He jumped me at the shrine, a tasteless little grotto at the side of the track decorated with plastic flowers and solar powered fairy lights. I’d bent over to take some water from the spring, when he hit me across the back of the neck. I don’t remember how he got me up the hill to the house, but when I woke up, my head aching with pain, I was inside and tied securely with leather thongs.
* * *
“I was going to fry Puss some old liver, but now I can give him fresh.”
“You can cut the Butcher Beynon crap.”
“It’s my inheritance.”
“Mrs Profetti knows where I am.”
“Look, Puss.” Waldo picked up the grey cat as it purred across the room. “A little martin’s flown in for dinner.”
“My brother’s a policeman. I told him I was coming here.”
“I wanted to spare Rachel, you know, but she said she loved you.”
“You tortured her.”
“It was a ritual, a cleansing, a simple purging.”
“She wanted to help.”
“We didn’t have sex. Not my type. Nothing for you worry about there.”
“She was trying to help you get better.”
“Better?” Waldo threw down the cat, and came towards me. I screamed as he pinched out my nipple and sliced off the end with the scalpel. “There Puss. You can have the nice gentleman’s liver next.”
I felt the blood streaming down my chest and soaking into the top of my shorts. “You’re Chiesa’s son,” I said, trying to sound challenging.
Waldo looked genuinely surprised. “My, you have been doing your homework.”
“I’ve been to the Registry here. I know all about Giovanni.”
“It was a long time before anyone told me about him.”
“When you were young?”
“Much later, at his funeral.”
“He left you the hotel, but you sold it.”
“I wanted to buy Fern Hill.”
“Things had gone too far. You were Dylan’s son by then.”
“She made me into something I wasn’t.”
“You don’t know the whole story.”
“Puss won’t mind waiting.”
It was clear that Waldo was going to kill me. I knew there was no chance of my being rescued but there was a hope of saving Waldo, sparing others. There was no American airman standing on my shoulders, but I could feel the weight of other lives.
“You know Rosalind was in the SOE?”
“She mentioned it once.”
“When the war ended, they transferred her to MI6. They told her to stay on Elba. They wanted information on the communists, and Giovanni was close to the leadership.”
Waldo looked perturbed. “She was spying on my father?”
“And the others. The affair with Giovanni was over, of course, but they were still on good terms.”
“Torn between country and lover?”
“Yes, it’s partly why they started worrying about her. The quality of the intelligence she sent was poor. They wondered if she’d been turned, if the Soviets were using her. London knew Dylan was in Italy so they asked him to stay on, go to Elba and bring her back.
“Dylan could be quite a charmer, and Rosalind fell for him straight away. Giovanni was no intellectual, and she’d missed that, but Dylan was exciting, overflowing with ideas.”
“A holiday romance,” said Waldo sarcastically.
“Maybe, but she followed Dylan home, with you in tow. Your fantasy father took you away from your real one.
“They cleared her, of course, and she stayed in MI6, probably became Dylan’s handler. That’s when she started to weave her fantasies. There was no harm meant, she wanted you to have some roots, I suppose. So Dylan became your father, and poor Giovanni just an uncle.
“And that’s when the trouble started, wasn’t it? She wouldn’t let you write to him, or go and see him. She was wiping out the Italian side, filling it up with Dylan and Eliot. It’s not surprising you flipped, became the village delinquent, especially when you found out Giovanni was your real father.”
“I never understood the Eliot thing.”
“The fantasising took over, she lost control. It was an occupational hazard in MI6, the plotting and counter-plotting, bluff and double bluff... they lost sight of their real selves, and the real world, too.”
“Some of it was true,” said Waldo, scowling.
I was weakening now. My energy was ebbing, flowing away like the blood from my chest. The pain in my head from Waldo’s blow was so intense that each pulse, each heart beat seemed ready to explode. Waldo’s intent was now so clear that I could probably calculate how many more heart beats I actually had left. I thought again of Francesca, and the memory gave me strength. “Rosalind would certainly have met Eliot before the war,” I said. “There’s a photo of her standing with the Faber children outside Tyglyn.”
