Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  *

  Caroline would go on seeing the Wests in and around Gloucester over the years. She mostly saw Rose. And each time she saw her she seemed to have become heavier-bodied, with some of the reasons for that straggling behind the inevitable pram. She could have been born with her hands locked on to a buggy or a pram. She’d see her in the pedestrianized precinct or Eastgate market or crossing at the lights, shouting at one or other of them, clipping another, nondescriptly dressed, spreading, gradually growing into the done-down homebody of a woman she had always struck Caroline as being.

  There were odd sightings that didn’t fit into this picture. Pointers to her having another life. Out with a coachload on a hen night one night, Caroline spotted Rose in the vaulted bierkeller bar that ran under the Fleece. She was wearing jewellery and make-up and sitting in an elevated part of the pub with two men. Laughing and flirting with these men; and also with them joining in was Anna-Marie, who by then was thirteen or fourteen. And she turned to the friend who was nearest her in the crush and said, ‘Oh my god, Anna’s on the game.’

  Caroline’s friends, who knew the background and could see the effect this was having on her, quickly got her away. She actually followed Anna-Marie into the toilets at one point and they exchanged a few words. But five years had passed and a lot had happened and it was obvious Anna didn’t know who she was. In any case she was pretty near totalled, she could see. She was very drunk. Caroline’s friends got her coat and her bag and hustled her away.

  Her life continued. She hadn’t been crippled by her experience with the Wests. But she had been destabilized by it. Certainly that. She started to have doubts about whether her body was normal because of what they had said needed doing to it to put it right. She was ashamed of her body and ashamed of her past private live that had been disclosed to the police.

  And then, after the way her stepfather and her brother and the policeman had reacted, and the outcome of the trial, which was no more than a slap, she believed herself to be worth even less than she had before. Although she did manage to have a few months’ good relationship with her stepfather before he died, and was able to think of him as a dad instead of a stepdad, she still believed it was the way he had treated her all through her life that had made her feel she was trash and deserved all the bad things that had come along. If good things happen to good people, which is what she truly believed, what did that make her?

  After the Wests, she started going out with younger boys – boys younger than herself. It seemed to give her a sense of being more in control. But she ended up ruining all her relationships with her insecurity and her jealousy tantrums. She’d be suspicious and possessive and if she thought that the boyfriend was getting fed up of her, she’d turn on them and hit them around. Kim, for instance. One night she was parked with Kim up in their usual spot in the woods and he was telling her it was all over and she was begging him to stay, and he was adamant, so she beat him up. Tried to force him to make love to her. She was desperate and like a madwoman. She’d always feel ashamed and sorry after but she couldn’t help herself.

  The low point came when she was twenty in 1975 and tried to commit suicide. She was working at the Rozel Hotel in Weston-Super-Mare and took an overdose of the antidepressants the doctor had just given her. She was rushed to hospital and had her stomach pumped.

  After that, Kim and her mother did everything they could to get her to raise her opinion of herself. She entered for Miss Cinderford because of them and ended up riding through the streets on a camel, waving at the crowds and even appearing on the local television news that night. Then she got nervous about having to speak at functions, and for the rest of the year the girl who came second had to do that for her.

  No matter how many people told her she was a pretty and lovely girl, she still didn’t like herself. It wasn’t until 1979 that she agreed to pose for a keen local amateur photographer. The pictures were nothing too glamorous but he told her she was photogenic and said she should advertise herself. An elderly man booked her for glamour shots wearing pretty underwear. She worked with him a few times, but the last time he got shaky and knocked over a lamp and that worried her, so she didn’t work for him again.

  Later on she worked with an Irish guy. He was very sarcastic towards her, but in a fun way, and eventually she agreed to go topless for him. They worked well together and they did a shot that he sent to Page Three at the Sun. The Sun was interested but it was at that point that Caroline discovered she was pregnant. Kelly was born in January 1980 and gave her back her interest in life. She never thought of suicide again.

  She had a second daughter in 1988. Dylan, the father, was a member of the Desperadoes Outlaw Club, the local biker club, and had come to live in the Forest from Manchester. They lived next door to Mrs Maude Potter, the aunt of the writer Dennis Potter and a very strict old lady, and she babysat Kelly and the new baby when she arrived.

  The baby’s name was Shani-Jade. Shani, pronounced ‘Shay-nee’. Caroline had liked the sound of it when she heard it on the news. A woman of this name had been found dead with her hands tied behind her back in a lake. She had cut her lawn and had been taking the bags of grass for disposal somewhere when she disappeared. And, perhaps because of the submerged, but never totally eradicated, conviction that she would herself end up being famous for the wrong reasons one day – famous for being a body; the logical outcome of the self-destruction mission she seemed to be on – she took the name of the woman whose body had been disposed of in a lake and gave it to the baby that was on the way. There were lots of investigations going on, and she heard the name Shani pronounced ‘Shay-nee’ on the news, and she thought: Oh! I like that! It had been going to be ‘Shannon’ but it ended up ‘Shani’. Shani-Jade.

