Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  She had packed her things and she hadn’t gone back to Bill Letts in Bishop’s Cleeve. Rose was very close to her younger brothers. And her mother and Graham and Gordon had disappeared and left her. ‘Abandoned’ was her word. Glenys had been given instructions not to tell Rose where they had gone. Just that they’d gone. They’d moved on.

  The atmosphere among them was bad. Eventually Rose and Glen had a stand-up row. A fight really. It developed into that. Glenys told Rose that she had been left in charge and so from now on she would do as she said. It became physical. Glenys took back and swiped Rose across the head. And it all came down on her then. She’d left her father’s house and she expected the support of her mother. Her mother had left her. She was on her own. She had been abandoned. She had left her father, her mother had left her, and now she had to start to look after herself. She made a fist and launched one right at Glen. Contact was made. She was used to defending Graham and Gordon against the bullies in Cleeve and had earned herself a reputation for being useful with her fists. She fisted up and hit her own sister. Jim Tyler watching all this, knowing he was not unimplicated in the bad turn of events between the sisters.

  Half an hour later she was out of there and out on the street with her bag. A schoolgirlish-looking solidly built girl, tramping the streets of Cheltenham with a bag. Dragging her life around with her in a soft-sided, cardboard-and-canvas case. She was a lumpish adolescent. How it had happened she couldn’t exactly remember. She was walking the streets through a long day with nowhere to go. Cheltenham on a Sunday. Everything closed.

  It was just starting to get dark when she realized that a car was moving slowly along behind her and that she was being kerb-crawled. The car came along very slowly, with the driver leaning over and saying something to her through the window. His left arm along the passenger seat and him craning his neck towards her the way they do. She stepped back into the shops and told him to clear off. He said, ‘It’s all right. I know your sister.’ And when she looked close, although she didn’t know him very well, she had seen him at Glen’s and Jim’s. An older man. Old to her. He was about thirty, twice her age.

  He was being nice. Concerned and responsible. He told her she couldn’t just wander around the town. Unless she told him the problem he would have to let the police know she was homeless and wandering around town on her own. He said he lived not far away and if she got in the car he would take her to his house and make her a cup of tea.

  She was wary. Naturally she was wary. She had already been raped – what she considered to be rape – once that year; and she would be raped a second time within weeks of walking away from Glen’s and Jim’s.

  The first time had been after a Christmas party in January. It was now April time. So about four months. She had gone to the party with a friend at the place where the friend’s mother worked. She was aware of a man whose eyes had been hot on her all night. And at the end of the party her friend, who was supposed to be giving her a lift home, had gone off with a boy, and she was wandering around outside on her own when this man pulled up and said he would drive her back to Cleeve. The last bus had gone and she was wandering and so she got in. Bad move. Instead of turning off at Bishop’s Cleeve, he went on past her home and on to the hills where she lived. Cleeve Hill, where she had played with Graham and Gordon and all her friends all her life. They stopped up on the golf course on Cleeve Hill and the situation had seemed very threatening to her. She had wondered whether he was going to kill her. She took her clothes off and got in the back seat as he had ordered her to do, and then he raped her. Afterwards, he drove her home and dropped her off outside the house. She didn’t tell anybody about what had been done.

  By her own account, the second rape in 1969 happened four or five months after this rape, just before her encounter with the man called Fred West. She was back by then living at the family home in Bishop’s Cleeve and waiting for a bus out of Cheltenham at a stop on the Evesham road. The stop is close to the famous Pump Room, near the railings of Pittville Park. She has done her day’s work and is waiting for a bus, and the memory of what happens then will be vivid for her even twenty-five years later. A man standing at the bus stop starts chatting to her. There’s just the two of them, quite a lot of evening traffic passing on the busy road, and he starts chatting her up. She indicates that she isn’t interested, but he is very forceful. Very strong. He is crowding her; grabbing her. He’s a strong man. Then it gets out of hand. She panics. She gets frightened and runs away from him towards the park – Pittville Park overlooked by its ice-cream-coloured Georgian terraces, often known as Cheltenham Park. An up-market very green area on the edge of the town centre, between the main shopping streets and the race course. There is nobody around; no other pedestrians. And this man’s gaining on her, pursuing her towards the park. There is a little gate set into the railings of the park. It’s locked but he smashes the padlock off it; right off the gate like it’s nothing. That’s how strong. He drags her down by the lake under some trees, into the dark, and rapes her. Eventually she gets on board a bus when one comes and nobody notices anything, or says anything, and she goes home and tells nobody about this second rape of 1969.

