Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  Actually, Alf and Betty had a couple of friends who were black. Their main friends, the couple they went around with, were white, but they had black friends. And they all used to come through to Cinderford now and then for a drink. Afterwards they would come back to Alf’s and Betty’s after shut tap at the George or the Foresters for supper of a ploughman’s. Cheese and bread and pickled onions. Always a ploughman’s. Caroline was still little then, and if she saw them it would either be because she got out of bed when they came in, or she saw them going into the bathroom, through her bedroom door. These were the only black people she had had any personal contact with, and she was always a bit wary.

  Most of her life Caroline grew up thinking that all black faces washed off like the ones on the television and like Alf’s when he came home from the pit. Fred West also had a black face for a lot of the time as a result of the job he did at the factory. He would come home and go back out without washing. He wouldn’t wash to sit down and have his dinner, or even to go to bed on many nights. He’d keep the oily black face on all the time.

  There had been a slowly growing West Indian community in Gloucester since the mid-fifties. Today it is based mainly around the Midland Road area on the other side of Gloucester Park. But in 1972 many Jamaicans lived in and around Wellington Street and Cromwell Street, closer to the city centre. A Mr Joiner in Wellington Street was one of the first grocers to supply Caribbean produce and, in the sixties, with the help of a grant from the council, Jamaicans in Gloucester opened their own social club.

  The Jamaica Club was virtually empty on the afternoon that Caroline visited with the former babysitter for the Wests. There was just a band that had been rehearsing and an old man. Caroline was nervous. She was still a bit leery. Maybe it was because of that rumour there was about black men. Black men are big boys.

  The blonde girl disappeared after a while, to have sex, as Caroline later discovered, with somebody outside in a van. And then somebody else had decided they were going to have sex with the girl as well. Later Caroline remembered a textbook pursuit dream. A dream of being chased. But it wasn’t a dream; she says it was real. ‘After the blonde piece, they decided they were going to have me. I know I got a warning that if I didn’t get out of there I’d be gang-banged. That was the intention of these blokes. So I did a runner. And I got chased by half-a-dozen of them. I had one left chasing me in the end, and that was the youngest of the crowd, and he’s saying, “You’re all right, you’re all right …” Anyway I managed to get away from them and went back to the house.’

  The most regular visitor to Cromwell Street during Caroline’s time there was Frank Zygmunt, the elderly Pole who had advanced the Wests the money to buy the house. He would come about once a week and money would change hands. After a while Caroline became pretty sure that there was something going on between him and Rose.

  The only other regular visitors were a number of West Indian men who Caroline was told came round to see Rose for a ‘massage’. Even before what had happened at the Jamaica Club she was wary of these men. She didn’t like being on her own in a room with them. But they turned out to be all right. One man in particular was very nice. He would come in the back room and chat with her while he was waiting for his time with Rose. He had met Fred and Rose in the Arthur, another local pub, and they had invited him back round to supper. Caroline liked him. His name was Roy. He never made any kind of move on her. He was very smiley. He reassured her.

  The longer she went on living at Cromwell Street with the Wests, the more Caroline felt she needed reassurance. Fred was a bully. Anna-Marie, the oldest girl, was always quiet when Fred was around. She did what she was told when she was told without a murmur. And from time to time he would pick on Rose.

  Rose wanted to please. Giving your man a good meal after working hard all day was very important, was the kind of thing she would come out with to Caroline. It was what her mum had taught her. She was only nearly nineteen. That’s how old-fashioned she was.

  Caroline had never had a live-in relationship with anybody, but she had seen people. She had seen her mother with Alf Harris, and her mother with Michael Mahoney, the Irishman who was her real father, and it hadn’t been like this. Not so strong and locked into each other. He was very sexual with her, and he liked talking about it. He was always grabbing hold of her. Grabbing out and touching no matter who was there, which was a bit embarrassing.

