Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

Merrily—’

‘I seriously think you should follow Kirsty’s suggestion and go on holiday somewhere quiet and uncomplicated with good food, nice views and room service, and spend a lot of time talking to one another. She’s throwing you a lifeline, if you could only see it. At the end of the week, if you play your cards right, who knows how the situation might’ve changed? I mean, I’d be the first to miss your famous scowl around the place if you went back to Merseyside, but—’

‘Merrily, I do have a scenario.’

‘What?’

‘Lol tell you about the attaché case? The one Gomer dug up just behind Roddy’s bungalow before he went up the pylon like a monkey?’

‘Possibly. I—’

‘Stay there.’ Bliss stood up. ‘Don’t go away.’

Bliss didn’t have the actual case any more. The case had gone to the lab.

It had been so lightweight that they’d thought at first it was empty, he said. He didn’t have the stained and crumpled newspaper cuttings that had subsequently been found inside, either, but he did have photocopies, and if she’d give him a minute he’d fetch them from his car on the square.

This just doesn’t go away , she thought. Why doesn’t it go away?

When he returned, she saw that the old briskness was back, his caffeine eyes burning through the fatigue.

‘Whatever this is, should you be showing it to me?’

‘Merrily, I shouldn’t even’ve taken the copies away. Who gives a shit?’

He dropped the A4 buff envelope on the kitchen table and slid out a stack of papers. He spread them. Merrily recoiled.

Headlines snarling, headlines pleading, headlines shouting outrage, black on white, hard and contrasty and unremittingly ugly.

IN THE DEPTHS OF EVIL

THE PREDATORS

THEY GREW INTO MONSTERS

A LETHAL LUST

‘I don’t understand.’ Even though they were only copies of copies of old newspapers, she didn’t like to touch them. A low cloud of black-flecked smog was almost visible above the heap. Bliss fiddled about in the papers and brought out one with a font that looked, among the rest, almost comfortingly familiar: the Hereford Times .

INQUEST ON REMAINS FOUND IN FINGERPOST

FIELD, MUCH MARCLE

‘It’s funny how many people mentioned it when we were in Underhowle,’ Bliss said. ‘We never thought. It’s only about eight miles away, Marcle, as the crow flies. Nothing really, is it?’

‘Sorry, I don’t—’

‘Much Marcle?’

‘Frannie…?’

Merrily froze up.

The table was whited out by ghastly flash-photo images: bodies under concrete in a cellar in Gloucester, police digging up red Herefordshire fields. A series of young women raped, tortured and butchered over a period of twenty years. Gloucester Council had demolished the house and talked of eradicating the name of Cromwell Street, but both Gloucester and the village of Much Marcle, in Herefordshire, would retain the memory of this man and his vicious wife for ever. An evil you couldn’t see through because there was nothing on the other side but the night.

‘HOW MANY?’

‘Twelve, officially. Including his first wife and two daughters.’

‘But probably more.’

‘Oh, yeh,’ Bliss said, ‘could be a lot more. The estimates range from twenty to sixty. The little bastard kept careful count, I’m sure of that, even if he could never remember their names. Very efficient, in his way – this is what people don’t realize. Most serial killers, they relish the reputation, the drama of it, the fancy names the papers give them: The Night Stalker , all this shite. They enjoy that sense of ritual. With him, that was no big deal at all. He just had an extremely skewed sense of right and wrong. He didn’t relish being evil, because he couldn’t see himself as evil. It wasn’t a concept he understood. This is a man with a big part of him missing, and the space filled up with something black.’

‘Yes.’ Merrily was finding all this sickening, didn’t see the point, wished they were still into marriage guidance.

Bliss had hung his jacket over a chair back. Now he was unfolding one of the cuttings, flattening it out.

‘This is the important one. Not the article – the photo.’

The picture under the headline, though embellished with the smuts and smudges of hasty copying, had a feeling of formality. A flash photograph, carefully posed, of the two of them. Merrily was sure she must have seen it before.

Even if you didn’t know who he was and what he’d done – what they’d both done – you would automatically have given him an identity: maybe the one-time randy paper boy grinning over his handlebars, grown now into the backstreet grease monkey who would guarantee to get your banger through its MOT for twenty in hand or – Seeing it’s you, my love – a tenner and a kiss.

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.