  Because of the chase followed by the rape in Pittville Park, she started to use the main bus station in the town centre after work. She stopped walking out to the stop along the Evesham Road. And it would be there, while waiting for a bus in the town-centre stand, that she would first become aware of Fred West.

  But this man now, who was offering her a way out of her predicament, who said his name was Ken and who was a friend of Jim and Glenys, he seemed all right. So she did as he asked. She got her bag with all her belongings in it and got in the car. He was kind to her and listened to what she had to say, about the fight with Glenys and being dumped the way she had by her mother and her brothers. Ken was Irish and twice her age and they had sex together that night. Although, because he wasn’t rough and didn’t rush it and insisted on wearing protection, she thought of it as making love. He made love to her that night and told her there was a room for her there as long as she needed it. She could pay him rent and food money when she found a job.

  She got a job with Sketchley’s in Cheltenham, but it was dirty and low-paid work and she didn’t last long. She left Sketchley’s and, along with another woman she had met there, was taken on as a trainee seamstress at County Clothes, a high-class shop on the Promenade.

  She went on living with the Irishman, Ken, and sleeping with him. But there were also other boyfriends around. She found out from her brother Andrew’s girlfriend, Jacquie, whose family lived next door to the Tylers in Union Street, where her mother had gone. She had found work as a housekeeper-cleaner at a chicken farm in a village called Teddington, near Tewkesbury, and was living with Graham and Gordon in a small cottage that came with the job. Rose tracked them down and started going out to see them sometimes, taking whatever boyfriend she had at the time. It was lovely countryside in the area and plenty of it where you could be private and alone. There was sex in the fields around Teddington that summer with a drink afterwards in a big old-fashioned pub there called the Royal Oak. Lots of the kind of high-class people who would shop at County Clothes. Ken always used a condom, which was a pointless precaution as far as Rose was concerned because she never bothered to with anybody else.

  Teddington is a few miles north of Bishop’s Cleeve. And, to the amazement of her mother and her older sisters and brothers who had all been browbeaten and damaged by him, Rose moved back in alone with her father in the house at 96 Tobyfield Road. There were days of silence followed by violent eruptions. He was bullying and violent. You didn’t dare look at him the wrong way. And she had moved back in to live with him – there was only going to be the two of them – out of choice. To put it mildly they were amazed. Before long, Daisy Letts and Graham and Gordon came home to Cleeve to live, and the pattern of unpredictable kickings and beatings, the black moods and silences, started all over again.

 
; Rose was going to be sixteen in November 1969. It was only late summer. And the police started to come around to the bread shop in the centre of Cheltenham where she now worked. Every night when the time came for her to pack up work she’d look outside and see a uniformed policeman, occasionally two, waiting there. Every night she was taken to the police station and questioned about the many boyfriends she seemed to have. They were particularly interested in an older man at whose flat she had become a regular visitor. They showed particular interest in Ken and the fact that she was a minor and that therefore any sexual intercourse with her, as far as the law was concerned, was rape. She undertook to stop seeing Ken and then didn’t. Undertook to stop seeing him and then didn’t. Ken or the others. Ken or anybody else. And the next night there would be a plod pounding the pavement waiting for her after work. This was her attitude to the police then – to any kind of authority – and it would never change. Hello, Mr Plod. Cunt. Oh, already she had a mouth on her.