  But he would suddenly turn on her. Caroline would try and stick up for Rose when that happened and he would tell her to mind her own business. And it was true. Rose seemed prepared to take it. Caroline didn’t know what she was doing with him in the first place.

  She wasn’t getting on with Fred and hated it when he started telling her about the operations he could do. If you had anything wrong down below he’d put it right for you, and he knew different ways so you could get more pleasure from sex. He would brag about his sex life and tell Caroline if she ever got pregnant he could give her an abortion; he’d done them before. He was talking as if he had actually performed some sort of operations on women.

  Caroline began to dread these conversations. At first she had suspected it was just lies. Then one day he was talking about sex yet again and he said that Anna-Marie wasn’t a virgin. He told her that Anna-Marie, who was eight, had already lost her virginity. She was aware of him watching her carefully while he was telling her this, and when he observed how she reacted – she was upset and angry; repulsed by what she was having to hear – he said, ‘She fell off her pushbike and hurt herself.’ The saddle had come off Anna-Marie’s bike and she had gone to sit on it without realizing and damaged herself.

  Caroline wouldn’t be able to remember for a long time how she had come to get away from Cromwell Street. She knew he’d said all this about operations and abortions and about Anna-Marie not being a virgin any more. But she couldn’t remember about the nice Jamaican, who she now knows was called Roy Morgan, coming to the house one day and finding her hysterical and crying and begging him to help her because they were saying things to her and wanting her to take part in a ‘sex circle’. She buried all this. How she left the house when she was living there.

  Roy Morgan remembered where she came from, Cinderford. And he told her to get her things together and he drove her there. He took her all the way home to Northwood Close and met her mum and Alf and had one drink in a pub in Cinderford with them, wished them luck and went on his way.

  But she blanked this for many years. Her memories were revived years later only by hearing Roy Morgan’s account of what happened. And the reason she thinks she blanked it is because she made an inexplicable mistake and accepted a lift from the Wests again. She had had the warning but she still got into their car. She had been given the signal but she ignored it.

  She reported what she believed was the abuse of an eight-year-old girl living at 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, but she didn’t hear any more about it.

  *

  Caroline left Cromwell Street about two weeks after her seventeenth birthday. She had been there for six weeks altogether. She stayed shaken up for a few days, but soon she went back to her routine of going to see Tony three or four nights a week, thumbing it from Cinderford to Tewkesbury.

  A month would pass until the night when Tony would leave her at their usual place across the road from the Gupshill Manor pub and she would be driven off to face the ordeal that some raw part of her had always been dreading. She knew even as it was beginning that this was the most terrible thing that had happened to her and that she would for ever be singled out by it.

  6 December 1972 was a Wednesday. Caroline knows that from the police reports of what followed. But it could have been any day. They hadn’t done anything special. She had met up with Tony and they had killed a few hours doing what they usually did, which was mooching about, wandering around town, sitting in cafés. They had spotted the Wests about nine thirty or ten. The main Gloucester Road forks as it enters Tewkesbury, and they had seen the Wes
ts’ Ford Popular going off the roundabout to take one part of the fork while they were on the other. They seemed to be riding around, cruising. They knew that Caroline would be hitchhiking home at her usual time, and when they saw the Wests, Caroline and Tony gathered that they were keeping an eye out for her. They had seen the Wests but they didn’t think the Wests had seen them.

  Caroline had been standing by the road for about ten minutes on her own when the grey car came to a stop beside her. She didn’t know what was going to happen until it happened. She didn’t have anything in her head to say, in spite of the advance warning. It was Rose who spoke first. ‘Oh, we really missed you. The children really missed you.’ All this. She was out of the car, standing on the roadside next to Caroline, being really nice. She chatted away. He was being really nice from inside the car as well. ‘I’m sorry you left on bad feelings. I’m sorry we had a row.’ De dah. She didn’t know what was going to happen. They could have started a confrontation. And because she was so nice, and he was so nice, although she was still a bit dubious about it, she got in the car. She didn’t want to start the friendship off again, but out of relief partly, and partly out of embarrassment, she got in the car.

