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 the 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 again. 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...”
There was a lot to make up for.
The great long-distance footpath, the GR5, passes through Briançon. The next morning, I picked up the trail just below the Fort du Château and headed east, skirting along the river Durance in dark pine woods, soon part of a long line of walkers, all with little plastic bags dangling from their rucksacks with their bread and cheese inside. By early afternoon, I reached Montgenèvre, “a hideous conglomeration of tacky modern ski resort architecture”, as Rachel’s diary described it. Here the path turns sharply northwards to the Col de Dormillouse, and I said farewell to the group of walkers with whom I’d spent the last few miles. I sat in a café eating hot dogs and olives, and when the customs man went home for his siesta, walked down the road to Italy. I caught the last bus out to Ouix, another ugly, sprawling town given over to skiing but now empty, save for its residents who were out in full force for the passeggiata. I found a room above a pork butcher’s shop, bought some salami from her and wandered down to the station to find out the time of the first train to Turin in the morning.
The journey south was hot, boring and noisy. The Espresso pulled out of Turin’s Porto Nuova with almost every seat taken by Piemontese undertakers and their wives going to a funeral services exhibition in Rome. By Genoa, I was fed up with their boisterous good humour and got off. I waited for the slow train to Pisa, where I patted the tower and bought a straw hat. I caught the Locale to Livorno, and just made the late afternoon ferry to Elba.
In Rio Marino, I found the Bar Karl Marx, and told them I was Welsh and that my father had known Aneurin Bevan. Soon I’d been found a room at the top of the town with a magnificent view of the bay. “Che bel panarama, signore,” said my landlady Signora Profetti, who warned me that there were 237 steps to the bottom of the town, and suggested I have dinner with her. She stewed some squid with garlic and vegetables, and told me of the time she had sung opera on the ocean liners to America. I wanted to ask if she’d met Dylan and Caitlin when they’d visited Rio but I was reluctant to say anything that might attract Waldo’s attention. I just wanted to look like an ordinary tourist, interested in minerals, good food and the flowers of the macchia.
The next day, I bought sunglasses and a paper, and hired a moped which I left chained outside the shop. I strolled through to the harbour, and found a table on the outdoor terrace of Da Alfonso’s, and decided it was as good a place as any to wait for Waldo. It had a clear view of the Banca Commerciale. If Waldo was here, he would need to come to Rio for money.
I sat in the café for five days before Waldo appeared. The time had gone quickly. There was enough to keep me busy just watching the locals and tourists going about their business. When the bank closed for lunch and siesta, I went off exploring on the moped. I also visited the museum and asked to see the script of Under Milk Wood that Dylan had written for Luigi Berti. I was nervous about this, in case it got back to Waldo, but it seemed silly to come to Rio and not see the script, if it existed – part of me believed that Rosalind had probably made the whole thing up. Yet I couldn’t dismiss all she’d said – she’d known about the path that ran along the cliff from the watch tower to Il Porticciolo, and she was certainly right about the Bar Karl Marx.
The Curator looked nonplussed but took me down into the basement to show me a room full of boxes. Signor Berti’s bequest to the museum, he explained, as yet unopened and uncatalogued. He could not guarantee that Dylan’s script was there because some of Berti’s papers had been pirated by the university in Florence. Still, progress was being made, and a committee had been set up to explore how the museum might fulfil the honour bestowed upon it by the late Signor Berti. These things take time... Yes, he remembered Signor Dylan, a kind man who gave the children chocolate and taught the miners “the English push penny” across the café tables. And Signora Dylan... truly a beautiful woman, very especial...
That evening, I did another stint in the café when the bank reopened, had dinner at La Cannochia, and ended up in the Karl Marx with the old comrades.
