You have seen the grainy footage of the white tent in the back garden. You have caught the documentaries on a wet Sunday afternoon. You have argued over a pint about how a quiet Gloucester terrace ended up with twelve young women under its floors and patios. The headlines gave you the bones of the case. They never gave you the brain.

This audiobook gives you the brain.

Forget the lazy version where Fred is the leering monster and Rose is the puppet. That story is comforting, and it is wrong. What was happening behind the door of twenty five Cromwell Street was a perfect partnership of two damaged minds who recognised each other on a Gloucester pavement in 1969 and never let go. He was the cheerful workman with the missing wiring. She was the watchful schoolgirl with the kind of stillness that should have warned somebody, anybody, years before the digger went in. Together they built a small private kingdom of cellars, hooks, rope, and silence, and the country walked past it for a quarter of a century without a flicker of suspicion.

Inside these chapters you will meet every one of their victims as a person before you meet them as a body. You will sit in the front room while a young woman called Lucy waits for a bus that is never coming. You will stand on a doorstep with a mother holding her dead daughter's slippers in a paper bag. You will see the eldest West daughter buried under her own mother's washing line while the family carries the joke about her for seven years. None of it is sanitised. All of it is necessary.

This is the case as you have never been allowed to hear it before. Stripped of the tabloid theatre. Stripped of the easy good and evil. Stripped of the comforting distance that lets you put the audiobook down and tell yourself it could not happen on your street. It could. It did. And by the last page you will know exactly how.

You will not sleep well after listening to this. That is rather the point.