The Islander: My Life in Music and Beyond by Chris Blackwell

Author:Chris Blackwell [Blackwell, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Music, General
ISBN: 9781788705769
Google: 2SBeEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Blink Publishing
Published: 2022-06-09T21:42:03+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

IMMACULATE CONCEIT

‘Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to tell a lie well.’

SAMUEL BUTLER, NOTEBOOKS

F

rederick West was a compulsive and felicitous liar. Lying came to him as easily as breathing, and required no more thought. It was as much a part of his personality as his relentless sexual appetite. But, like much else in his life, West brought a meticulous care to his lying. Throughout his life he had steadily refined a technique that made everything he said seem straightforward, but which also effectively concealed far more than it revealed. West would layer half-truth on half-truth – to disguise the lies beneath – apparently open and yet in fact obscuring almost everything of the truth. It was a technique that he must have used on the young women who became his victims, the apparently open-faced, talkative little man, who took pains to lace every sentence with an exaggeration or an irrelevant detail.

Ask Frederick West if he knew someone, and he would never answer directly, always asking instead where they lived, before digressing into an endless description of the best route to take to their house. Ask him if he had committed a crime, and he would embark immediately on a description of the events that might have led up to it, only then to digress again until it was almost impossible to recall the detail of the original question. West went to considerable trouble to seldom answer any but the most direct questions, and even then to do everything in his power to confuse and fog the questioner.

In his final year West explained his technique to Detective Constable Hazel Savage in an interview room at Gloucester Police Station. It was the first and only time that he ever did this, and it revealed the subtlety of his approach. ‘What happens is,’ West confessed,‘I’m talking away to them . . . and suddenly it comes into my mind, shit, I’m telling them the truth, you know what’s been going on . . . So then I shove something in there . . . to get away from it.’ This use of irrelevant detail, West admitted, was ‘because I want to get away from it, to give me a chance to think’. It was the only occasion on which West admitted that he knew when he was lying and when he was not, and how he managed to cope with the situation.The only difficulty he encountered was ‘that you get to a stage where you . . . just don’t know what you are actually saying . . . You’ve got everything mixed up. So you’ve got to try and get out of it, to give your mind a chance.’

West maintained throughout the 145 police interviews conducted at the end of his life that he would never explain anything to anyone unless somebody asked him the correct, direct question, and even then he would still lie rather than tell the truth.

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