“Dylan loved me, you know.”
“He loved nobody, not even himself. It’s Caitlin you have to thank for everything.”
This time Waldo flinched in surprise. “Caitlin?” he said aggressively.
“Who d’you think persuaded Giovanni to leave you the hotel? She came back to see him when he was dying. Go to the Registry and see for yourself. She witnessed his will.”
“Why should she bother?”
“You were the son of Giovanni Chiesa that she never had.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The wife of your fantasy father was carrying a child by your real father.”
“Caitlin and Giovanni?”
“And then an abortion, but she never got over it. She mothered you instead, did more for you than Dylan ever did, or Rosalind.
“When was this?” asked Waldo suspiciously.
“In South Leigh. When you and Rosalind arrived from Elba, they put you in the caravan next to the house. It was Caitlin who looked after you, when Dylan was at the BBC and Rosalind was travelling up to MI6 every day. Caitlin’s little Italian boy, you were, the only one who knew the Lord’s Prayer in Latin.”
Not quite, I thought. More a nice Jewish boy bought up a Catholic in Italy, then dumped in cold and cheerless Oxfordshire, too dark-skinned for local people to be really comfortable about. Then spun a lie for the rest of his life about being Dylan’s son, or Eliot’s.
“Giovanni’s will was the last straw,” I continued. “You inherited the hotel and a bit of money but he insisted you went to Mass again.”
“It was nothing, a bit of ritual.”
“It was everything. A complete denial of your mother, your grandparents, the relatives in the Holocaust. For thirty pieces of Catholic cash.”
I cried with pain as Waldo grabbed my ear, and twisted it round his forefinger. “No wonder you’re so fucked up,” I shouted.
He pulled the lob towards him and cut across with the scalpel. Blood trickled down my face.
“Say what you will,” he said menacingly, “I still know how the Eucharist goes.”
He crossed himself, raised his arms and cried: “O Lamb of God that takest away the sinners of the world, have mercy upon him.”
“Wrong,” I said, wincing from the pain in my ear. “Take away the sins of the world.”
He stood silently grinning at me, holding a piece of my ear in his fingers. “Draw near,” he whispered, “to receive the flesh of thy dear Son.”
Then he leaned across and wiped the ear in the blood running down my chest. “The Body of Christ keep me in eternal life,” he intoned.
He put the slice of ear in his mouth and swallowed.
I was sick, shooting vomit across the floor. The cat scampered across to lick it up.
Waldo put down the scalpel and walked to the sink. He washed his hands, and went down on his knees. “Almighty God, we thank thee for feeding us with the Body and Blood of thy Son, whom we offer to thee to be a living sacrifice.”
He got up and came back across the room. “You see, word perfect. Did it disgust you? I’m surpr
ised. I took you for a church-going man.” He carefully polished the scalpel with an old napkin. “My love for Rachel was rather all-consuming,” he said, giggling. “The kidneys were especially tasty.”
I gagged again, but this time nothing came up. I thought of Rachel and wondered if she’d been alive when he cut off her fingers.
“Strange word, cannibal, don’t you think? A corruption of Carribean, some say. Racist nonsense, of course. Comes from Hannibal, Dylan knew that. What else had the men to eat when he took them across the Alps?
“The people round here got rather used to it, you know. Times were hard in the war. Then there was the Liberation. The French army came in 1944, mostly Moroccans and Senegalese. Drove off the Germans, and then the troops looted and raped for a whole week. That’s why there’re so many dark-skinned people on Elba, though I wouldn’t ever mention that if I were you. Anyway, the peasants came down from the hills and cut off the balls of the dead Senegalese troops. Took them home, fried them in batter and ate the lot. Good for the sex life, they said.
“Funny how people get the wrong idea about things. Take maggots. Wonderful creatures. Fisherman like them but nobody else does.”
