Read Make Room for the Jester for Free Online

great murderers.
    ‘So Ashton Vaughan is back at last.’ Her black eyebrows,thick as a man’s, swept up. ‘Are you quite certain, Lew?’
    ‘That’s who he said he was.’ I tried a description. ‘He’d been drinking,’ I said.
    ‘That’ll be him! My word, won’t this cause a stir in the old town…’
    ‘Why, then?’ I said. ‘Why should it?’
    Polly went mysterious – the way she did when sex came up. ‘Events of the past,’ she whispered. ‘The wheel going full circle.’
    I’d realised at tea, as Owen spoke, that I had heard a great deal about the Vaughan brothers. Polly, however, brought it all into sharper focus. In 1920, she said, Marius and Ashton Vaughan had fought it out, with knives, down there by the harbour. It had taken all the policemen in Porthmawr to part them; that scar on Marius Vaughan’s cheek was a relic of that night.
    ‘Then Ashton vanished from sight. Hardly a word of him until today…’
    ‘But why did they fight?’ I asked.
    ‘Brothers born to hate,’ Polly replied, and left me hanging on for more. It was a fatal mistake to cross-examine her. I had to wait until she was ready to tell me.
    ‘Their father,’ she continued, ‘went to sea with Tada there. As a matter of fact, Marius Vaughan always has a word to say to Tada.’
    Polly said it as if it was an honour or something – just as Owen had admitted that the Vaughans were better than that crowd of shopkeepers up on Hillside: the Vaughans had fought it out brother against brother, but they were somebody and it was an honour when they spoke to you. It didn’t make sense.
    ‘Poor as a church mouse, their father’s family was, but my word he picked up some money from somewhere, that man did. Robbing poor sailors, I shouldn’t wonder. Serving bad food on those ships of his.’ She touched the Captain’s hand to see if he was still warm. ‘More money than I’d care to mention in coasters in those days. That’s what Tada used to say. And he used to wonder how William Vaughan made it, I can tell you. Born in those old houses used to be by the gasworks there – the ones they took down in 1930. Those old slums. Made all that money. Built that big house on the Point. Bought up all that property from the old Estate.’ She lowered her eyebrows so that I could no longer see her eyes. ‘Ways and means, dear. There must have been ways and means.’
    She jumped up suddenly and put the ear trumpet to the Captain’s ear. ‘Do we want to wee-wee?’ she roared, so that the Chinese plates did a dance on the wall. The Captain shook his head, opened one small blue eye and gave me a wink, then closed it again.
    ‘ He never made money,’ Polly said, ‘and he was a master mariner, Tada. Ways and means, dear.’
    ‘Stealing?’ I said.
    Polly sniffed the air. ‘Who knows, dear? But he made it all right.’
    I risked the question. ‘But why did they fight?’
    Polly’s reply told me I had been too early with it. ‘They fought all the time,’ she said. ‘They even fought in Capel Mawr.’
    ‘Did they go to Capel Mawr?’ I said. We went to Capel Mawr, too – well, we went to the Mission by the harbour which belonged to Capel Mawr. We didn’t have clothesgood enough for the big building itself. The shopkeepers on Hillside set the standard.
    ‘They went when they were small.’ Polly gave one of her shudders. ‘Marius Vaughan doesn’t go anywhere. He doesn’t fear God. He doesn’t even fear the Devil, that man.’
    ‘An atheist?’
    ‘Well – he threw the Rev A. H. Jones out of his house. Threw him down the steps, they say – put him in bed for a week. That should make him an atheist…’
    And that was something else I’d heard, of course. Hadn’t someone – Meira probably – said the Rev A. H. Jones had been too much of a Christian to bring a case against Marius Vaughan? And hadn’t Owen said the Rev A. H. Jones had been too scared of Marius to do so? Owen never went to Capel Mawr or anywhere else.