  *

  Afterwards, it would sometimes strike Caroline as ironic that, during her time at Cromwell Street, she never once went in Gloucester Park. That when she was out with the children she would skirt the park rather than walk through it, and always kept a distance between the toilets in the park and herself. When all the time of course the danger was where you would least expect it, in the safe, protected spaces of the house. She had thought of it as being out there, when all the time, without her knowing it, it was in here.

  It would never occur to her, though, to think that she had known murderers.

  Chapter Four

  He brought her a lace dress and a fur coat. The year was 1969. The year of Woodstock. Easy Rider. The acid counterculture. TV pictures of violence and atrocities. Vietnam protests. Student protests and sit-ins. Charles Manson. Terrorist bombings. It was a Regency dandy look that year for pop stars. The fashions in the street reflected the ethnic look from Morocco, Turkey, Kashmir – kaftans, beads, fringe jackets. ‘Youth’ had been given the kingdom. Drugginess was mainstream.

  And he brought her a lace dress and a fur coat. Symbols of everything everybody was apparently rebelling against. Straight life. It was his present to her. To mark their first date. A kind of nylon lace dress suitable for somebody double, even treble, her age, and this rabbit-fur coat. Fred’s gift to Rose.

  He had brought the parcel to the bread shop where she was working in the centre of Cheltenham. He was twenty-eight at this time. She was not quite sixteeen. Nearly, but not quite there. This man had walked in the shop, thrust the parcel at her and walked out. Told her to be at the Swallow at eight o’clock, and turned heel.

  She had first encountered him on the bus from Cheltenham to Bishop’s Cleeve, a village about three miles north of Cheltenham, where she lived. Where he also lived, or was living, as it turned out.

  She had seen him at the bus stop and was conscious of his interest in her but had tried not to catch his eye. A gypsyish individual with a swarthy complexion and a prison build. Short and disproportionately big in the upper body. An impression of physical strength. Broad shoulders, powerful forearms. She hadn’t returned his glances but there had been no avoiding him once they were on the bus. He made a bee line f
or her. He was in overalls and boots. The overalls were muddy. The boots had gas mud caked around them. He had startling pale blue eyes with a lot of light in them and a winning grin which also appeared wary at the same time. A wary cast to his eyes. A cheeky grin, though. He told her he lived in Cleeve and worked on the motorway. He said he was going home because of an accident. The digger he was driving had turned over and rolled down an embankment. He had just come back from a check-up at the hospital. Going for the sympathy vote.

  Before she got off the bus he asked her out to a place she knew to be a rough pub in Cheltenham and she told him no. Then a couple of days later he was waiting for her at the bus stop when she arrived there from work. He asked her out again. Again to a place with a rough reputation. Again she said no. But he didn’t take the hint, and soon after was in the shop, pushing the parcel at her and telling her to meet him at the Swallow at eight o’clock. The Swallow was a pub in the village just yards from her house so she thought it would be safe enough to go and see what this one was all about. If anything happened she could run home.

  Rose was floating at this point. Her family had come apart and she wasn’t connected to any part of it. She was fifteen and a half and had only just left school and was adrift in her life. And with his instincts he was able to spot a floater, any directionless or rudderless person. She had drifted into his radar, and he had locked on. For example, she hadn’t told him where she worked, but he knew. She hadn’t told him where she lived, but he obviously knew that as well, just along from the Swallow. (Not usually a bus user, he also knew where she caught her bus, and when. It’s likely he had calculated that the knee-to-knee crush on the tea-time commuter bus to Bishop’s Cleeve was a good way to approach her and have her as a captive audience. That invitation to a dirty world made with a cheeky grin.) For a man as directed and alert as him, giving the appearance of being haphazard but actually scrupulous in his methods, she hadn’t been hard to find. For Rose Letts, 1969, the year she left school, had been a turbulent year.

  At the beginning of the year, after being bullied and beaten by him all her married life, Rose’s mother had finally drawn the line and walked out on her father for the first time. Bill and Daisy Letts had been married for twenty-seven years. The marriage was the kind of oppressive, brutal regime that appears to have been all too common then but which many women of Daisy Letts’s generation accepted as their lot in life. Bill Letts had been in the Navy. He had signed up during the war as a radio operator and had volunteered to stay on after the war was over. He was a disciplinarian and a pathological bully. He would turn off the gas and electricity and then beat his wife for not having a meal ready on the table for him. He expected the house to be spotless and woke the children at dawn with their household duties for the day. Daisy, Rose’s mother, put this down to him being ‘Victorian’. ‘Dad’, as she always called him – he has been dead for twenty years, but she still calls him this – was very Victorian. Very Victorian.

  He was probably a schizophrenic. He had been diagnosed as schizophrenic at an early stage of his life, but his family were told this only after he died. He pulled knives on his children for not eating their breakfasts and wielded hatchets. He fisted his young sons in the stomach if they came in a minute after he said they had to be in and threw his daughters bodily down stairs. Joyce, Rose’s second-oldest sister, has retained a big dislike towards him for this very reason. He used to hit her around. She used to take really big hidings from him. After she went to work, he used to beat her black and blue, throw her down the stairs. Joyce was older and took a lot of the responsibility for running the house and she got a lot of the brunt of it. This was in the house. Outside, with strangers, he was easy-going, affable; a little stiff and formal, but reasonableness itself.