Waldo walked across to the fridge, reached inside and took out an old margarine carton. “Did you know there’s over twenty-three thousand web pages on maggots? There’s even an international maggot conference every year!” He held the carton close to my face. “Look at these buggers. Best you can get, shipped across from the Maremma swamp.”
He put his hand in the box and scooped up a fistful of the squirming mass. “Take that wound on your chest. Could get a nasty infection, might lead to gangrene. In the old days, they’d put a handful of maggots in there, and in a day or two, you’d be right as rain.”
Waldo smeared the maggots across my chest and rubbed them into my sliced off nipple. The pain was a thousand razor blades ground in my skin.
“They’ll wriggle a bit till they settle in. They’ve got little hooks, you know, helps them burrow about in there.
“They’ll just gobble up the infected tissue, and leave the good stuff. Debridement, the medics call it, posh word for cleaning.”
I saw the front door open.
“Suppose you could say I’ve been a bit of a maggot. Took your bride away, didn’t I, cleaned out the old marital infection.”
A man came in, someone I’d never seen before. He walked slowly across the room to Waldo. “Debrided your miscegenous marriage, didn’t I? Ate up the necrotic Rachel. And what thanks do I get?”
Waldo felt the draught blow through the door, and half turned to see who was there. He swung round and lunged with the scalpel but missed. The man grabbed Waldo’s arm and tried to force it downwards across his knee. Waldo hit him savagely on the chin with his fist. The man staggered back and Waldo came at him with the scalpel again.
Then Cressida came through the door with a machete in her hand. She brought it curving through the air towards Waldo. He turned to fend off the blow, but the blade sliced cleanly through his forearm. Blood spurted out, covering my hair and face, filling my eyes, horse-tailing over my lips. He staggered sideways, his arm hanging loose, held on by a flap of skin. He swung at Cressida with his other arm. She hit him again with the flat edge of the machete. “You’ll be dead in a minute if you don’t stop that arm bleeding,” she said coolly. Waldo spat viciously at her and ran out through the door.
“Time to take you home,” she said, coming across to my chair.
“We must stop him.”
“Old Chinese saying: man with one arm can’t tie tourniquet. He won’t get far. By the way, this is Bissmire Junior, Daddy’s new driver, ex-paratrooper, obviously a bit rusty now.”
We heard the engine of the Edsel start up. “He’ll pass out before he reaches the bottom,” said Bissmire, in such a matter-of-fact voice that I looked up in surprise.
“Go and make sure. Follow him down.”
Cressida cut the thongs that bound me to the chair, and brought towels from the bedroom. I held one over my nipple to staunch the flow of blood, whilst she poured pitchers of cold water over my hair. “Let’s clean up this room,” she said when I looked respectable enough for Rio, and had a plaster on my ear.
“Were you going to kill him?”
“I had to make some pretty tough decisions in Africa,” she replied, throwing me one of Waldo’s shirts. “This was easier.”
Cressida set about scrubbing the floor. I wiped down the table and chair, and took the blood-soaked towels outside. Bissmire was coming back up the track. “The car went over the edge,” he said. “Gone up in flames.”
We went into the house. Cressida had placed a half-empty bottle of grappa on the table, and was searching for a glass to set beside it. “Let’s go home. I’ve had enough of Italy.”
The track down was strewn with pieces from the Edsel, and a whole bumper had come off on the first sharp bend. Not long after, we found the break in the wall where the car had finally gone over the side. It had fallen to the bottom of a small ravine, and was still burning fiercely, standing end-up against a small cluster of carob trees.
“Bissmire and I will take the next ferry out. You stay and settle up with your landlady, say goodbye in the Karl Marx, just do the normal things.”
“And the police?”
“It’ll be weeks before they find what’s left of Waldo.”
“No reason for them to think it wasn’t an accident,” added Bissmire.
“Which is exactly what it was.”
“One grappa too many on a treacherous mountain track.”
