Fast Forward 1

Out of a bower of red swine
Howls the foul fiend to heel.
I cannot murder, like a fool,
Season and sunshine, grace and girl,
Nor can I smother the sweet waking.

The Sergeant leaned across the table, and switched on the tape machine. “Now then Les, the bloke had his head bashed in, the crows were pulling out his brains like worms.”

And Les, still dreaming of topless gypsy dancers, and wondering if he’d caught anything from a tasselled Andalucian nipple dunked in his wine glass, said: “The first time I saw him I was in Miss Hilton’s front garden, cutting the heads off in the borders, that’s what she asked me to do. A car pulled up, a big red Volvo, with a black roof rack, and National Trust stickers, not local. He got out, there was no-one else in the car with him. He came up the garden path. He had to go past me to reach the cottage but he didn’t say a word. Miss Hilton answered the door. ‘Stillness,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘Acquisitions and Disposals.’ I couldn’t see her face but she sounded very surprised. ‘Good heavens,’ she said. They went inside and I carried on in the border.

“Yes, definitely Stillness. No, I didn’t catch his first name.

“Ten minutes later, Waldo turned up, angry, black as thunder, nostrils wide like a dog outside the butcher’s. He sniffed round the car, not bothering I was there, then he emptied this plastic bag over the windscreen. Jesus, guts everywhere, blood and slime, and big rolls of intestines which he wrapped round the wipers. Then he went to the back of the car, took something from his pocket, and jammed it hard on the exhaust pipe. A rabbit’s head, fresh too, by the look of it.

“No, I didn’t say anything, it’s not my place. We know he’s not always right in the head, but we look after him as we can. He’s one of us, and that’s good enough for me.

“Dylan Thomas? I know nothing about him and Waldo.

“Anyway, Waldo ran off across the fields and I thought I’d better get out of the way, so I went round the back. Next thing, this Stillness was marching across the lawn, shouting and swearing. I told him I knew nothing about it. He threw a punch and I hit him back solid in the stomach, and he went down, just a bag of wind, nothing to him. He fetched up and I fetched the bike. I went up to the square to sit with the lads. He came past later, driving like fury, but I don’t know how far he’d have gone with a rabbit’s head on the exhaust.”

And the Inspector, who’d once known the real Polly Garter down in New Quay, pulled out his notebook and said: “Dylan Thomas wrote wonderful poems.”

“Isn’t it funny,” remarked the Sergeant, “how most poets die young.”

“My father said it was the biggest funeral he’d ever been to.”

“My auntie says he died of AIDS in New York.”

“I believe,” said the Inspector, dreaming of a Ferris wheel in which Dylan aficionados turned forever, “that the CIA had him put down.”