  Bishop’s Cleeve isn’t a big place. It’s a small, tightly knit village community with a large housing estate added on. Bill Letts worked for Smith’s Industries. He was an electronics engineer working on flight simulators at the Smith’s factory complex outside Cheltenham, and he lived in a Smith’s house in Bishop’s Cleeve. The company had built the estate for its workers, and the estate is known by everybody locally as ‘Smith’s Estate’. New model homes for the new post-war generation of workers. The verges are clipped; the ‘No Ball Games’ notice still fixed to the side of 96 Tobyfield Road, the Letts’ house, weathered and worn. The atmosphere is watchful; the houses regular and neat. Little, particularly in those days, went unremarked.

  The decamping of Daisy Letts with the younger children would have counted as a scandal. It would have caused talk. Word of Rose Letts’s sexual shenanigans around Cheltenham would have quickly got back. Tongues would have wagged. And Fred West, a watcher and a prowler who was fly enough not to appear either of those things, would have heard them, or at least have got wind of them second hand. Rose was a subject of gossip around Bishop’s Cleeve in those days. But then so was he. They both were. It is possible that neither was aware of the existence of the other before he made his move on the Cheltenham–Bishop’s Cleeve bus that night, but it seems unlikely.

  He had been living in Cleeve for just over a year by the middle of 1969. He was married to a woman called Rena, and they lived at the Lakehouse caravan site on the outskirts of Bishop’s Cleeve with their two young children. They said they did at least, and it was in their interests that the authorities and others believed them.

  But Rena West, who was twenty-five and had been born Catherine Costello, was a handful. She had a long history of borstal and prostitution, and more recent convictions for burglary, stealing, and actual bodily harm. She carried a cut-throat razor and another knife in her handbag, if her husband was to be believed. She liked drinking and having a good time; she still worked intermittently as a prostitute and would go off for long periods without any warning. Sometimes she was there and sometimes she wasn’t. Sometimes the children were there and at other times they were being taken care of by foster parents. Rena would reappear and the children would come back to live at the Lakehouse site in the trailer. Then Rena would disappear again, and new fostering arrangements would have to be made for Anna-Marie and Charmaine. It was a shambolic existence.

  Anna-Marie was five in 1969; Charmaine was a year older. Anna-Marie was Fred’s and Rena’s daughter. But Charmaine was Rena’s daughter by another man. Her father was Asian, so she was half-Asian, and that was apparent from the colour of her skin. There weren’t any Indian or Pakistani, or even Chinese, families living in Bishop’s Cleeve at that time, and so she was noticed; she stood right out.

  Rena’s absences meant that Fred was constantly looking around for minders and babysitters and people to sit with the children. It gave him the excuse he needed to approach girls in the village and all around the surrounding area. He had a routine he developed of waiting in his van close to the gates of Cleeve School, sometimes with the children. And he was able to talk several girls from the school into going back to the caravan with him. The mess and conditions they found when they got there made them feel even sorrier for the two girls. But as soon as Anna-Marie and Charmaine were out of earshot or in bed, he would shift the conversation away from whatever they had been talking about to sex talk and abortion talk, and talking about the operations he could do on women. You know. The what’s-her-name. The down-below areas. The curtains of the trailer would be pulled closed, and he would show them things – crude and rusty-looking tubes and rods – that he said he used for abortions. Vagina, isn’t it what they call it? He had a set of black-and-white Polaroid pictures showing close-ups of women’s vaginas, and he would bring them out. He would try to get the girls to pose for photographs, depending on what signals he felt they were giving him. He told them he could pimp for them like he pimped for his wife and like he had pimped for other women. Women were sitting on a goldmine but most of them didn’t seem to know it. He told them how much money a girl could make on the streets of Cheltenham.

  On the night of his drink with Rose, he rolled up in what she would remember as an old ice-cream van. It was actually a white camper van with a blue stripe on its side and a stolen tax disc on the windscreen. She was waiting outside. You could see her house from there. It was eight o’clock. She had the parcel he had delivered to her at the shop earlier under her arm. They went in the Swallow and sat for a long time over a single drink. He had his half a shandy. Always that. And for her maybe half a cider. Later she would drink Malibu and Coca-Cola. But Malibu wasn’t around in those days. So maybe a half a cider or a Bacardi and Coke. Drink would never play a significant part in anything that happened between them and they stuck to the one.

