The Dylan Thomas Murders by David N. Thomas

that.”
    â€œDid you ever think how a woman could enter a men’s club and get hold of a member’s letters? No, it was Davenport. So they told Dylan that they’d send one of the love letters each week to Caitlin until he agreed to go to Iran. Of course, he caved in, and he went out to make the film. Araf passed on his list to Dylan to bring home. And that’s where it all went wrong.
    â€œDylan was supposed to take the list to Harold Nicolson, who would pass it to the Cabinet Secretary. But as soon as Dylan set foot in London, he went on the binge. He ended up in the Gargoyle with the usual cronies. Guy Burgess was there – he and Dylan had been great friends for a long time. He gave Araf’s envelope to Burgess: ‘Give this to Old Nick – save me going into the office tomorrow.’ Dylan was anxious to get back to Laugharne to repair things with Caitlin, and he caught the milk train that night.
    â€œBurgess, of course, opened the envelope, and found his name on the list. Three days later, Araf was killed in a car crash in Tehran, not an accident, Philby’s doing. It gave Burgess enough time to warn the others, and in June he defected to the Soviets, and the others went soon after.”
    â€œIt was Dylan’s fault they all got away?”
    â€œOh yes. And they took everything with them. Nuclear secrets, lists of our agents, defence deployments, the lot.”
    â€œYou’re saying that Dylan’s mistake helped the Russians catch up in the arms race?”
    â€œYes, the final irony. He hated those bombs so much. He was devastated. Didn’t write a line of poetry after that.”
    â€œAnd no more work for intelligence?”
    â€œOf course not. And in the end, they had to get rid of him. He’d worked out what the Americans were up to in Iran in 1953, and didn’t like it. The CIA intercepted his letters to Bert Trick. The last straw was his suing Time magazine. They couldn’t risk anything coming out. So the Agency leaned on the hospital.”
    â€œYou mean..?”
    â€œA winking injection too far.”
    â€œThat’s unbelievable!”
    â€œIt was the height of the Cold War. No chances were taken.”
    Â 
* * *
    I left Rosalind’s, drove home the back way, and called in to see O’Malley. The pub was packed and I could smell why. There were plates of roulade on the tables, most likely spinach or chard, chopped garlic sausages, and slices of fried aubergine. O’Malley came across, with a Brains in one hand, and a small plate of sausages and roulade in the other. “You know something,” I said to him as I picked up the beer, “when my mother was alive, we always had thin sausages.”
    She and my father ran an oil and hardware business. We had a shop on the main street of the village, and a green Commer van that toured the farms and council estates. Selling paraffin had been in the family for three generations. The business declined under my father’s stewardship and eventually he was declared a bankrupt. This was largely because of his liking for long holidays in expensive hotels (where he called himself Wing Commander, though he had never been near a plane in his life), and by his thirst for whisky and late nights in the back room of the Wheatsheaf.
    I was always eager to help on the Commer on Saturdays. Up at six, I would lay two fires and take tea to my parents in the middle bedroom, where it usually remained undrunk. Then I’d run to the yard where we kept the Commer and the stores. My job was to open up the old stable, and fill and cork two hundred bottles with parazone ready for the coming week.
    I’d usually be finishing just as Sid the driver arrived, and we’d load the day’s supply of parazone into the Commer on racks behind the passenger seat. Sid would drive us down to the shop. I’d grab some breakfast, and Sid would collect the leather money bag from my mother, who had