Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  And no mention had been made of lodgers. About the fact that lodgers had most of the rooms on the first and second floors, making them effectively out of bounds. The front downstairs room, Mrs Green’s special room and the one where she had died, was Fred’s and Rose’s room. The door to the cellar was kept locked. Carol’s movements were restricted to the room she shared with Anna-Marie, the eight-year-old who was all over her, and the small living room on the ground floor. But where else was she going? She’d left school at fifteen, and had no concentration and had done no exams. All she wanted to do was get away from home.

  Fred West knew Cinderford. He’d grown up a few miles to the north, just over the county border in Herefordshire. His father was a farm labourer, and he had lived in and around farms all his life. As recently as five years earlier he had had a job that involved regular trips to Cinderford and the Forest of Dean. He drove a lorry around abattoirs, collecting hides and skins and offal. It was a night run and his route included Tredegar, Newport in Monmouthshire, Ross-on-Wye, and Ensor’s in Cinderford. They used to kill late at Ensor’s, which meant a wait. So he would pass the time sitting in the Telebar coffee bar at the bottom of the town. Carol used to get in there on occasions and, although she was only eleven or twelve and had no memory of ever seeing him, it is possible Fred West noticed her then.

  Northwood Close, where Carol had gone back to living with Alf Harris and her mother and all her half-brothers and sisters, including the two sets of twins, Adrian and Angela and Richard and Robert, was at the opposite end of the High Street in Cinderford to the Telebar. The Wests had taken care to drop her off outside her door in Northwood Close the night they gave her a lift home from Tewkesbury. And they were back there in the grey Ford Popular a few days later to persuade Alf and Betty to let Carol come and be their live-in help. They brought the three children with them to meet Carol and they were given tea and biscuits and a nice Sunday afternoon tea.

  A certain, not unhumorous, pageant of small talk and niceness was carried out. There was the Wests with their talk of ‘nurseries’ and ‘nannies’ and mortgage commitments, and Betty who was introduced to the Wests as ‘Liz’. This was the name she had switched to when she changed her last name to ‘Harris’, following her marriage and her move from Gloucester to Cinderford a dozen years before. Carol, too, had told the Wests her name was ‘Caroline’, and this was true. But all she had ever got in Cinderford was ‘Carol’ and the even shorter ‘Car’. Now she was embarking on a new phase of her life and she wanted ‘Caroline’ and the Wests seemed happy to go along. Alf, whose name Carol had always had difficulty pronouncing – it came out as ‘Halfred ’Arrison’, with the aitch in the wrong place – was still recovering from the heart attack that had brought Carol back from her Southsea jaunt. He came in from the shed just long enough to say hello.

  Alf didn’t say much, but it didn’t matter. Fred West did enough talking for them all. He hadn’t made any kind of effort for the occasion in terms of how he looked. Casually scruffy, you would have to say. But you wouldn’t say he looked dirty when he visited Carol in Cinderford. He was just scruffy, that’s all. The Wests didn’t really stand out that bad, to Carol or her mother. As looking … rough. ‘Nobody’, Carol remembers, ‘was that smart in them days.’

  They had a cup of tea and biscuits and a chat, and they agreed. Caroline had moved in with the Wests within a few days.

  Rose and Caroline would go shopping together, do the housework and cook together, and quickly settled into a harmonious routine. But, although there was only two years between them – Rose was nearly nineteen, Caroline coming up to seventeen – there wasn’t a lot of common ground. Caroline had been to nightclubs and hitched all over the country and had loads of boyfriends and liked pop bands and fashionable clothes. And Rose was with a man twelve years her senior and had an eight-year-old stepdaughter and two babies and, as far as Caroline knew, no social life. She was quite a pretty girl. But she had a drippy voice on her. Quite annoying, that slow voice. And she dressed too old for her age.

