by Phil Rickman
Have you asked her?’
‘Indirectly. We had a big row last night. Ended with me driving off and sleeping in the car. My fault… as usual. When the job’s going well, I’m not there; when it’s not, I’m there but I’m flamin’ unbearable. I could stay on in Hereford, work me shifts, gradually mature into the mellow – but secretly bitter and twisted – old DI who lets the youngsters buy him pints and passes on his wisdom.’
‘How would it be if I had a chat to Kirsty?’
‘And let her know I’ve been telling yer all this? Look… I’ve gorra fair bit of leave owing, as you can imagine. It’s been suggested that I take it now. Kirsty thought it might be a good idea if we left the kids with her ma and went away for a week to try and get ourselves sorted.’
That was a very good idea, Merrily thought.
‘That was what the row was about,’ Bliss said.
Merrily closed her eyes in despair. ‘Oh, Frannie, you clown.’
‘I can’t leave it like this, Merrily. I’ve gorra know.’
‘Know what, for heaven’s sake?’
‘If I was right!’ Bliss leaned heavily on the table, spilling sugar, making his mug and spoon rattle. ‘You know what they’re saying now? You know what Fleming’s saying? He’s saying that what we’re looking at with Roddy Lodge is a one- off, bog-standard, common-as-muck domestic. That he strangled his girlfriend during a drunken barney, figuring he could cover it up with no fuss, but when we pulled him, being the kind of cocky sod he was, he gets carried away with the big-killer image. That was Fleming’s first assessment of the situation. In other words, he’s saying Roddy Lodge, serial killer, was created by me.’
‘Oh.’
‘And then he talks to Roddy’s GP, and then he consults Moffat, the forensic shrink who confirms that Roddy was exhibiting absolutely classic symptoms of advanced manic depression. You see where that’s going?’
‘It…’ Merrily hesitated. Lol would know for sure, but she had ‘a good idea, and it fitted all too well. ‘They lie, don’t they?’ she said glumly. ‘Manic-depressives lie on an industrial scale.’
‘Exactly.’ Bliss smiled icily. ‘In the manic phase, they may tell extravagant lies, which can be very convincing because they half believe it themselves. If it isn’t the truth, they believe it ought to be. In other words, they boast about things they haven’t actually done.’
I done tanks for all the nobs all over the Three Counties and down into Wales. I done Prince Charles’s fuckin’ sewage over at Highgrove.
Bliss said, ‘Fleming’s pointing to one thing in particular that Roddy came out with when he was up the pylon. He said he was gonna kill Madonna – we have all this on tape, of course, thanks to some local smart-arse with a video camera. You yourself said he claimed to have done Madonna’s drainage in the Cotswolds. And of course, Madonna doesn’t even live in the Cotswolds – he got that wrong. Her place is down in bloody Somerset or somewhere. Roddy Lodge never got closer to Madonna than pictures in the News of the World.’
‘But what about the other two? Melanie Pullman and the girl from Monmouth.’
‘They’re saying I offered those names to him and he went for them with his tongue out. They say my style of questioning was antiquated and inept, given that we’ve no proof that either of the women are even dead. To deal with it once and for all, Fleming’s hired another firm with five diggers. They’d excavated about fifteen more Efflapures by yesterday.’
‘Nothing?’
He didn’t even answer. Merrily didn’t know what to say. If Roddy Lodge in fact hadn’t been a serial killer at all, if there weren’t any more bodies buried, then that was surely the best possible outcome… except that Frannie would be seen as an ambitious but misguided detective who’d driven a man to his death – a man who, if hardly innocent, was certainly guilty on a far lesser scale than… Oh hell.
Bliss put his hands behind his head and stretched out his legs, talking flat-voiced to the ceiling.
The last thing Fleming said, yesterday afternoon, was that if I’d suggested to Roddy that he’d killed Lord Lucan’s nanny he’d have gone for that, too. He said I was dangerously naive. He said that in my craving for fame and glory, I was probably only slightly less manic than Lodge himself. He said the combustible combination of Lodge and me had created something it was gonna take West Mercia a long time to live down. He said – finally, he said that if he didn’t see me again for the rest of his career he’d consider himself a very fortunate man.’
His hands fell away from his head and he slumped in his chair, his lips compressed into the kind of smile you put on to ward off weeping. He didn’t need a Catholic priest; this was his confession. Merrily wondered if he’d told any of it to his wife; she feared not.
‘Which I thought spelled it out very nicely,’ he said after a while. ‘Pastures new, Frannie, and don’t expect a reference.’
She didn’t even like to ask what Fleming was saying about the incineration, allegedly by Lodge, of Nevin Parry.
Bliss stood up and walked across to the window. ‘Another option, of course, is for me to quit the Service altogether.’
‘Frannie, this is just one man. He might move on himself.’
‘Doesn’t matter. Marked me card now. No, I’ll do exactly as advised: take two weeks off. Use them as best I can.’ He turned away from the window and came up to where she was sitting. She could smell dried sweat on him. She could smell anxiety and frustration, a toxic mix. ‘I’m telling you he did it, Merrily. He did Melanie Pullman and he did Rochelle Bowen. And maybe some more. I could see it in his eyes, I could feel it in me chest. Somewhere, there are bodies.’
‘Oh.’ It was what she’d been afraid of. If the maverick loner cop was history, the suspended cop determined to clear his name was movie history. Anyway, Frannie’s situation was, in a way, worse than suspension: his conduct would not be investigated, the investigation would simply continue without him. An investigation that was no more now than a tying-up of loose ends. Nobody was in danger; the beast was dead, and perhaps he hadn’t been that much of a beast after all.
‘I’m gonna find them, Merrily.’
‘What – commandeer Gomer and Lol again?’
‘I’d pay them.’
‘Frannie, you’re bonkers. You don’t even have anything to go on, do you? You wouldn’t know where to start.’
‘Well, I would, actually,’ Bliss said. ‘If, for instance, we talk about the piccies on the walls—’
‘Part of his fantasy. Despite all this chatting up in pubs, making a fool of himself when he was in his manic phases, he was actually afraid of real live women; he only felt truly safe with dead ones.’
‘Aw, you’re just—’
‘I’m just saying what the shrink’s going to say. I don’t recall you had much to say about Lodge throwing his weight around in the police station. Subdued… uncommunicative… sick… didn’t want to leave his cell. “Hunched up into himself” – I think that’s what your phrase was at the time. The word depressive somehow springs to mind.’
‘All right, then.’ Bliss sat down again. ‘Let’s go back. Put yourself back in that bedroom for a minute. Look at the bed with the nasty black sheets. Sniff the air. Now look at the pictures in half-light from the low-wattage bulbs, so that they’re not like pictures any more; they’re actual shadowy women, right there in the room with you. Flickering about. Moving in the dark. And you know they’re all dead.’
‘But he didn’t kill them.’
‘Tell me you couldn’t feel the evil in there, Merrily. Tell me you couldn’t feel it. As a priest.’
‘I don’t… I don’t know what I felt.’
‘I know what I felt.’
‘It still doesn’t make too much sense, Frannie. You don’t have any kind of scenario for Roddy Lodge as a mass murderer. You don’t even know why and in what circumstances he killed Lynsey Davies, do you? What happens if you don’t find anything to support the theory you don’t yet have? What happens if
you go blundering about and you don’t find anything at all?’
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.
24
On the Sofa in Roddy’s Bar
‘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.
‘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 am
ong 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.’
