The Lamp of the Wicked

Frederick West, in suit and shirt and tie, was leaning over the back of a sofa that had floral cushions. Behind him was a photomural of mountains and fir trees. Fred’s hands were resting around the shoulders of the woman sitting on the sofa – plump, mumsie Rosemary, his wife. Fred looked like he’d rather be doing something else to her; Rose looked happy about that.

Two big smiles for the camera, four eyes alight with twisted love and shared memories of dead girls.

‘Oh, it was an eye-opener for all of us, no denying that,’ Bliss said. ‘It shocked us out of our provincial complacency, Merrily. It actually shocked coppers.’

‘Look, I…’ She pushed the paper away; West wore a grin that could sear your dreams. ‘Maybe I should’ve read more about it at the time, but I couldn’t face it. When was it – ninety-five? I wasn’t here then. And I still had… some other problems, personal.’

‘I had nothing to do with him meself,’ Bliss admitted. ‘I’d not been down here long – still a DC when they were digging at Marcle. It was a couple of years later when I was in a pub with a sergeant from Gloucester, who once escorted West to a remand hearing, and this guy, he said that the worst thing of all, the very worst thing, was that you could actually get on well with him. One of the lads, good for a laugh. Of course you’d hire him to install your new bathroom – why not?’

‘And leave him alone with your wife while you were at work?’

Bliss inhaled through clamped teeth. ‘It’s easy to go through all the pictures now and say, yeh, you can tell straight off he’s an evil bastard. But if you didn’t know… I mean, look at him – an imp, a troll. Where’s the serious harm in him?’

Merrily chose not to look, for the moment. It hadn’t even registered at the time that he was a Herefordshire man. He was always ‘the Gloucester mass-murderer’ because that was where he lived, operating as a self- employed builder out of a tall terraced house in Cromwell Street. The house where Fred had promoted Rose as a willing prostitute, watching her doing it with other men, especially black men. Where the Wests had rented out rooms to young people who didn’t take too much luring into sex. And where the police had found most of the bodies of women and girls – buried in the garden or concreted into the cellar. Frederick West who lived for sex – and then killing became part of it. Fred West, the lust murderer, and Rose, his all-too-complicit wife.

But the killing had started long before Fred and Rose moved to Cromwell Street. It had started when he was a Herefordshire country boy, born and bred less than thirty miles from Ledwardine and only a ten-minute drive from Underhowle. This was where the police had gone next, after Cromwell Street, discovering that the roots of the evil lay deep in Hereford red soil – something Bliss now kept emphasizing.

‘I remember when the lads came back from Marcle. After they found the first body in the Fingerpost field. Probably his first victim, Ann McFall – tied up and strangled, stabbed… butchered. Here.’ His fingertips pressing into the pine top of the kitchen table. ‘A feller who grew up among farms, worked for a slaughterhouse. In the country, where—’

‘Where everybody killed, yeah. You keep saying that.’

‘And buried the bodies. To West it was no different from disposing of a dead ewe. He cut them up for more efficient burial. Efficiency – that was the only ritual for Fred. An efficient workman. An efficient workman always makes good afterwards. Is it really such a big step? I mean, if you can kill and butcher an animal, you’ve got over the queasy part, haven’t you? Only the morality of it left to deal with. And he didn’t have any of that, anyway.’

‘Frannie, can we just get to the point?’ Merrily felt jittery, like a child who couldn’t swim, standing on the edge of a frozen pond and watching a friend skating enthusiastically towards the centre. ‘He’s dead. He hanged himself in Winson Green prison while awaiting trial, and his wife’s serving life for her part in the murders.’ She pulled her cigarettes towards her. ‘And Jane will be coming down for tea very soon and when she does I really would like not to be discussing this stuff. Get to the point.’

‘You know the point. These selected articles were in an attache case buried in what would have been Roddy Lodge’s back garden, if he’d been of a horticultural bent.’