  They had a drink and he told her he was married but his wife had left him two years earlier. He said he lived in a caravan on a site in Stoke Orchard with his two children. Stoke Orchard, which she knew very well. Just a short walk away on Stoke Road, at the point where Cleeve village turned into countryside again. He was always a good talker. She liked that. She wasn’t. He was the sort of man who could talk the birds out of the trees. He had the gift of the gab.

  He had worked around Bishop’s Cleeve ten years earlier, when he was eighteen. He had delivered bread around Cleeve and the surrounding villages in a Sunblest van. He had been a seaman in those days, and Sunblest had just been a fill-in job. Only a sort of one-fling job. But he had a son in Bishop’s Cleeve somewhere as a result of that round. The mother had the brightest ginger hair you’ve ever seen in your life, and she was clubbed, look. Lived off Tobyfield Road and had been put in the club by him. There was a woman next door to her had loads of children. She used to have something like four or five loaves of bread a day, and this ginger piece next door, the redhead, used to have a brown loaf now and again. Her mother and father worked in Smith’s Industries. She didn’t work. This particular day she asked him to bring a small brown in and he walked in and there’s a big rug in front of the fire and she’s starkers lying on it. She says: How about it, then? Well, you couldn’t refuse. Couple of months went by, she come to the van one morning and said: Look at this, I’m pregnant, look. She was clubbed. He jacked the job there and then. He was gone. Didn’t wait to finish the round. All this in 1959. Rose would have been five.

  He had sea stories. He had been at sea. Six months as a deckhand fetching oil from Amsterdam and bringing it in to Gloucester docks. You didn’t pay tax or nothing, and you just signed on in any name. He went to Jamaica, the Far East. He went to Jamaica twice, for bananas, oranges, stuff like that. He went to Kenya once, that was on a safari trip, which was a hundred pounds and everything supplied. Bigger docks and bigger journeys. Girls just standing waiting on the docks by the dozens. It was gang-bang, thank you ma’am, and that was that story finished. He could remember times when he slept with three or four girls and went with each of them at least twice in a
night. Just gone from one to the other and then gone back over them, look. In the same bed. He never paid for it in his life. Sailors’ stories. Tales of the sea. Stories of his far-flung and manly life.

  He was a story-telling cowboy. He yarned in the same way he would operate as a cowboy builder: adding and bodging, lagging and pointing, improvising until a story could seem upright and watertight, with the idea of not being around to watch it topple over. Whether telling or building, what mattered to him was that something looked sound, and not to worry about the qualities of straight and plumb, square and level, right and true. The mugs could look after all that.

  And all the time the parcel that he had delivered to her at the bread shop earlier in the day sat beside them in the Swallow. He had brought her a lace dress and a fur coat, which she knew by now, because she had taken it home and had a look. They were nice, but she couldn’t keep them. There was no way she could keep them because her mother or her father might find them and they would go really up the wall. Nylon lace. Rabbit fur.

  Clothes – certain items of clothing – were to play an important part in their life together. Clothes as tokens of affection, as souvenirs and eroticized playthings. Clothes as fetish objects; clothes as bonds and restraints.

  That first time, though, she told him that she couldn’t take his present to her back to where her parents might ask questions, because she wasn’t supposed to have boyfriends. Her original idea had been to bring it and return it to him as a bare statement of the fact that she had no intention of starting any sort of relationship with this stranger. That had been her intention. But now an hour or two had passed. Between them they decided that he would take the coat and the dress back home to the site where he lived and store them in the trailer. The unspoken promise being of course that she would wear them there for him. And sooner rather than later he did photograph her standing on a deserted road leading from nowhere to nowhere, striking obscene poses and dressed in nothing but a thin fur coat.