Make Room for the Jester (15 page)

Martha stopped screaming immediately. ‘Let them hear,’ she said sulkily. ‘Everybody should hear…’

‘Have yourself a cup of tea and calm down,’ Gladstone told her. ‘Wipe your face, too. It’s a proper mess.’

He came back and crouched with us at the hearth. ‘All got cards, then?’

‘Your face would be a mess too if you’d heard what I’ve heard,’ Martha said. ‘Murder in Porthmawr…’

Gladstone put his cards down. ‘Murder? Tonight?’

Martha had a mirror up in front of her face now. ‘Don’t ask me. Don’t ask me because I won’t tell you. I’ve been insulted enough. Coming home upset like I did, and getting the cold shoulder. Just don’t ask me, that’s all. I’m not telling anything.’

‘I heard about it,’ Dewi put in. ‘Know all about it, as a matter of fact…’

‘You never do, then. How long’ve you been here? Been here an hour or more, haven’t you?’

‘At the pictures it was,’ Dewi said. ‘James Cagney shot the other one – bang, bang, like that. Everybody’s heard…’

‘Which one?’ Gladstone’s question was a whipcrack across the room.

Martha lowered the mirror. ‘I’m not telling you any more…’ her voice trailed away, and she began to sob again. ‘Ashton,’ she said, ‘brother killing brother. Ashton killed his brother dead!’

We were on our feet, Gladstone running to the door. I had followed him without thinking, was running now at his side down Lower Hill. Behind us Dewi and Maxie followed, Dewi saying murder, murder, murder, over and over again. There were no lights anywhere. Porthmawr was a dead town, murdered, dead.

At the edge of the Square, Dewi cried out in pain and fell to his knees. We all stopped and crowded around him.

‘Dewi’s shot!’ Maxie cried. ‘Bullet came from over there!’

‘Bullet my ass,’ Dewi groaned, ‘got a stitch, that’s all!’

‘Oh – come on,’ Gladstone said sharply, and turned away.

‘Where to?’ Maxie asked. ‘Where we going?’

I heard Gladstone gasp in the darkness. He came back to
us. ‘Don’t know,’ he said in a voice so changed that I thought it was one of the others who had spoken. ‘Don’t know.’

‘Police station, that’s where,’ Dewi said as he struggled to his feet. ‘Where else would we go?’

‘That’s right,’ Gladstone said, and set off across the Square in the direction of Market Street. Maxie and I followed with Dewi, who was limping badly and cursing.

The light outside the police station must have been the only one in Porthmawr that night, and there was a small crowd, all caps and shawls, standing under it, talking softly. At the top of the police station steps stood Constable Matthews, thumbs hooked in top pockets, stiff with importance.

Gladstone pushed his way to the front. ‘Is it true, then?’ he was saying. ‘Is it true?’

Ned Evans turned with beer on his breath and said, ‘Hell aye, boy. Shot him dead, see.’ Ned was a South Walian and spoke very quickly. ‘Housekeeper comes home, see – and there’s Ashton sitting in a chair, the gun on his knees, and the other one on the floor…. Bloody pantomime for you, that is…’

‘Shouldn’t talk like that,’ Gladstone said.

Ned Evans bunched up a big collier’s fist. ‘Not telling me the way to talk, are you, boy?’

‘You haven’t the slightest idea what’s behind it,’ Gladstone said, sticking his ground.

Ned Evans laughed. ‘By God, now – is that right?’ He turned to the crowd. ‘Hey lads, here’s Martha’s boy – knows all about the
motive
and all, see.’

‘Go and sober your mam up,’ someone said to Gladstone.

‘Oh – be careful now. He’s a
great
friend of the
Vaughans, that one…’ there was a lot of laughter… ‘oh, hell, aye – a very great friend.’

Constable Matthews came down the steps, stiff-legged, but quick. ‘What’s going on, then? All this laughing.’

‘Constable,’ a beery voice broke out, ‘someone here that knows all about it. Knows the
motive
, see.’

There was more laughter.

‘Any more of this,’ said Constable Matthews, ‘and I’ll clear the lot of you…. The Super…’

‘Missing a bit of
evidence
, you are,’ someone said.

‘Come on,’ I whispered. ‘Gladstone, come on.’

I pulled at his arm. He held firm for a while, then gradually backed away with me.

‘He’s
escaping
,’ a voice cried. The laughter rippled across the crowd.

‘Now then,’ Constable Matthews was saying, ‘warned you, haven’t I? Clear the lot of you, that’s what I’ll do.’

I pulled Gladstone back. ‘Never mind them,’ I said. ‘Come on home.’ He allowed me to do it, too, but once away from the crowd he shook himself clear of me and walked off into the darkness. I saw his face briefly before he vanished: it was all broken up, like old china.