  And Rose said, ‘Oh, I’ll get in the back with Caroline, so we can have a chat.’ Her drippy voice. Slow and high. And that’s what happened. She got in the back and she was all like nice again and chatting away about the kids and that. Girls’ stuff. Nanny stuff. Rose sitting next to her, Fred in the front. Caroline was just trying to get home to Cinderford. It was when they got to Gloucester and had crossed the river and were starting along the Chepstow Road towards the Forest that some change occurred. Like a change in pressure, when your ears pop. It was as noticeable as that. Almost physical. Caroline could sense that there was something between them and that she wasn’t quite in on this.

  ‘Had sex with Tony tonight, then?’ This was him speaking of course. Watching for her reaction in the mirror. ‘Had sex with Tony tonight, then?’ And then she started grinning at Caroline and laughing, edging closer, and Caroline was saying no. No! Unlike the time in the toilets when she couldn’t get any sound to come. She heard her voice and it was loud in the car. No! No!

  And, over Rose’s laughing and Caroline’s protests, he said, ‘See if she has, Rose.’ So Rose thrust her hands between Caroline’s legs, grabbing. And then he said, ‘What’s her tits like?’ Seeing her in terms of her parts. Breaking her down to her parts. Her head also disembodied and floating in the mirror. So she grabbed Caroline’s breasts and kept grabbing, all the time laughing and grinning up close in her face. And an odd thought occurred to Caroline then: that Rose might have been nervous as well for all she knew. As scared as her. But no. Horrible laugh. Horrible grin. And him looking in the mirror all the time.

  Caroline was still wrestling with Rose, who she found to be strong, still trying to fight her off, when she felt the car moving over softer ground. Next she saw a five-bar gate brightly illuminated in the headlights. A farm gate opening into a field.

  For Cinderford, you turn left at the first big roundabout out of Gloucester. This is Highnam. There’s a big field and a five-bar gate there. Caroline knew the roundabout and the gate well, having used the road regularly from the age of five. Strange that she should recognize this gate, one gate out of so many, but she did. It gave her a bearing when the car came to a halt.

  The gate was the last thing she saw before he knocked her out. As soon as they stopped, he turned around in his seat and punched her in the side of the head. She saw stars like in the cartoons. Black-framed flashes of light. She was knocked out as a result of the punches she took to the mouth and the head. She had started panicking. And that’s why he did what he did; to quiet her. She was making noise and shouting and panicking. The main road was just behind them and it was quite busy. It was the going-home time of night. And then when she came round she found that she was tied up and they were putting some stuff around her head. They had forced her forward and tied her hands behind her back with her scarf. It was December, coming up to Christmas; it was cold nights and she had brought a scarf. He dragged her head up and, while she held her, he taped it all around, across her mouth and around the back of her hair so she could hardly breathe. And all the time they were laughing and threatening her and telling her to just shut up and things would be all right. The sound of the tape and the effort it took to get it off the roll. She could tell from his breathing it was effortful. The tape they used to gag her up was brown and very tough. Textured and gummy. Like parcel tape. Very sticky. And when it was on and she could only breathe through her nose, they pushed her down on to the back seat, bound and gagged, and Rose sat on top of her. He turned the car around and set off back to Gloucester.

  The way she was lying, she was able to see up. She could see all the street lights, the lamps lighting up the road signs, and she sensed they were travelling back towards Gloucester. She knew where she was going.

  They took her back all tied up. But Rose had been her friend. She thought Rose was her friend. After that girl had told her what she had about Rose being both ways and liking other women, Caroline had thought that maybe she was a bit strange. But even if she was a bit strange and she fancied her, she had been sure Rose would never hurt her. She’d stuck up for her a few times in front of Fred when he’d had a go at her about anything.