  Caroline had friends working in a café on Clarence Street in Gloucester, which was virtually around the corner. A chip bar plus restaurant in the main shopping centre. They were a couple of girls she had grown up with and gone to school with in Cinderford for a while. She would go to the café to see them, and now and then they’d go out round to the Dirty Duck off Southgate Street and have Ponies and Cherry Bs and lots of other sticky drinks in little bottles until they were sick. A Wicked Lady was brandy and Babycham. About four of them and you’d be throwing up.

  There was a nightclub called Tracy’s below the multi-storey car park on the bus station, another short walk away, and Caroline used to sneak in there sometimes. Very occasionally she’d hang around the bus station itself in her platforms and wide flares. She was still staying well away from the park. But most of the time the children kept her in or around the house in Cromwell Street, which she didn’t regard as any kind of sentence at all. She wasn’t often bored.

  The room that Caroline shared with Anna-Marie was on the first floor at the back of the house. There was a bathroom and separate toilet opposite, and both of the rooms upstairs were filled with lodgers. Officially there were four of them. But from the amount of traffic on the stairs and the noises coming from the boys’ rooms and the bathroom at night, you could obviously multiply that by several times. Caroline would lie there on red alert, trying to piece together in her mind what was going on.

  All the first intake of lodgers were male; hippies or bikers, Hell’s Angels types. A café on Southgate Street called the Pop-Inn was frequented by the Vampire motorcycle gang. Another gang, the Scorpions, mostly used the Talbot pub next door. Fred West, once the owner of a 1000 cc. Triumph, knew members of both gangs from being a Pop-Inn regular, and also from when he was living above the Rendezvous café in Newent, a popular biker haunt.

  Eric, one of the first to have the top-floor front room at Cromwell Street, was a Scorpion. He was seventeen, had recently dropped out of school, had a bad drink problem, and needed somewhere to doss down. He moved into Cromwell Street with Wagg Jones, another Scorpion gang member, and a half-caste boy called Billy. There were a lot of parties. Endless parties. And a lot of drugs. From about eight in the morning, you’d have all the girls who were old enough to have jobs, the seventeen-and eighteen-year-olds, leaving to go to work. Then you got what Fred West called the ‘teeny-boppers’, the fourteen-and fifteen-year-olds and younger, all the teenyboppers coming in for the day. They disappeared about half-past four or five, and all the other girls came back. There were comings and going at all hours of the night and day. And the people who owned the house never seemed to mind. There could be anything up to thirty people in the house at any one time. It was just a continuous flow going in and out all the time.

  Caroline was aware that there were mattresses on the floor of the room that shared a landing with hers, where people could ‘crash’, but she never went in. When she wasn’t with her own friends she was shy. She could appear tough and probably a bit brash, but that was only when she was with people she knew. At other times, she’d get nervous if people started chatting her up. It was only when she was with her mates that she got brave. With her mates and dancing. Otherwise she was pretty shy. During the day she spent all her time downstairs in the living room and the scullery, looking after the children and cleaning and generally helping out. There was an outside toilet between the scullery and an old garden shed the Greens had left behind, and she was happy to use that.

  She was still seeing Tony Coates, her boyfriend in Tewkesbury. But now Tony was travelling to see her. He had to go to Gloscat one day a week as part of the apprenticeship he was on. And Gloscat – Gloucester College of Art and Technology – was on the next street over from Cromwell Street. Practically backed on to it. So Tony would bicycle over from Tewkesbury, a distance of about ten miles, and stay with Caroline the night before. The Wests were all for this. Very encouraging. They were very kee
n for Tony to come. So he started coming and staying one night a week, and the next morning he would get up and go to college.

  Caroline was approaching her seventeenth birthday. She was going to be seventeen on 26 October 1972. She had stayed in touch with Steve ‘Jimmy Riddle’ Riddall, the sailor she’d met in Southsea. And Steve wrote to her at the new address she had given him in Gloucester saying that he would like to come and see her on her birthday. He asked if he could stay the night and again Fred and Rose were very keen. Caroline had told Rose about this old boyfriend she still wrote to, about how they had made love once before when she was living in Portsmouth and about her infatuation with him and him having a girl in every port. She confided her worries about two-timing Tony. But it was at Rose’s suggestion that Caroline had written to Steve inviting him to stay the weekend.

