Leading Article: Questions for ourselves, too

WHAT makes the West case so peculiarly horrific - and, for most people, almost unbearable to contemplate - is not just the terrible savagery inflicted on the victims but the humdrum ordinariness of the perpetrators. The crimes of Brady and Hindley or Peter Sutcliffe, for example, were every bit as revolting. But their murders were committed where such murders ought to be - on lonely moors, where nobody can hear children scream, or on dark waste ground at the dead of night. The Gloucester murders were committed in an ordinary family home on an ordinary street. To all outward appearances, the Wests were no better or worse than many other poorly- educated and unprepossessing couples that you might find at the rougher end of a town: a history of petty lawbreaking, mostly involving drugs, motoring offences and stolen goods; a cheerful attitude to sexual promiscuity; harshly disciplined children who create "problems" at school; a murky family past. They were not even, by some standards, specially incompetent parents, insofar as their eight children were, by all accounts, "well turned out". Even now, as we gaze upon Rosemary West's plump, homely, bespectacled figure, we find it almost impossible to imagine her carrying out the awful acts of which she is convicted. Yet to her and her husband murder and torture were apparently just a routine part of family life, a pleasant evening or weekend diversion alongside DIY, chatting to neighbours and popping out to the pub.

Is it so surprising, then, that police, social workers and teachers failed for so long to detect what was happening? If friends, neighbours and relatives failed to notice anything untoward - the authorities received a few tips but not, in all truth, very many - it hardly seems fair to expect strangers to do so. For example, Fred West told a teacher that he had "laid Stephen [his son] out" - no doubt, the teacher should have alerted somebody but it is easy to imagine the remark being treated as a casual exaggeration. Again, the children had 31 treatments in 20 years at the local hospital casualty department - but why should busy doctors and nurses think of trying to link these visits into a pattern and why should they think it unusual for children in a large family to suffer frequent bruises and scratches?

This is one of several ways in which the West case makes us peculiarly uneasy. It challenges our notions of what it means to live in a modern, civilised, well-ordered society. Indeed, we often think we live in an over-regulated society. We are suspicious of computer records, official files, video cameras. We grumble about being watched, complain that "they" know too much about us. Yet the West case shows that it is perfectly possible for at least a dozen people to vanish quite without trace in the heart of England, to be as lost and helpless in Gloucester as they might be in the middle of the Amazonian jungle. Despite all the interviews with the Wests and those who knew them, despite all the combing through files of missing persons, it is still unclear exactly how many people Fred West killed. In all probability, we shall never know. This, too, disturbs our sense of balance. True mysteries - Jack the Ripper and so on - belong in other centuries. In our time, men can tell us what is happening on the other side of the universe. Yet we now realise that nobody can tell us what has happened to young women in the middle of an English cathedral city. If anyone, over the past decade or so, had an inkling of what had happened to them, they kept quiet, deciding to mind their own business. Our language is not kind to those who take a different attitude: we talk of busybodies, grasses, snoopers. And then, when something awful happens, we demand to know why "authorities" or "social agencies" failed to stop it.

The West case, as the prosecuting counsel put it, is beyond words. In a strange way, it seems incomplete, lacking the finality we expect from great criminal trials, partly because we suspect many victims are still undiscovered, partly because Fred West, the main actor, can never be brought to justice. Even the judge seemed unequal to the occasion, denying himself the usual end of trial lecture. But we should talk about it nevertheless and consider, not just the responsibilities of police, teachers and social workers, but our own responsibilities as members of a society that turns out to be not quite as we thought it was.