Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

‘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 attaché 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 as…’

‘Can’t say there’s no solid precedent for it, can you?’

‘Yes, but when you look at all the women Fred West killed and the one he didn’t kill…’

‘That’s because Rose was what she was.’

‘His soulmate – if he had a soul.’

‘And also found guilty of ten murders,’ Bliss pointed out. ‘And now in prison with a recommendation from the judge that she should never be released. Talk about star-crossed lovers – when you start to ask yourself what the chances are of two people that depraved finding each other within a small area of rural England…’

‘Yes.’ The aura of an almost alien abnormality lit the image of Fred and Rose, two people who’d formed into something that lived for physical gratification in its most twisted and degraded forms, mixing other lives at random into the bubbling sexual soup.

‘Lynsey might’ve put it about over the years,’ Bliss said, ‘and she might not’ve been on the shortlist for the Mothercare Trophy. But my guess is that when she posed for that picture she wasn’t aware of the true significance. So when she did become aware that she was posing as Rosemary West – well, how would you react?’

‘You’re saying he killed her because she found out and was threatening to shop him?’

‘Probably. We don’t know. We probably never will know.’

‘Who took the picture?’

‘Automatic exposure, I should think. There were two SLR cameras around the place, and a camcorder in the car. Lodge liked gadgets, just like Fred did. On the other hand, Roddy was different from Fred. He boasted more. Fred was talkative, but Roddy was loud. Yeh, it’s possible he got somebody else to take the picture – flaunting it a bit.’

‘Frannie, why did he go up that pylon?’

‘There was nowhere else to go. We’d got men on all the possible exits, he knew that. Maybe he stupidly thought we wouldn’t spot him up there in his orange overalls, and he could wait till we’d gone. He’d been up the pylon before, I reckon – somebody’d cut away the barbed wire they bind around the legs. Maybe he used to go up them as a kid. Like kids do – for a dare.’