  She was very excited the day of her birthday and waited all day for Steve to turn up but he never came. However he did appear at Cromwell Street the next day. It was late. They got to the pub just before closing time and Caroline quickly got a few drinks inside herself. She always felt shy in front of Steve and so she needed that. When they got back, Fred and Rose were waiting up to tell them they had decided to let them use their room for the night, which had a double bed. They would sleep in her single upstairs.

  It was the first time Caroline had had a bed that was big enough to roll around in, and they talked or made love all night. She experienced her first orgasm that night, although she wasn’t clear at first that was what it was. She thought she was having palpitations and her legs went stiff and she felt her muscles ache after. When she told her sailor he laughed and informed her, ‘That was an orgasm’, so now she knew what all the fuss was about.

  He left the next day instead of staying the whole weekend. After he had gone, she found a twenty-pound note just showing from behind the big mirror in the room. His birthday present to her, as she found out later. But she thought it must be the Wests’ and so she took it and gave it to them.

  Later, Rose asked Caroline how it had gone, her night with her sailor. And Caroline told her: it had been great. But then Rose had to go and tell this to Fred and Fred as usual had to know more. She had started to notice this tendency in him. His liking for smut. He liked talking about sex. He used to ask all sorts of personal questions about her sex life. What she did in bed with Tony, and so on. He brought every conversation around to sex in the end. He thought he was the expert on it to hear him talk.

  There were two, sometimes three, men a few years older than Caroline living in the rear top-floor bedsit, immediately above her. They were hippies and they played loud music and smoked grass and she would talk to them when they met each other on the stairs or in the street and she took a fancy to this one called Ben. He was tall with long dark hair and a nice smile and he talked rather slowly on account of him always being stoned.

  Ben Stanniland shared with Alan Davis, who was known as ‘Dapper’ and was short and skinny and not as hot in the looks department to Caroline’s way of thinking as Ben. When the inevitable happened and the hippy lodgers invited her upstairs to their place for a drink one night, she went.

  In the event, she wouldn’t be able to remember whether she had a drink and a smoke, or just the smoke. Another new experience. It was her first attempt at dope. So there was druggy music and dope and she ended up having sex – ‘nookie’, she called it – with Ben on the floor. When it was over Ben got into his single bed and Caroline fell asleep where she was. When she woke up, the other one, the one known as ‘Dapper’, was on top of her, and she’s like, ‘Oh, get off.’ Still not quite back on the planet. ‘Leave me alone.’ You wake up and somebody’s messing you around and it’s not the person you thought it was. Ben’s telling him ‘Get off her’ and ‘Leave it’ but Ben’s still out of his brain and Dapper Davis is going on being his usual horrible self: fucking this, fuck you, fucking that. ‘Ahh, she wants it.’ That one, of course. All this kind of stuff. And he did get off, but not until he’d finished. Then he gave her another load of verbal abuse.

  The next day she felt horrible. She felt disgusted with herself. But there was nobody she could tell. She couldn’t tell Tony because she had been with Ben as well and that was out of choice. She couldn’t tell the Wests because she knew what he would say: ‘Why didn’t you stay away, they’re druggies. I warned you to stay away.’

  But Caroline’s feeling was that Fred West had quickly found out what had gone on upstairs anyway, either through listening or watching (a possibility that didn’t occur to her until a long time afterwards), or through being told. She was conscious that, from around the time of this incident, his sex talk and sexual innuendo started to become more and more crude. He grew increasingly bare-faced in his references to sex and kinky sex and the ‘operations’ he had performed.