Meira and Owen were on the doorstep, waiting for me.

‘No right to be out with murders going on,’ Meira said, and I felt a terrible contempt for her. What did
she
know about it, anyway? And there was Owen launching straight into
his
version, as if he’d been there, as if he understood…. But I stayed up with them a long time just the same, and listened to it all…. Marius on the floor, half his face blown off by the shotgun; Ashton
sleeping
in the chair when the
police burst in; a mirror shattered on the wall….

‘Bad luck, breaking mirrors,’ Meira said. ‘Where was that blondie, then? Eirlys Hampson. Was she there?’

I would have stamped off to bed there and then, only I was afraid that the Vaughans would be there, waiting for me as soon as I closed my eyes.

Porthmawr next day came to a dead stop with the wonder of it. Wherever you looked people stood talking and
tut-tutting
and glancing up at the sky and doing the shiver that meant someone was walking over their graves. Voices were pitched at low, faces had a funeral set; and there was a tension in the air that was full of what had happened, and what would happen, and fear.

But not for Polly.

She had sent me out for the papers, had examined each report carefully through her magnifying glass, like a lawyer studying a brief. She was Portia, suddenly, precise and careful of speech, and brimming with jurisprudence.

‘Hang him, will they?’ I asked.

‘See that,’ she replied, tapping the
Mail
, ‘Porthmawr spelt wrong, such ignorance. Never make a mistake with Addis Ababa, do they?’

‘Hang him, though?’

She placed the glass down carefully and stood, then smoothed down her black dress, then stroked her high, white forehead with the tips of thumb and forefinger. ‘We know the procedure, don’t we?’ she said. ‘Monday morning, Magistrates’ Court. That’s the official appearance for the remand. Then they’ll take him away until they have the case ready. Prison, of course. Now – there should be a coroner’s inquest, I think.’ She looked at the
Family Lawyer
next to the Bible on the sideboard. ‘I’ll have to look that up….’

‘The court will be here – in Porthmawr?’

‘Scene of the crime, cariad,’ she said, ‘won’t it be marvellous?’

Oh, poor old boozy Ashton Vaughan, I thought.

‘We know what
that
verdict will be, of course. Then will come the Assizes. Judge
and
jury. The black cap.’ She mimed it for me. ‘The judge passing the sentence. “You shall be taken to the place whence you came…”’

Be quiet, be quiet, I wanted to say, this isn’t one of the great murderers, for God’s sake. Be quiet.

But Polly’s prophecies never materialised. Fate, as Owen said, stepped in. Ashton never got as far as the Assizes, never as far as the Magistrates’. He appeared in court, though, on that Monday morning, and the charge was read out. Super Edwards kept the public out, but of course everyone knew what had gone on.

‘How do you plead…?’

I was standing outside the police station with Dewi at the time.

‘Guilty, that’s what he’ll say,’ Dewi said. ‘I plead guilty but insane….’

‘Not that,’ I protested, ‘can’t say that.’

‘Course he can,’ Dewi insisted. ‘His brain’s pickled in alcohol…’

‘But he can’t say that.’

‘All his nerves have rotted away,’ Dewi went on. ‘That’s the last stage – when it pickles the nerves. Then you’re insane.’

Dewi was wrong, too. Ashton Vaughan had appeared before the magistrates that morning, and had been asked the question.

‘Got to go to the lavatory,’ he’d replied.

The question was asked again, and Ashton had told them his bowels were giving him hell. Then Super Edwards had said, ‘Mr Vaughan, we have to know how you plead – guilty or not guilty?’ And Ashton, loud and clear, had answered, ‘Guilty, you silly bugger. No lawyers by request.’

That was the story we heard that day, and everyone said it had come from Super Edwards himself. Ashton had been remanded in custody – we all had procedure and phraseology right to a T – and he’d been taken, not to a cell to await his escort, but to the lavatory. Ten minutes later they broke the door down when he didn’t answer, and they found him sitting there, dead.

‘Poison!’ Porthmawr cried hopefully, and they were wrong again. Ashton Vaughan had had a heart attack.

Monday was a day to remember. We were surfing along on the waves of tragedy, not sorrowing perhaps, but living at a new pitch of excitement.

‘By God, it’s like the pictures,’ Dewi said.

‘Like Capel Mawr drama, only better,’ Maxie put in.

We walked the town all day, hoping something else would happen. None of us mentioned Gladstone. None of us suggested that we go and see him, either.