The bar was very much as Rosalind had described it. It reminded me of the salt beef cafés behind Leicester Square that were filled with photos of boxers, except that the Karl Marx was decorated from floor to ceiling with images of Communist Party leaders around the world. These were dominated by a line of black and white portraits of every Soviet President since Lenin. And, behind the bar, were the heroes of the Italian left. Gramsci had pride of place, with Togliatti, the two founding fathers of the Communist Party in Italy. Next to them was Giacomo Matteotti, brutally murdered by Mussolini’s fascist gangs, his body hidden in a barrel of salted anchovies, preserving sufficient evidence for his killers to be brought to justice after the war. It was indeed a place of homage.
The back wall of the café was laid out with as much care and reverence. This was entirely taken up with a series of photos of AC Portoferraio, matched against various clubs from the Soviet Union, most notably the Kiev Iron Workers XI. The side wall seemed altogether more eclectic, with an assortment of photos that included Marconi, Sophia Loren, Verdi, and Gianluca Vialli.
I didn’t notice Dylan’s photo until late in the evening, when the bar had started to empty. It was tucked away above the lintel of the café’s front window, and partly obscured by a climbing oleander. Carlo, the elderly owner, seemed delighted I was taking an interest, and immediately fetched a pair of scissors to cut back the leaves of the plant.
It was a portrait of a group in bathing costumes, signed “Webfooted Dylan, Porticciolo, 1947”. Dylan stood in the centre of the photo, with Caitlin on one side, and a young and beautiful Rosalind on the other. Curiously, the man next to Rosalind was not Ian Fleming but someone I didn’t recognise, perhaps a local, because he was deeply tanned. Even more curious, Rosalind was just as brown, unlike Dylan and Caitlin who had the blotchy patches of people on holiday who’d been in the sun too long. A little boy stood in front of Dylan, presumably Waldo, looking even browner than his mother. Carlo took the photo down, blew off the dust and polished it clean with a bar cloth. “You like Signor Dylan?” he asked.
I nodded. “A fine poet, a good Welshman.”
“A true socialist. Come.”
Carlo took me by the arm, and led me out of the bar. We went down through a dark passage to the back of the building. He ushered me into his living room which, like the bar, was full of photographs. On the far wall was an old oak door. I thought at first it was the way into another room, but then I saw it was screwed to the wall and hung some way off the ground. Carlo took me across. “My loved possession,” he said.
The door was riddled with splintered holes, some large enough for me to put my finger through. Just above was a piece of paper that had been framed and covered with glass. It was a poem, and the handwriting was very familiar. “Door come from old gabinetto,” said Carlo.
The holes, he explained, had been made by the Germans during the war. His sister, Francesca, had been out one day picking wild strawberries in the hills. She’d seen blood on the bushes and called some of the men from the Resistance. After a long search, they found a wounded American airman hiding in a cave. In darkness, they brought him to the town and made a bed for him in one of the café’s outhouses. He was soon fit and well, and ready to be taken off the island. But the day before he was due to leave, the Germans raided the bar. An informer, said Carlo, spitting on the carpet.
The soldiers came crashing into the Karl Marx in the early morning. Francesca dropped to her knees, and managed to crawl out from behind the counter. She ran to the kitchen where the American was making himself some coffee. There was only one place to hide him, in the space above the ceiling in the gabinetto. She dragged him inside and bolted the door. She sat on the toilet seat and he climbed on her shoulders to pull himself up. The Germans came down the passage. They shouted and banged on the locked door. Francesca refused to come out, the American was still not up in the ceiling. Finally, the soldiers opened fire.
They found Francesca slumped dead on the seat. The American had managed to get into the space above, and the Germans never found him.
“She gave up her life to save him,” I said.
“No, Signor,” replied Carlo, tears running down his cheeks. “She died to save family. If they find American, we die too.”
I asked about the poem. Carlo gave a big smile. From Signor Dylan, he said, written after Carlo had told him the story of Francesca and the airman. He reached out and gave me a chair to stand on so I could read it properly. There was no title, just a dedication:
For Francesca i.m.
