“They found blood traces in his cottage, and bloodstained towels buried in the garden.”
She noticed that the Inspector was hoisting his trouser leg up and down his white shins, a sure sign of increasing irritability. “It did strike me as odd, sir, that we’ve been looking for a Waldo Hilton who may have been on Elba, and then we get a message from Elba about a person called Waldino who’s gone missing from there.”
“Is that all?”
“My auntie told me that Chiesa means ‘church’, and our Waldo is a Hilton, which is a hotel, if you see what I mean, sir?”
“Frankly, no.”
“Giovanni Chiesa was Caitlin’s lover, sir...I’ve been doing my homework, you see. And he ran a hotel on Elba. It’s an odd coincidence.”
“Have you looked into it?”
“I’ve checked Births and Deaths, sir.”
The Inspector looked up in astonishment at the Sergeant’s initiative. “And what did you find?”
“Born in May 1948, sir, in the John Radcliffe, Oxford. Birth certificate says ‘Waldo Chiesa Thomas’.”
“Not Hilton?”
“No, sir. Caitlin Thomas was the mother.”
“So the father could have been Dylan or...”
“Most likely Chiesa, sir.”
“And where were Caitlin and Dylan living when the baby was born?”
“South Leigh, sir, just outside Oxford, after they’d come back from Italy.” The Sergeant looked nervously across the desk. “I went up there last week on my day off, sir. To see what I could find. We were sitting by the village pond when...”
“We?”
“My auntie and me. She was very keen to come, sir. We were on this bench, as I said, by the pond, when she noticed that one of the seats had a little metal plaque on it. Couldn’t believe my eyes – In memory of Waldino Chiesa, 1942-l948.”
“But you just said he was born in 1948, not died.”
“That was Waldo Chiesa, sir. The name on the plaque was Waldino.”
“So the man who’s gone missing from Elba died in 1948,” said the Inspector sarcastically.
“I was just as puzzled as you are, sir. A bit later, we went across to the pub for some lunch. My auntie started talking with some of the old boys in there. Apparently, Caitlin and Miss Hilton had gone up to London one day to buy clothes for the baby that Caitlin was expecting. They left Dylan in charge of Miss Hilton’s little boy...”
“Who was called?”
“Waldino, sir. Waldino Chiesa,” replied the Sergeant with a quiet sigh of exasperation.
“But I thought Miss Hilton’s son was called Waldo. He’s the one we want for the murders, Sergeant.”
“I’m coming to that, sir. Dylan took the boy with him down to the pub, and what with the beer and the darts, he forgot all about him. Waldino wandered off, fell in the pond and drowned. I’ve seen the death certificate, sir, no doubt about it.”
“Then who is Waldo Hilton?”
“My theory is, sir, that when Caitlin’s baby was born a month or so later, she gave it to Miss Hilton. Perhaps she didn’t want it anyway, but maybe it was an act of love, sir, a recompense, if you like, for Dylan letting Waldino wander off like that. We’ll never know, sir.”
“So Miss Hilton brought up Waldo as her own, a replacement for Waldino?”
“It looks that way, sir. Easy enough after the war to sort out the paperwork – especially if you had the right connections.”
“And the consent of the natural mother.”
“I feel sorry for him in a way – he never knew who his father was...”
“And now it turns out that the woman he thought was his mother actually wasn’t. We’ll probably have to tell him all this when we collar him.”
“I wonder how he’ll take it?”
“I should think he’ll be very, very upset. Anything else, Sergeant?”
“Just an odd coincidence, sir. When we were in the pub, one of the locals mentioned that somebody else had been in a few days earlier, also asking about Waldino and the drowning. A man with one arm, sir.”
The Inspector shuffled impatiently in his chair. “Why should that interest us?”
“Arrived in a taxi with a little baby. Couldn’t feed it himself, had to ask the landlady to hold the bottle. And she changed its nappy as well, she said.”
The Inspector looked at his watch, and stood up. “Time to move on, Sergeant. Perhaps we’d better ask Mr Pritchard to come in for a chat about all this.”
“I’d thought of that, sir, but his phone’s been off the hook for days.”
“Keep trying.”
“I’ll call round this afternoon, sir. See what’s what.”
With special thanks to Stevie Krayer for ‘Held holy and scuffed’, and Mary Overton for ‘For Francesca i.m’ (originally ‘Witch Penny’). And to Mick Felton, Liz Welch, Manon Hellings, Siân Hurst, Andrea Bianchi, Silveana Siviero, and the Dylan Thomas Estate and David Higham Associates for permission to use ‘Find meat on bones’ from Collected Poems 1934-1953.
Written with the help of a Writer’s Bursary from the Arts Council of Wales.
David Thomas is also the author of Dylan Thomas: A Farm, Two Mansions and a Bungalow and The Dylan Thomas Trail.
The Dylan Thomas Murders Page 18