On Tuesday the town was still tight-lipped and tragic. Two brothers dead, they whispered, one by his own brother’s hand, the other by the hand of fate. The ravens of the hunting Vaughans had come home to roost… that’s the kind of thing they were saying. In a prayer meeting at Capel Mawr that day, the Rev A. H. Jones added his voice: ‘The mills of God grind slowly,’ he said, ‘but they grind exceeding small.’ It was a quotation that caught on, was repeated by all the Bible-punchers in town, eyes half-closed and all.

By Wednesday, however, the wave of tragedy had hit shore. The jokers were out. ‘He died with his pants down,’ was a favourite. ‘The killer never pulled the chain,’ was another. Dewi had them all off pat. ‘Know why Ashton bumped off Marius, then? Wouldn’t let him have any toilet paper, get it?’

I thought of Gladstone and Eirlys Hampson. ‘Shouldn’t say things like that,’ I said.

‘Come to Jesus,’ Dewi jeered, so we had a fight.

‘Heard this one,’ Meira said at dinnertime. ‘Old Evans Cymric Dairy – know how
dry
he is, don’t you – said it would never have happened, the shooting I mean, if Ashton had taken his working medicine regular. “Should have had his Andrews, missus fech, like the rest of us,” he says.’

‘Not right,’ I said.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Meira said. ‘Didn’t really like the Vaughans, did you?’ She giggled. ‘Can’t help laughing, neither.’

And that was true. It was wrong, but you had to laugh. Like the town, I was tickled too – it was no use pretending I wasn’t.

‘Heard this one down the dole,’ Owen said. ‘Poem. See if I can remember: “Ashton Vaughan did live on gin, It rotted away his brain: Shot his brother – oh, what a sin, And forgot to pull the chain.” Like it, then?’

Meira liked it so much she had the hiccups.

‘So there we are,’ Rowland Williams said, ‘both dead at one fell swoop, and the town wetting its pants laughing. The interesting thing about us is this craving we have for the comic. Anything, we have discovered, at the right time, can produce the belly laugh – and that’s their real love, Lew. They’ll never admit it, mind; none of us will. We like to think – in the small hours, times like that – of our tragic existence; we like to think of the
nobility
of man. But the frame is so grotesque, so comic, Lew…. What we see in the mirror is so ripe for the big belly laugh, so we let fly with a typhoon of laughter, and the world is doubled up, eyes streaming. He was watching himself in the window of the workshop as he spoke, gauging there his gestures with the chisel. ‘In the twentieth century there is no place for
Hamlet
, Lew – follow me, do you?’

‘Well, Mr Williams,’ I began.

He threw the chisel down. ‘What I am saying, boy,’ he went on sharply, ‘is that we are unwilling, probably by now incapable, of recognising and appreciating the dignity of man. Are you with me?’

I nodded, but he wasn’t looking at me.

This laughter is a killer,’ he went on, and he was angry now. ‘A killer – tell Gladstone Williams that, will you? Tell him to shape his mouth in a grin straight away, tell him quick, Lew, before the howls and screeches drown him…. Oh, by God, he’s taking a chance, that boy – never a smile, never a giggle…. You tell him I said this laughing’s a killer. Tell him I said that.’

Then, suddenly, and for the first time to my knowledge, Rowland lost his temper. He picked up a mallet from the bench and flung it into the far corner of the workshop. It made a clatter and raised a cloud of dust, and left a silence deep as eternity. Rowland never turned to give me a grin of apology, either – just stood there looking at his reflection in the workshop window. I left him like that.

‘Cheated the gallows,’ Polly said sorrowfully. ‘Have they fixed the inquest, then?’

‘Friday – after the funeral.’

‘You’ve got to try and get in – understand? I want a full report – who said what – everything. And you can watch the funeral for me, too. Can’t leave Tada, more’s the pity.’

Poor old boozy Ashton Vaughan, I thought. Were all the great murderers like him?

Dewi and Maxie and I joined the crowd across the road from the police station on the morning they buried the Vaughans. We were moved along twice by Constable Matthews, but we shuffled back and waited in the sunshine with the rest.

The clock on St Mary’s church struck ten, and the first of the coffins came out. Hats came off. All talking stopped.
The coffin went into the first hearse – Marius or Ashton? I wondered. Then came the second coffin, and at that moment I saw Gladstone. He was on the other side of the road, wearing a black suit that looked new to me, a white shirt and a black tie. He was carrying two bunches of flowers. He looked fine – taller, somehow, and distinguished.

I gave Dewi the nudge. ‘Gladstone.’

‘Going with them by God,’ Dewi said, and the crowd murmured as if echoing his words.