* * *
We’ve been living together now for many months. When we arrived back in Ciliau Aeron, Cressida insisted she stayed until my injury was properly healed, and she has never left. I think she was more interested in my emotional trauma than the breast wound because she treated me like a patient who needed to talk things through. I resisted jumping onto her Freudian couch, but we got into bed instead and made love for only the second time in all those years since we’d first met. The only therapy I felt I needed was to shave off my hair, which Dai Dark Horse did on a wet Saturday morning when there were no fishermen pestering him for bait. But it didn’t work and the smell of Waldo’s blood was as strong as ever.
Cressida found a job, working with special needs children in the county. She learnt conversational Welsh very quickly, and even joined the local Women’s Institute. I gave up private sleuthing, and started to write a book on T.S. Eliot and his connections with Cardiganshire. It won’t be about Rosalind and Waldo, but about the poems Eliot wrote whilst staying with the Fabers in Tyglyn Aeron. I found a long-neglected archive in the National Library which shows that ‘Burnt Norton’ was inspired by Ciliau Aeron.
And then we had a baby, a lovely girl who we’ve named Rachel. She turned out to be the final block in re-building relations between Cressida and her elderly parents. Naturally, they were worried about the future of their baronial pile when they died. Cressida’s their only surviving child, and will inherit everything. We haven’t told her parents, but when the time comes we plan to turn the mansion into a home for war orphans from Afghanistan. This would be a much quieter revolution in the fortunes of the estate than Cressida planned all those years ago when she was a Communist.
Of course, all they care about at the moment is their new, and only, grand-daughter. They’re already talking about private nurseries and prep schools and setting up a trust fund, but we’ve firmly told them that Rachel will be going to the village school, and will be taught in Welsh like everybody else. But we did accept a loan from them to buy a house. A new relationship, we decided, needs a fresh start. So we bought an old farm on the other side of the village, where we are now comfortably settled in, with all the packing boxes cleared away and the books in their proper places on Billy Logs’ pine shelves.
Mother and baby were fast asleep upstairs, after a long and exhausting night. Having a baby in middle age is wonderful but sometimes I worried a
bout whether we would cope with it physically. I poured myself a gin and tonic, and began to open the presents that had come for Rachel, most from Cressida’s friends all over the world. There was one parcel from Spain that particularly intrigued me. It was addressed to “Baby Rachel” which I thought strange, because the name wasn’t really known outside the family.
I’d started to take off the wrapping paper when Cressida knocked twice on the floor, the signal for a pot of tea. I took some up, clucked over our beautiful baby and came back downstairs. I found some scissors and cut away the rest of the brown paper, revealing a red plastic lunch box. It gave off a strange smell, pungent, like burning, yet sickly sweet, too. Smoked artichokes, I thought, sun-dried and dunked in olive oil and peppers, but what a peculiar present for a baby, though her parents would certainly enjoy it. I peeled back the lid.
Inside were the charred remains of a man’s hand, and a black-bordered card that said:
Before death takes you, O take back this.
Stop/Eject
Disturb no winding-sheets, my son,
But when the ladies are cold as stone
Then hang a ram rose over the rags.
The Sergeant knocked on the Inspector’s door, and went straight in. “There’s something new on the Rachel Pritchard murder, sir.”
The Inspector looked up with a welcoming but wary smile. There’d been no progress on the case for months, and the Cambrian News was kicking up a fuss. “Sit down, Sergeant.”
She pulled up a chair beside the desk, and laid a single piece of paper in front of him. “It’s a fishing circular from Interpol, sir. Apparently, our previously unhelpful colleagues on Elba are asking for a little assistance.”
The Inspector pushed the chair back from his desk, and nodded thoughtfully.
“They’ve found a burnt out car up in the hills. Belonged to someone,” said the Sergeant, pausing for effect, “called Waldino Chiesa.”
The Inspector nodded again. It had come through his in-tray some time ago but he’d given it very little attention before passing it down. “Sounds more like a distraction than a new lead.”
The Dylan Thomas Murders Page 17
