ARROW OF DESIRE
‘That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.’
SHAKESPEARE, HAMLET
Halfway between a smirk and a leer, never quite a grin, it was a naughty boy’s smile, a smile that hints he’s got away with something, but no one is ever quite sure what. It was the smile that Frederick Walter Stephen West hid behind throughout the fifty-three years of his life, his mask against an inquisitive world. Looking back, it was a smile to send a shiver down the spine.
Frederick West was a small, spare man. Five-feet six in height, barely ten stone in weight, he would have looked quite at home at a fairground, tearing the tickets for the dodgems, winking at the girls as he helped them into their car, then standing on the back as they made their first tentative movements across the rink. West would always have jumped off – just as they started to scream.
His eyes were as sharp as a poacher’s. Startlingly blue, darting out from beneath a shock of dark curly hair, they were the eyes of a man who always knew what he wanted, eyes that never missed a movement, particularly from a warm-blooded furry animal. The Herefordshire countryside that bred him infused every fibre of his body, just as it haunted his voice.
When West moved, it was always quickly. The noose would be around the rabbit’s neck before the animal had a chance to move, the pheasant caught by the wire before it could blink. Success was always greeted with an ugly, gurgling snigger, once heard, never forgotten; a dark sound to accompany the sparkle in his eyes.
Never afraid of being dirty, his short strong fingers were forever soiled in offal or manure, clay or mortar, which he would wash off in the cattle trough at the side of the field or the tank waiting to be plumbed into the house on the building site. If there were no hot water, he never craved it. A cold stream from a hosepipe in the garden would do just as well at the end of the day. He would often sit down for supper wearing only underpants and a vest.
Frederick West may not have been able to read or write, but that rarely inhibited him. He could talk, and talk he did, incessantly; bragging about his prowess with women, boasting about the size of his motorbike or who he knew ‘in the right places’, nudging and winking his way through the world, forever ready ‘to sort things out’, never afraid to ‘shoot round’ and ‘help someone out’, anything to keep himself busy.
For West was not a lazy man, any more than he was a stupid one. His intelligence was born in the fields and woods on the very edge of Gloucestershire and Herefordshire, honed in the thickets of the countryside, nurtured in a world in which it was sometimes safer to kill a man than to kill a hare, a delicate skill that he brought to the city of Gloucester, and to the prey there was to be had there.
His hands were large, with the thickened thumbs of a man used to manual labour. He prided himself on being one of the best trench diggers ever to work on a motorway, just as he did on his record as a press operator in the light fabrication shop at Gloucester’s Wagon Works.They were the hands of a man who was not afraid of the feel of steel or blood.
Blood did not terrify Frederick Walter Stephen West. He was not afraid of it any more than he was afraid of the sound of a cracking bone. He had grown up with the sharp tooth-edge of violence, the rabbit hit with a pickaxe handle as it runs out from the corn, the pig hanging in the kitchen for its blood to drain away, the chicken caught by a fox leaving its trace of blood in the snow.
When he talked about blood, West would sometimes laugh to himself. But it was not a generous laugh, born of affection and kindness. It was a lascivious, wolfish laugh, the acknowledgement of an illicit pleasure, a laugh that made others uneasy, though they could never quite put their finger on why. It was the laugh of a man who was not afraid to inflict pain.
To a gamekeeper, the laugh made Frederick West seem innocent; that and his endless stream of chatter. The naughty wink, the suggestive story, the knowing leer, all rendered him approachable, unthreatening, an obsequious Jack the Lad at the end of the public bar with a pint of cider and a bag of crisps. What could be a more effective disguise? West never presented himself red in tooth and claw; he was too careful for that. Instead, he took refuge in the ordinary, the banal. Who could take offence at that? Even a policewoman might be won over.
Women were Frederick West’s only hobby. He did not keep pigeons, do the football pools, or dream of Disneyland. Instead, he craved the company of women, vulnerable women, creatures who could be seduced by his relentless, eager talk. His was an unexpected charm, a persistence that never faltered. Women were sexual objects to be conquered, and then displayed as trophies, the only truly worthy prey.
It was no accident that one of Frederick West’s nicknames was Freddy the Fox – ‘’cause nobody can work me out’ – for beneath the endless chatter, weaving its spells and fantasies, behind the smirking laugh, tailored to cajole, there lay a ruthless wickedness a wild creature might scent in the air, a ferocious, slippery violence capable of freezing a rabbit on the edge of a cornfield.
Though he would always call it love, lust was the light that illuminated the life of Frederick West. Learned as a child, burnished as an adolescent, and given full rein in adulthood, there was no limit to his priapic desire.To him, it was as natural as the stoat’s pursuit of a leveret in the moonlight. There was no shame to be drawn from victory when it came, only pleasure.
It was an evil love, as the world would come to know.