Because you said I must not lose it
Not the beaming moon nor noonlight
Spy out its place
Bedded on an untended grave
Weighted by sea-deep coral brain
Below the owl-perch stone
Loss-fear brought midnight madness,
Daylight named it rage
I’ll climb the hill and fetch in flowers
You are not lost, only away.
Con sympatia, Dylan.
I climbed down. There were tears in my eyes now. “You weep for Francesca?” asked Carlo, putting his arm round my shoulder.
“For a friend,” I replied.
“A good friend?”
“A very good friend.”
We walked back to the bar in silence. “A grappa, Signor?”
I nodded. “The man in the photograph, next to Signorina Hilton?” I asked.
“Giovanni Chiesa.”
“Who kept the hotel where Dylan stayed?”
“The same.”
“And Signor Fleming? Did he take the picture?”
“The name I not know.”
“He came here with Signorina Hilton in 1947.”
Carlo looked confused. “Impossible.”
“They came on holiday.”
“On holiday? But Signorina Hilton live here in Rio many years. Why holiday?”
Now it was my turn to look confused. “But she came to see Dylan and Caitlin. They were old friends, from before the war.”
“Impossible. They meet for first time in Rio. I saw it myself.”
“In 1947?”
“Si, naturalmente.”
“Then who is this young boy?”
“Waldino Chiesa.”
My head was spinning, reality reeling away from me, pulled by a gravitational force I didn’t understand. “Giovanni was the father?”
Carlo gave me a pitying look. “Naturalmente.”
I sat down at the table near the window. Carlo bought me another grappa. “She was spy, working al coperto.”
“Under cover?”
“Si. Signorina Hilton, she came at start of war, dropped under paracadute. Special soldiers.”
“The SOE?”
Carlo shrugged his shoulders. “She teaching partisans. Blow up bridges, stop iron mines, help soldiers like the American. Very brave signorina. Then she hit.” Carlo grinned broadly, and drew back his arm as if he were firing a bow. “Giovanni send arrow.”
“They were lovers?”
“Si. Next she was... .” He paused, and blew out his stomach as far as he could. “... incinta.”
“With Waldino?”
“Si. She tells Londra. She must come home, she says, to have baby. No, they say, you stay. Baby good cover.”
“And she lived with Giovanni?”
“No, he had wife, so she have room in hotel, with baby.”
“Where’s Waldino now?”
“Here, in mountains.”
“Does he come to the bar?”
“No, I stop him, he always fighting,” said Carlo. “Un temperamento violento,” he added, tapping the side of his head with his finger.
“So what happened in 1947?”
“Dylan and wife come to Giovanni’s hotel. She fall in love with Giovanni. Dylan meet Signorina Hilton here in this bar first time. Never before. She fall in love with him.”
“And then?”
“Dylan go home to England. Signorina Hilton follow after.”
“And Waldino went with her, of course.”
“Naturalmente.”
I thanked him for his help and kindness, and said it was time to go. He shook my hand. “You are only person never offer money for door of gabinetto.” He reached below the bar, and pulled out a bulging file of papers. “Letters come from over world.”
I glanced through them, mostly American universities wanting the Francesca poem. “I never sell,” said Carlo. “Last year, Englishman come, not very nice.”
“Tall?” I asked, “with two small children?”
“Si,” replied Carlo, “and with very strong wife.”
Ogmore Stillness had indeed cast his net widely.
The next morning I came down to breakfast early but by the time Signora Profetti had fussed in the kitchen and dealt with early morning callers, I was way behind my schedule for being at the café before the bank opened. Then, Signora Profetti started complaining about my “milk skin.” I was, she said, “not healthy in the body.” I spent too much time in the café. She implored me to sit by the sea to let the sun “crack the damp joints.” Furthermore, she insisted I take off my trousers and wear shorts. Brown knees were a sign of inner peace. That I had no shorts was of little consequence. Her late husband had a drawerful and it would make him happy if I were to choose one.