  And she had never seen them bundle anybody into the house, or seen strips of tape or anything. Never heard anybody. And they had tied her up with her scarf, which meant they obviously hadn’t planned it. And the tape, she thought he’d just grabbed hold of that out of the car. It must have been in the car and he’d just used it. If they had planned it, it made sense that they would have brought something with them. The street lights kept going by like a stick against a railing.

  Caroline has an idea now that he went in first to make sure the hallway was clear. One of them went in, then they all went in. They took her upstairs. Led her upstairs, one behind, one in front. Upstairs and left through a door. She couldn’t remember ever being in that room before. It was the room on the first floor at the front of the house, overlooking Cromwell Street. She had been thinking if they were going to take her to a bedroom, it would be their bedroom just inside the front door, because there was much less risk of being spotted that way. But they ended up in the other room on the floor where she had shared a room with Anna-Marie, the bigger room with the mattresses in it for ‘crashing’. Brian Fry’s last bedroom when he was living in the house.

  In addition to the mattresses, there was a sofa. They sat her on it. Then, when she was seated, Fred West brought out a knife. Of course she thought he was going to stab her and that at the time was the worst way to die as far as she was concerned. For a long time – for the remainder of her life; twenty-six years now – she would have nightmares, varying from seeing herself being used for sex by the Wests and their friends, and the different ways they killed her, to being buried alive and hearing people walking and talking as they passed over her grave on one of Gloucester’s busiest corners. She is shouting for help, for somebody to come and get her, clawing the under part of the pavement, and nobody can hear her and she wakes up still shouting. Yet when they had her in their home that night she was too scared to shout out for help in case they killed her sooner in panic.

  When he went to cut the tape from around her face and head she thought he was going to kill her then but he didn’t. He did cut her, though. Nicked her face with the double-sided knife he used to cut away the packing-tape gag.

  This made her more comfortable, but her comfort wasn’t his main concern. Taking away the tape made her mouth available for his wife. And his wife sat down next to her on the sofa and began pleasuring herself, bearing down, touching and kissing. Caroline remained fully dressed at this point, and after a while Rose went and made them all cups of tea. Fred West untied Caroline’s arms so that she could hold her tea, but as soon as she had finished they both started to undress her. When she was comp
letely undressed they retied her hands and packed her mouth with cottonwool. While Rose West was taking her own clothes off, he told Caroline to lie on her back on the double mattress on the floor and he put a blindfold on her. Defaced her again before he started to probe in between her legs with his grimy fingers in a way that suggested he was preparing to perform one of his much-boasted-about operations. She felt Rose’s longer-nailed fingers join his inside her and was terrified they were going to put something in her or operate or something. She heard them discussing the appearance of the ‘lips’ of her vagina and what could be done to them to increase her sexual pleasure. They were too fat and should be ‘flattened’, they decided. And a few moments later Caroline felt something strike her violently between the legs. The blindfold must have slipped, because she saw him whipping a wide leather belt, buckle end first, down on to her. Rose held her legs open while he hit her repeatedly with the belt. The next thing she was aware of was Rose crouched between her legs, exploring her with her tongue. It was the first time this had happened to Caroline. She had never had it done to her before Rose did it. She didn’t respond even though she was scared Rose might get nasty.

  He seemed to be happiest scaring and hitting, and then withdrawing to watch. But quite soon he took his clothes off and, while his wife was still crouched over with her back to him, had sex with her from behind. He spectated for a while, with a kind of excited detachment, and then he briefly took part himself, drunk on his wife’s erotic drunkenness.

  Unbelievably, they were able to sleep. Fresh tea was made. It was the middle of the night. And then quite soon they seemed to be fast asleep on the mattress on the floor. There were blankets. Caroline, still bound, was lying on the floor next to them. She was unable to sleep and only able to think about her mother – what her mother was going to be like when she didn’t go home or if they didn’t find her. Her poor mum’s face and how heartbroken she would be if she never went home.