  What she didn’t know was that the situation in which she had found herself that night was a virtual rerun of what had taken place on the night Ben Stanniland and Dapper Davis moved into Cromwell Street just two or three weeks before. The difference was that the woman involved then was Rose West and all the sex was consensual.

  Fred West had invited them out for a drink with him and his wife on their first night. They had gone to the nearest pub, the Wellington, thirty yards away along ‘little’ Cromwell Street on the corner of Wellington Street, and call-me-Fred, the new landlord, had spelled out the broad-minded, free-and-easy, anything-goes attitude – what he would regard as the ‘hippy’ attitude – he took towards sex. To prove it, the door to their room opened and his wife climbed into bed with Ben Stanniland later that night. When she had finished with Ben, it was Dapper Davis’s turn. They were dubious about what would happen the next time they saw Fred West, but the next time they saw him he just grinned.

  *

  An aspect of living at Cromwell Street that had immediately struck Caroline as strange was the fact that there were no locks on the bathroom and toilet doors. If she was in the toilet and there was the sound of somebody outside, this involved a lot of coughing to let them know that it was being used. She would get a foot to the door if that was possible.

  Of course you couldn’t do anything when you were in the bath apart from slide down into it a bit deeper if somebody walked in. Rose frequently used to come in the bathroom when Caroline was in the bath. She would stand by the bath and stroke her hair. The crop growing out around the edges into feathery strands. Lift the damp hair away from her face and tell her how lovely it was. Rose was always telling Caroline she had beautiful eyes and if they sat next to each other on the sofa she would mess with her hair, just like Anna-Marie. But she never worried about it. She never saw it as leading to anywhere else.

  It would have been just about understandable for anybody not up with the latest trends in fashion and popular music to misread the signs that Caroline was sending out. The big boots, the boyish hair, the high-waisted, tight-fitting trousers. That tough-nut attitude which was new. Fred West went around whistling the ancient Susan Maugham hit, ‘I Want to be Bobby’s Girl’. A record from his youth. He was a man who it is probably safe to say had never danced in his life. Rose West had gone to live with him more or less straight from school at the age of fifteen. But it was the year of David Bowie and Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars. And the way Caroline looked was only that: a look; a tribal thing; a fashion. She never thought it could be misread as a statement about her sexual preference. It had never occurred to her that it could be open to that kind of misinterpretation.

  None of these things had occurred to her until an encounter that took place with a woman in Cromwell Street after she had been living there for two or three weeks. It started off quite hostile. Caroline was alone in the house and the woman accused her of stealing her job and replacing her as nanny to the West children. This was a big woman. Tall and bleached-blonde and very buxom. Very big and powerful-looking. Loud. About nineteen. But she was buxom. And things looked nasty for a while until Caroline explained that she did
n’t know anything about the woman – she never learned her name – and wasn’t aware that she was taking anybody’s job away from them.

  They started chatting and this girl who used to babysit for Fred and Rose asked Caroline, ‘Has Rose ever tried it on with you?’ And Caroline said no, in quite an indignant way. What did she mean? Of course she knew what she meant but she wanted her to spell it out. ‘You know, tried to get into your bed with you or have sex with you or anything like that? Because she did with me. You want to watch her. Didn’t you know she’s both ways?’

  The blonde then went on to tell her about the time that she had brought a black bloke back to Cromwell Street one night and Rose had jumped in the bed with them. Caroline was starting to think now that maybe the girl was trying to scare her into leaving so that she could move back in and take over. But that was the first inkling she had had that Rose might be that way.

  And then she ended up asking Caroline out on the day she visited. The big buxom piece asked Caroline to go to the local Jamaica Club with her. And, having nothing better to do, Caroline said OK. It wasn’t her kind of place and she had never mixed with blacks before but she went anyway.

  The only black people she knew in those days were on The Black and White Minstrel Show on television. She used to hate it, but Alf Harris used to make her sit down and watch it. There was one black man in the whole of the Forest of Dean, Big Joe, and he was a character and called them all ‘honkies’ and married a white woman in Cinderford.