I started the long descent to the harbour, wearing a pair of Signor Profetti’s tartan shorts. I waved goodbye, and earned a nod of approval from Signora Profetti by moving out of the shade into the heat. The sun was already hot enough to quiet the caged song birds that hung from every window. The air smelt of dog rose, drifting in from the macchia, and synthetic lemon steaming off the white linen hung out across the narrow, cobbled streets. And at every corner, as I turned to descend another flight of steps, the blue blistering sea, as Dylan had described it, called me onwards, gleaming and sparkling like sheets of polished steel.
I by-passed the harbour, busy with tourists waiting to catch the ferry, and walked out along the mole, past the rotting jetty where Dylan had watched the scorched and naked miners drag the rusty trolleys full of ore to the waiting ships. Half way out, I turned to wave to the top of the town, where I knew Signora Profetti would be watching to see that I had taken her advice. By the time I returned to the harbour, the sun had already turned my legs pink, and I was ready for a cold beer. I stopped at the stall outside the fish market, bought a bottle of nazionale, and sat in the coolness of a large myrtle tree, watching the crowded ferry head out to sea.
The bank had now been open an hour, so I hurried to claim my table at Da Alfonso’s. At the corner of Via Ginestra, I found myself caught up in a group of elderly women coming out from morning mass. The cool air from the church soothed my burnt legs and I was tempted for a moment to go inside. But the ornate interior seemed claustrophobic in its over-powering bad taste. As I curved like a tartan porpoise through the shoal of black dresses, I wondered about the cultural consequences of celibacy. If the Papacy had allowed its priests to marry, the post-renaissance makeover of its churches would have been far more tastefully achieved.
The Ford Edsel stuck out like a sore thumb in a china shop. For one thing, its colour, a red and yellow trim with a spruce green roof, and whitewall tyres. For another, it was parked in the illegal zone outside the Banca Commerciale. I stopped on the corner at the end of the Via Scaligeri and watched a group of schoolboys giggle at the vaginal contours of the car’s chrome radiator grill. I looked across to find my table in the café, and there was Waldo, sitting with two of the men from the lobster boats.
A policeman came out of the bank, pushing his wallet into the back pocket of his trousers, a Polizia Urbana, much resented for their speeding tickets and parking fines. He stopped beside the Edsel, and pretended to give it a polish with the sleeve of his uniform. Crossing to the café he embraced Waldo warmly, sat down at the table, ordered a coffee and started to tell a long story which soon had Waldo and the two fisherman laughing.
Soon the group stood up to leave. Waldo was much leaner than I’d last seen him. His hair was cropped short, and he wore a red bandana that made his hair spike upwards like cacti. He was wearing black overalls with faded tan cowboy boots, and a strange brass and leather belt that must have come from an Olde English pub. He crossed the road, and reached in through the open window of the Edsel to pull out some papers, before entering the bank. I ran down the little alley to the Via Magenta, and grabbed my moped from outside the hire shop. I jammed on the crash helmet and after two false starts got the engine going. No match for a Ford Edsel but good enough to keep me in touch.
“I knew you’d come eventually,” said Waldo. I was strapped to a chair, the front of my shirt torn open. I’d tried screaming and shouting but, as Waldo had pointed out, this high in the mountains only the buzzards would hear me.
He took out a scalpel from its protective plastic sheath. “I think Butcher Beynon got it right, don’t you?”
It had been easy enough to follow the Edsel from the bank. It wasn’t the kind of car you could miss. I’d come round on my moped just as Waldo was pulling away. He drove out along the coast, and then turned west, taking the high mountain road to Vetulonia. I’d visited the village on my second day on the island. It was one of the few that had resisted the Elba tourist boom. It had no hotel or shops, just one restaurant, hidden away in the basement of a villa where Napoléon once called on his Turkish lover, a young man called Mulini.
Just after the village, Waldo turned onto a dirt road, climbing higher through the wild macchia. I pulled up, and watched his dust cloud track up the mountain. I left the bike at the junction, and started walking. I could see from the map that there were not many places he could be going to.
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 surprised. 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 about 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.