meeting in a tranquil or elated state, the effect of sitting in silent worship for an hour, or of particularly uplifting ministry from one of the group. She was always buoyed by the support she found in the closeness of the circle. Occasionally she came home angry, but never did she come home looking, as she did now, as if she had been to the dentist. She was pale, and looked troubled.
I scrambled some eggs with tarragon and bacon bits chopped in, and we sat in silence around the small white table in the garden room. I made a pot of tea, and then another. I washed up, still waiting for the moment. I dried the dishes. I put them away. I cleaned the kitchen counters. I swept the floor. As I rounded the corner into the passage-way, the broom brushed up against her feet. She was leaning against the doorpost, her arms folded, looking at the floor. I sensed the time was right and said: “Well?”
“We were in Lampeter today.”
I nodded. Quakers don’t have churches, they have Meeting Houses. But Rachel’s Meeting was peripatetic and twice a month they met in the library in the Philosophy Department. On the other Sundays, it was held in the sitting room of a remote farmhouse up in the hills, where the only philosopher on offer was a barn owl who usually sat for the entire Meeting on a bird table outside the window.
“I was on the door, welcoming people in, and on the look-out for any newcomers. There were seven people already in the room, and I didn’t really expect any more. I was about to go in, when the front door opened and a gust of wind blew down the passage, blowing the papers off the table. I waited but nobody came. I walked back up towards t
he front door, and there was a man there, sitting on the canvas chair, shaking and trembling as if he were freezing to death. ‘Have you come to Meeting?’ I asked. He nodded, without looking up. ‘I’ll show you the way,’ I said, and cupped his elbow with my hand. He got up and walked beside me down the passage. ‘Have you been to Meeting before?’ He shook his head. I gave him that little leaflet on Quaker Worship that we give to newcomers, and he stuffed it in his pocket. We reached the door and I said: ‘Come on in.’ We stepped inside. ‘I’m Rachel, by the way.’ And then he looked up. That was the first time I’d seen his face. ‘Waldo Hilton,’ he replied, and he walked across the room to the far side of the circle and sat next to Dot.
“Now it was my turn to shake, my legs were so wobbly I could hardly get to my seat. No, I know what you’re going to ask, but I just couldn’t tell whether he was the man who killed Mably. I was terribly twitchy and agitated but then somebody stood up and did this nice little ministry about finding a well, and how he tried to get it going again, and all the foul, black stuff that poured out of the tap for a week and then suddenly the waters ran clear. That made me think of Dylan. I looked at Waldo and he was crying, and Dot was holding his hand to comfort him. Somehow, that settled me for the rest of the Meeting, though I wasn’t completely calm because I felt as if Waldo was staring at me, but when I opened my eyes and looked across at him, he was looking at the ground, and sobbing still. I can’t explain it. Anyway, we all shook hands at the end of the hour, as usual. I saw Dot talking to Waldo, and then he disappeared.”
“What did he say to her?”
“I’m here slinking from my mousehole.”
The Dylan Thomas Murders Page 9
