“I’d like you to go to the woods – there are torches and wellingtons at the back – and collect twigs from nine different kinds of tree.”
I led the way out, because I knew how to find the coppice at the side of the farm yard. Thankfully, the snow had long stopped and little of it was left on the ground. The wind was still from the east, but the farm buildings gave us some protection. We muddled around in the coppice until we were satisfied that we had enough twigs, though it was hard to tell in the dark. When we returned, the women were drinking mulled wine and eating cake. Rosalind took the twigs from us and separated them into various piles. When she’d finished, Waldo came across and set them crosswise into the pit.
He lit the fire and we stood around as fascinated as if these were the very first flames we’d ever seen. The wet bark of the wood hissed and spluttered as the fire took hold, and the smoke curled up into the roof of the barn, driving down the few remaining butterflies.
“In the old days,” said Waldo, “they tried to cure sick cattle by throwing a new-born calf into a bonfire.” He paused to pick up the poem from the table. He looked directly and intently at Rachel, and I felt that something awful was about to happen. I had a feeling that a little bit of the old Waldo was in the barn. “I wonder,” he asked, kneeling down by the fire, and putting on a few more twigs. “I wonder if we could purge the power of Dylan’s name-number by throwing this last child of his into the flames?”
I thought for a moment that Rachel was going to leap on him, and snatch the piece of paper from his hand. Her face was taut with anger and she stood poised like someone at the end of a diving board. But, thankfully, Waldo stood up and broke into laughter. “What a ridiculous idea,” he said. “What a waste of a fine poem.” He looked again at Rachel. “Take it. I want you to study it. I want to know if you’d like it for the publication. I’m sure you will, I’m certain that something can be arranged.”
Rachel took the poem. She glanced at me, and there was no need for words. We both knew that Waldo was suggesting some sort of deal or trade-off.
“And now for some food,” said Waldo. “A traditional supper for this time of year, the stwmp naw rhyw, the mash with nine ingredients, specially prepared by O’Malley.” Waldo clapped his hands, and Rosalind came out of the shadows again, carrying a glass tureen. She put it on the table, went to the back of the barn, and returned with nine bowls. “The first round is just for the ladies,” said Waldo, and I saw Rachel and one or two of the other women exchange disapproving glances at his choice of word. “All good stuff. Potatoes, carrots, turnips, peas, parsnips, leeks, pepper, salt, and especially for Martin, spicy sausage, sliced-up thinly, which I had specially sent from Italy.”
Rosalind began ladling the mash into the bowls, and when she’d finished Waldo said: “And now for the surprise ingredient.” He searched in the pocket of his shirt and brought out a gold ring. “It was customary to place a wedding ring in the stwmp naw rhyw. The girl who picked it up with her spoon would be the first to be married in the coming new year.” He dropped the ring into one of the bowls, asked Rosalind to close her eyes, and then shuffled the bowls around until it was impossible to tell where the ring had been put. Then Rosalind gave each woman a bowl of the mash.
I have to say that both Rachel and I knew that she would end up with the ring. And so it proved, but I don’t know how Waldo managed it. It was so predictable that when Rachel scooped out the ring on her third spoonful we burst into giggles. The rest of the guests clapped and whooped and made ribald comments. We both, of course, understood the significance and seriousness of what had happened. Rachel lifted the ring from the spoon and diligently wiped off the mash with a tissue, while she thought out what to do. There was now a certain tension in the barn, albeit light-hearted. Waldo stood pensively waiting for her response. I perfectly understood Rachel’s dilemma. In our own private battle with Waldo, she had to reject the ring without rejecting him.
Even I was surprised by what Rachel did next. She went across to one of the Quakers and asked for his Swiss Army knife. The guests, of course, thought that this was a hoot. She returned to the table, picked out a stick of hazel, and stripped the bark right off. She handed the stick to Waldo. “My ffon wen,” she said, smiling at him as if she felt some affection, which she probably did in her funny, Quaker, all soul-saving way.
He took the stick and started chuckling and then laughing, until the whole party was falling about, though they didn’t understand why. “Just my luck,” he said, “to choose a married woman.”
Rachel stepped forward and kissed him on his cheek, which I thought was going too far, and wondered what Cressida Lovewhich would make of it. Then music came falling like dew from the beams overhead, and the atmosphere changed once more as people moved to the tables at the back to find the food and wine. I took Rachel aside and asked: “What’s a ffon wen?”
“The white stick, sent by women in the old days to certain men.”
“Yes, but what does it mean?”
“Get lost. Get stuffed. I’m not interested.”
“And Dylan’s poem?”
“A piece of deception, and I’m going to tell Waldo so.”
She didn’t have long to wait. Waldo was moving through the guests with every intention of ending up with Rachel. She was waiting for him, again calm and radiating warmth, what the Quakers call ‘unconditional acceptance’.
“And what do you think of the poem?” he asked.
“The trouble is,” she replied, “it’s not by Dylan, and even if it were I doubt if it’s good enough to be published.”
I thought that was going too far, since the poem was clearly very good.
“I think it needs a little polishing. Why don’t you come to the poetry workshop on Tuesday night?” she suggested, believing she was handing Waldo off, but at the same time keeping communication open.
As we drove home, I said: “I still think it’s a fine poem.”
“I know. And if he behaves himself, I’ll make sure he gets it published somewhere or other.”
“He looked very upset.”
In Death’s Dominion
One evening, about a week or so after Waldo’s event in the barn, the phone rang. Rachel answered and hung up almost immediately. Rosalind wanted to see her urgently, she said. She left the house about nine o’clock. I woke at midnight, but she was still not home. I rang Rosalind, clearly waking her from a deep sleep. Rachel, she said, had left just after ten. I phoned Rachel’s friends in the village but none had seen her that evening, though one had noticed our car outside the Scadan Coch.
I grabbed a torch and rushed down to the pub. The keys were in the ignition. The engine was cold. This time I had no need of advice from Cressida, nor could I wait for the police. I had no doubt where Rachel was, and I was determined to get there as quickly as I could.
The gate to Fern Hill was tied closed with orange baler twine but I vaulted over and began to run. I heard Cressida’s voice asking what I was going to do when I reached the farm. But I was overwhelmed by the present, stumbling and falling over the uneven track, startled by grotesque faces in the trees. I noticed small things. There were no cobwebs across the track. A screwed up yellow post-it floated in a pothole. Small blobs of vomit lay along the grassy edge of the bank. Toads sitting in pools, waiting.
I reached the second gate, breathless and hurting with fear. A paper carrier lay at the foot of the gate post. I opened the bag and shone the torch inside. I could see a cucumber, and two hooves covered in blow flies. It’s significance didn’t strike me until much later, when it was too late, anyway.
I scrambled over the gate. A rat was sniffing at a squashed hedgehog. A shoe in a pool of oily water looked familiar. Another yellow post-it. A pen. A credit card. A badger snarled as I passed too close. Bats stitched and gathered overhead. The seasonal smell of decay rank in the chill air.
Another paper carrier had been pinned to a fencing post at the entrance to the farmyard. This one contained t
he bushy, ginger tail of a fox. I know what this is all about, I thought. I shouted Rachel’s name and then Waldo’s but there was no reply to either. A piece of paper pinned to the door of the farmhouse fluttered in the breeze.
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 agai
n. 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...”
The Dylan Thomas Murders Page 15