As the second coffin was pushed into the other hearse, the Rev A. H. Jones came down the steps with the Vaughans’ housekeeper. He helped her into his car and took his place behind the wheel. In the car behind his were a couple of Capel Mawr deacons, and after them Super Edwards and a sergeant in the police car. There was no sign of Eirlys Hampson.

Car doors were closing, engines starting up, but nobody, I felt, looked at anything or anyone but Gladstone. He stepped off the pavement and walked very slowly past the cars to the second hearse. The driver of the hearse came out, then opened the back of the hearse and let Gladstone place one bunch of flowers on the coffin. They walked together to the first hearse. Super Edwards got out of his car and stood by it on the pavement, watching. Gladstone put his other bunch of flowers on the coffin then said something to the driver. They walked back to the second hearse, and Gladstone opened the cab door and squeezed himself in next to one of the bearers. Super Edwards got back in his car, the funeral moved off, and all around me the mouths hung open, but no one was saying a word.

Dewi, Maxie and I, after the last car had gone past, stepped out in the road and watched them until they disappeared around the corner of St Mary’s Crescent.

‘Let’s follow,’ Dewi said.

We walked to the corner, then fell into a trot down the hill towards the cemetery. We gave them plenty of time to clear from the entrance before we went in, and even then we kept our distance.

From where we were standing by the trees we could only hear a murmur of what the Rev A. H. Jones was saying; he didn’t take long anyway. I was watching Gladstone, so stiff and straight by the open graves, his arms tightly clasped across his chest, his head lowered. It was a clear, sunny morning. Beyond the cemetery wall you could see the mountains, very cool and clean looking.

‘Two graves,’ Maxie whispered. ‘Should have buried them together.’

Dewi turned on him fiercely. ‘One of them murdered the other, old fool,’ he said.

Then it was all over, and the Rev A. H. Jones was leading them all away, the housekeeper crying on his arm. I saw Super Edwards turn to Gladstone and say something, then Gladstone left the graveside and walked towards the gate. The Super and the sergeant smiled at each other, and whispered: having a joke about Gladstone, I thought.

‘I’ll give him a whistle,’ Dewi said, but Gladstone never turned. He walked on to the gate and we saw him climb into the front of the hearse. He was a stranger to us that day, but even so I wanted to go after him and tell him I’d seen the smile on the Super’s face. But I didn’t. I stayed there by the trees and watched the two gravediggers get on with their job.
 The inquest was at two. I ran over to the police station straight after dinner, knowing full well there was little chance of getting in, but even so I hardly expected the doors to be closed and already a crowd outside.

Dewi and Maxie joined me. ‘Been shut for half an hour, them doors,’ Dewi said. ‘Full house – like Saturday night pictures.’

‘Seen Gladstone?’

They shook their heads, and we took up position at the edge of the crowd. The coroner and the police doctor, wearing black bowlers, marched up the steps looking important.

‘See them two going in now,’ Maxie said, ‘police special detectives. Scotland Yard.’

‘Gerraway!’ Dewi said.

I had no idea how long an inquest took. I wasn’t even sure why there should be an inquest at all now that both of them were down the road there in the cemetery. By three o’clock my legs ached with standing, and all the crowd around me had begun to look like birds of prey. Then, shortly after quarter past three by the church clock, the door opened. Constable Matthews came out first, then Gladstone, then Super Edwards.

‘Gladstone,’ Dewi said. ‘Trouble!’

Super Edwards looked angry. He held Gladstone’s arm with one hand and pointed down the steps with the other. You didn’t need to hear to know that Gladstone was being ordered out.

‘Thrown out,’ Dewi whispered. ‘Like us at the pictures!’

Gladstone came slowly down the steps, shaking his head. Super Edwards and the constable went back inside. The door closed behind them.

‘Come on,’ Dewi said. ‘See what’s happened, then.’

We ran across to the police station gate, but the birds of prey were there before us, crowding around Gladstone, yelling their questions. We tried to charge our way through to him, but they were scrum-tight. A loud cheer arose. We backed away to get a better view over their heads, and there was Gladstone pulling himself on to the wall, hanging on to the railings. Oh, God, I almost cried aloud, let him get down.

‘Quiet then,’ someone shouted, ‘quiet for the main man.’

Gladstone nearly slipped off the wall, but managed to hang on. ‘I will,’ he cried, ‘I will tell you what I told them in there.’ He made himself more secure on the wall so that he was facing them directly. He looked better now, fine in fact, but I still wanted him to get down.

‘Threw you out, did they?’ someone cried.

‘What’s it about then? A bit of quiet, boys, so’s he’ll tell us….’

Men at the back of the crowd were standing tiptoe and whispering that it was Martha’s boy, pal of the Vaughans, bit of a bloody young fool, queer and that.