‘And are they – Fleming, the SOCOs – entirely sure that Lodge was the one who buried them?’

Bliss sniffed. ‘I don’t know what they think. They’re not telling me things any more. But I’m sure. And I’m asking meself, Why? Why did he bury them? Why didn’t he just burn them if he wanted to get rid of them?’

‘Was that all there was in the case – the cuttings?’

‘No. This is it. This is the point. There was one other thing – one photo which, to my great sorrow, I didn’t have time to copy.’

‘Of?’

‘So I can’t show yer it. But you’ve already seen it, in a way. It’s a happy snap of Roddy and Lynsey. In Roddy’s Bar. You remember Roddy’s Bar?’

‘In his bungalow? Neon sign, optics, tall stools, leather suite, copies of Loaded.’

‘The same. What this photo shows is Lynsey on the sofa in a nice red dress and Roddy in his suit and tie leaning over her from behind, like he’s dying to start pawing. Got his back to the bullfight poster. Smiling for the camera. Geddit? Identical pose to the famous shot of Fred and Rose.’

‘I may be starting to feel sick,’ Merrily said.

‘Well, hold on to it a bit longer.’ Frannie Bliss went over to his jacket and dug an envelope from an inside pocket. ‘Now then, I’ve gorra cutting of me own here. Andy Mumford put me on to this. Good memory, Andy.’

Bliss laid the paper in front of Merrily. It was from the Daily Telegraph, dated 5 December 1996.

LIFE FOR KILLER WHO COPIED THE WESTS

‘Frannie…’

‘No, read it first.’

It was the report of the trial at Cardiff Crown Court of a man from South Wales known as Black Dai because of his preference for black clothing. In 1996 he was thirty-two, a car thief who’d never had a proper job. He was obsessed with Fred and Rose West.

‘Oh God.’

Bliss said nothing. He sat down again. The phone rang in the scullery; Merrily let the machine take it.

She read that the prosecution had told the court how Black Dai had suggested to his girlfriend that ‘just like the Wests, they could travel the country, pick up girls, have sex with them and torture them’.

No. Merrily took out a cigarette then pushed it back into the packet.

The girlfriend had thought it was ‘just fantasy on his part’. Until Black Dai abducted a young woman from a pub disco in Maesteg, Glamorgan, and subsequently drove her sixty miles to Herefordshire, where he beat her to death with a wheel brace and dumped her body in woodland at a place called Witches Fell, at Symonds Yat.

Symonds Yat: just a few miles outside Ross-on-Wye. Five miles from Underhowle.

Black Dai got put away for life.

‘And I keep thinking what a great pity it was,’ Frannie Bliss said, ‘that we were prevented by a green young lawyer from letting you and Roddy have your little chat.’

‘And what do you think he’d have told me that he didn’t tell the entire population of Underhowle?’

If he’d opened up to you, we might not even’ve needed to take him out to Underhowle, Merrily. I’m thinking of when Gloucester pulled West in, and he was leading them a bit of a dance, until a woman social worker was brought in to look after his welfare while on remand. Seems she looked a bit like Ann McFall, the first victim, his first love – the words “love” and “victim” tended to be synonymous in Fred’s world – and pretty soon he was telling her everything. Out it came: possibly the full body count. No more ever found, but still…’

Merrily jerked upright. ‘That’s why you set me up for it?’

‘No. Honestly, swear to God, I had no idea then. Never even thought about West. And no, don’t worry, you don’t look remotely like Lynsey. She was twice as big as you, for a start.’

She had a flashback then to her one contact with Lynsey Davies, the nauseous blast of human decay from under a tarpaulin, a stench like a howl of pain and outrage. She pulled out the cigarette again.

‘Lynsey, however,’ Bliss said, ‘did look more than a bit like Rose. Bit bigger maybe – taller. But buxom.’

Merrily lit the cigarette. ‘You’re saying that Roddy saw her as his Rose-figure. That he saw the two of them