by Phil Rickman
‘Yeah, I know Three Counties.’
‘They don’t pay much, but it’s good experience for a young reporter. You get to see your stories in the big papers – usually under somebody else’s byline, but it’s a start. Also the big papers get to know you. You can make an impression.’
‘But he wasn’t at the news agency when he wrote this, was he?’
‘No, he was in London by then, working on a national, but in quite a lowly position. But then the West story breaks, and he gets them to send him back to his old hunting ground. And he comes up with some heavy dirt. He knew exactly who’d been in Cromwell Street when all the murders were happening, all the torturing in the cellars. He knew exactly who to go to for the inside stuff. His paper was very pleased with him. Never looked back. Within a year he’s an assistant editor in features and writing Jenny Box’s column, and the rest is… as they say.’
‘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.
CLOSING CREDITS
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.
www.corvus-books.co.uk
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
October 1995
Part One
1. Foul Water
2. Pressure
3. Something Ancient Being Lost
4. A Good Name
5. Denial of the Obvious
6. Demonizing Roddy
7. Legs Off Spiders
8. Nil Odour
Part Two
9. Phobia
10. Caffeine
11. Just How Funny It Gets
12. Dark Lady
13. The Tower
14. Recognizing Madness
Part Three
15. Holes
16. The Glory
17. Expecting Confession
18. Up
19. On Angels
20. Stadium Rock
Part Four
21. Icon
22. Aura of Old Hippy
23. Nothing But the Night
24. On the Sofa in Roddy’s Bar
25. The Plague Cross
26. Black Sheep Kind of Thing
27. Lamp
28. Bloody Angels
29. Seeing Marilyn
30. Light and Sparks
31. Good Worker
Part Five
32. Ariconium
33. Empty Heart
34. EH
35. Sackcloth
36. Dying of Guilt
37. Long Old Nights
38. Bit Player in a Fantasy
39. Good at Men
40. Big Shoes
41. A Rainy Night in Underhowle
42. Vampires
Part Six
43. Fun Palace
44. Void
45. Execution
46. Mephisto’s Blues
47. Requiem
48. The Mak
e-over
49. Apocryphal
50. Fuse Your Dreams
51. Sacrificial
Epilogue
Closing Credits
Back Mater
