Phil Rickman: The Lamp of the Wicked

‘But you think the real history…’

‘Young reporter in Gloucester in the late seventies, finding ‘his way, earning peanuts. In need of some cheap accommodation. Merrily, there is so much… so much gossip about that place, and he may not have been the only young journalist to have spent some time there. There are – as I’m sure you’ve heard – even suggestions that some lads who dropped in for an occasional leg-over had to take off their dark blue trousers first. But Box – yeh, we’re pretty sure about him.’

‘Oh God, Frannie.’ Merrily was wide awake. ‘He was also a director of Efflapure.’

‘Yeh, and Lynsey Davies knew somebody at Efflapure and was thus able to bend somebody’s arm to put the area contract Roddy’s way.’ He did his acid smile. ‘The Old Cromwellians, eh?’

‘And he liked young girls.’

Bliss nodded.

‘You knew all about that?’

‘Mrs Box didn’t leave a note, and it’s always nice to know why they do these things, isn’t it? The general feeling is that he only married her because… well, because she was famous and earning more than him, but also because she still had the look of a teenager who’d been given bad drugs and then beaten up.’

‘Yes.’

‘By mid-morning, Annie Howe even had the names of four of Box’s ex-girlfriends, all with bad memories. And a fifth, who’d… disappeared some time ago.’

Merrily poked mindlessly at the fire.

A deep-embedded evil .

She looked up. ‘You think he killed? You really think Box killed?’

‘One thing you learned at Cromwell Street,’ Frannie Bliss said, ‘was how easy it could be.’

‘And he knew Lynsey…’

‘And you’re thinking about Donna Furlowe.’

She nodded and wondered how much Jenny Box had known, and what else Jumbo Humphries had been able to tell her. The enormous, holistic connections her mystical mind must have made as she waited for Gareth Box, with the iron cross held high.

‘Don’t you sometimes feel,’ Frannie said, ‘when these horrible little coincidences occur, that there’s a wider plan, and it isn’t always constructed by somebody with our best interests at heart?’

‘I don’t get paid to feel that,’ Merrily said uncomfortably.

That night, she prayed by the landing window overlooking the square. She didn’t see a woman out there with a white scarf over her head.

But she found she still had Melanie’s angel, and she slept with it under her pillow.

NOBODY WHO HAS studied the Cromwell Street case believes it was satisfactorily resolved or even, in the end, fully investigated – there is a limit to police resources. Estimates of the number of West victims still undiscovered range from ten to more than forty. All over Britain, there are relatives of missing women and girls who are unlikely ever to know whether their worst fears are justified.

The idea that the guilt extends beyond Fred and Rose is not new but is still rarely spoken of. Researching this book, I was told more unpublished West stories than I could reasonably use. The Black Dai story is true; a thirty-two-year-old man was jailed for life on 4 December 1996. The Terry Crick story is also true.

I owe particular thanks to West’s official biographer, Geoffrey Wansell, who knows more about Cromwell Street than anyone should ever have to. For information about the West case, electricity, radiation, EH, septic tanks, Ariconium and other related issues, many thanks also to: Rosemary Aitken, Penny Arnold, Caroline Boots at GPU, Krys and Geoff Boswell, William Corlett, the Courtyard, John Deeley, Paul Devereux, Kate Fenton, Philip Grey, Paul Harrison, Prof. Dennis Henshaw, Michael Howard, Prof. Bernard Knight, Mike Kreciala, Rebecca Lacey, John Mason, John Mayglothling, Ed Richmond, The Electric Shop at Ross, Lisle Ryder, Andrew Taylor, Rebecca Tope, Hereford Samaritans and West Mercia Police at Hereford, who were very accommodating and probably very grateful not to have Frannie Bliss in the CID room. Thanks also to Gruff Rhys, of Super Furry Animals for permission to quote lines from the excellent album Rings Around the World .

I leaned heavily on three books on the West Case: An Evil Love by Geoffrey Wansell, Happy Like Murderers by Gordon Burn and She Must Have Known by Brian Masters. Also Paul Britton’s The Jigsaw Man . The more bizarre effects of electricity and the hot-spot phenomenon are discussed in Albert Budden’s Allergies and Aliens . You can find out about Ariconium in Brian Cave’s The Countryside Around Weston and Lea (The Roman town of Ariconium and its district) , which may be out of print now but was published by The Forest Bookshop, Coleford, where I got mine second-hand.

Frankly, this was not exactly an easy book to write, and I relied throughout on the judgment and penetrating editorial skills of my wife Carol, who spent many weeks disentangling it and pulling me back from the brink of excess. The songs from Lol Robinson’s Courtyard gig can be found on the CD, Songs from Lucy’s Cottage , obtainable through the website www.philrickman.co.uk. The background and locations for The Lamp of the Wicked are explored in Merrily’s Border by Phil Rickman, with pictures by John Mason, published by – Logaston Press.

One day the whole truth may come out. But I’m not holding my breath.

PHIL RICKMANwas born in Lancashire and lives on the Welsh border. He is the author of the Merrily Watkins series, and The Bones of Avalon. He has won awards for his TV and radio journalism and writes and presents the book programme Phil the Shelf for BBC Radio Wales.

THE MERRILY WATKINS SERIES

The Wine of Angels

Midwinter of the Spirit

A Crown of Lights

The Cure of Souls

The Lamp of the Wicked

The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

The Smile of a Ghost

The Remains of an Altar

The Fabric of Sin

To Dream of the Dead

The Secrets of Pain

THE JOHN DEE PAPERS

The Bones of Avalon

OTHER TITLES

Candlenight

Curfew

The Man in the Moss

December

The Chalice