  Daisy Letts had suffered a series of nervous breakdowns. She had had ECT treatment. (She was having ECT treatment while she was pregnant with Rose.) She had lived with Bill Letts for twenty-seven years and was preparing something nice for his birthday – he was going to be forty-eight – on the day she was finally pushed over the edge.

  It was February, Rose was in her last term at Cleeve School, and she came home from school to find her mother making a cake. She had got Bill a present earlier in the day on her way home from work – she had a job at a café on the Promenade at Cheltenham – and now she was baking him a cake the way she always did. But she had forgotten some of the ingredients needed for it and she asked Rose to run down to the shops. There was a row of shops about thirty yards away, next to the Swallow, so she was there and back in a few minutes. She was soon back.

  When she got back she couldn’t believe what she saw. The house was smashed up. Her mother was battered and bleeding. There was blood everywhere, and mess. Broken furniture and spilled and broken things. Eggs and blood up the walls. Her mother said she was leaving and Rose was going with her. The Letts family fell into two halves, divided by age. The oldest four had already left home, driven out by their father. Rose and her mother took Graham, who was eleven, and Gordon, who was eight, and packed a few things and headed out to Rose’s sister’s place in Cheltenham.

  Glenys was three years older than Rose. She was eighteen in 1969 and had recently married a car mechanic called Jim Tyler. He was from Gotherington, the next village north of Bishop’s Cleeve. But they had moved into a small terraced house in Union Street in an old run-down part of Cheltenham, close to the town centre. Near by was the High Street and the Full Moon which had a reputation at the time as a drug pub, and was a place where Fred West used to like to hang around. He wasn’t a drinker. He rarely drank more than a half of shandy. He wasn’t a drug-user either. But he was interested in observing the effects drink and drugs, these kinds of disinhibitors, had on other people. He liked to sit in a corner of the bar separate from the druggies and the hippies and observe.

  It had come as a surprise to her family that Glenys had ended up living in Union Street, married to Jim Tyler. Glenys was bright and they had always seen her as headed towards better things. She had had boyfriends who were college students. She could have had her pickings of anyone. And she had gone off with Jim Tyler.

  He worked for the Volkswagen–Audi garage in Cheltenham as a general mechanic. But Jim and Glenys had another business that they ran together. They had a mobile transport café in a lay-by at Seven Springs on the Cirencester Road, just south of Cheltenham. Glenys usually looked after the snack bar while Jim was at work, but she was heavily pregnant with her first baby at the time that her mother and Rose and her two little brothers took refuge with her. They had been looking for another girl to tide them over. And with Rose being fifteen and a half and due to leave school in the Easter anyway, she got the job. It was decided that she could help out brewing the tea and selling the hot-dogs for a while.

  Jim Tyler got up early every morning and towed the caravan from Union Street to its site by the gravel pit at Seven Springs. He stopped at the cash-and-carry to buy bread rolls and fillings before going on to his mechanics job. Part of his job was to test-run cars, and at least once during the day he would take a route that brought him past the snack bar, and in that way he was able to keep a check on what was going on.

  Rose had shown signs of being sexually precocious from the age of thirteen. At fifteen, she was still going around in knee-socks and other schoolgirl clothes. But while she was living at Union Street with the Tylers, she had relationships with a number of different men. One of these was Jim Tyler’s brother, whose sexual inexperience Rose found amusing. Her brother-in-law, who was six years older than her, called her ‘a hot-arsed little sod’.

  Most of the people who pulled in to the lay-by at Seven Springs were lorry drivers and salesmen and reps. And on three or four occasions after Rose had taken over from Glenys at the counter, Jim arrived to find the shutters down, the caravan empty and Rose tumbling out of a lorry or a car. She would be in the cab of some lorry driver or off with one of the team laying gas pipes over the Cotswolds. Her clothes would b
e dishevelled and it would be obvious she had just been having sex, but her explanation would be that she had run out of bread or sausages for the hot-dogs and that the man, or men, whoever she happened to be with, had been giving her a lift. Her boast was that she took a lot more money at the site than Glenys ever had.

  It was while she was helping out at the café that Rose arrived back at Union Street one day to find her mother, and her brothers, Graham and Gordon, all gone.

  Once, while Glenys was away in hospital having her baby, Jim Tyler had heard odd moaning sounds coming from the room where Rose was sleeping downstairs. He had gone down and had found her sucking her thumb and groaning and rocking herself repeatedly backwards and forwards on the bed. This was a habit she had had since childhood but he had never seen it before. She wouldn’t tell him what was wrong, but she put her arms around him and cried into his shoulder and dropped one hand and slid it along the inside of his thigh. According to Jim Tyler that was as far as it had gone. She had tried to touch him up and he had gone back to his own room upstairs. But Rose’s brothers and sisters believe that their mother surprised Rose and Jim Tyler in bed together and that’s what made her pack up and leave. Their mother still won’t say, but that’s what they believe.