Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  All these stories, made up many years later, to explain why, at the end of 1965, he was feeling himself being drawn back to his mother and his father and his familiar family circle in Much Marcle.

  The departure itself he would build up into a drama – a dramatic getaway with Rena throwing baby clothes and the baby Anna-Marie in through the window of his Vauxhall Viva. A tyre-screaming chase, shooting the lights with desperadoes on their tail. In fact he simply told Rena and her friend, Isa McNeill, who was still living with them as a baby-minder, of his decision to go home and the fact that he had already contacted the Corporation to say he was ready to give up the keys. He would take both of the children with him and then, when he had found his feet, found a job and a place for them to live, he would come back and collect her. Them. Isa as well if she wanted to go.

  By mid-December he was back living at Moorcourt Cottage with his parents and Charmaine and Anna-Marie. Daisy, his mother, was very happy to have Anna-Marie who looked so like Fred and her own Hill side of the family. Big tawny moon face. Strong features. But she wasn’t happy having Charmaine living with her, no blood relation and a child of mixed race. She was prepared to look after Anna-Marie while Fred went out working but she wasn’t prepared to look after Charmaine. Because she was Indian. Old country people were a bit funny about that. His mother wanted him to put Charmaine in a home and she’d bring Anna-Marie up as her own. Those were her conditions. His conditions were that she had neither of them or both. Fred against his mother, by this time a mountainous woman. And his mother won. On 29 December 1965 both Charmaine and Anna-Marie, at the ages of a little over two and a half and just eighteen months, were taken into care by the Herefordshire Children’s Department at their father’s request. An officer of the Department found them to be ‘in a deplorable state’.

  It was six weeks before he got up to Glasgow to collect Rena and Isa McNeill. He arrived in the small hours of the morning and they were waiting. He wanted to do a quick turnaround and he found that there were three women to bring back with him, not two. Ann McFall was another pal of Isa’s and Rena’s who had sometimes sat the children. She was younger than them, not quite seventeen, with nothing to hold her in Glasgow and she had decided to give it a go in the south. He had driven up in his works wagon and he started to pile their stuff in the back. It was the wagon he used to transport hides and skins for Clenches Field Farm in Longford. Their few belongings. There wasn’t much. And the three girls piled in among the untrimmed skins and animal leftovers and the rank animal stench, sitting on their bags. The van he used to tour the abattoirs. Painting by Otto Dix or George Grosz. There is an actual painting. In fact a drawing by Grosz: Just Half a Pound, 1928. A drawing of a ‘real’ butcher’s shop which specializes in carving up and selling female carcasses. A Hausfrau buying meat from a butcher who has human carcasses hanging up in the shop behind him; dismembered bodies and knives. A drawing to illustrate the fact that the German language uses the same word – Fleisch – for living matter and dead matter; for flesh and meat. Women’s bodies are positioned as pure victims, as nothing more than Fleisch (both ‘meat’ and ‘flesh’) that has been slaughtered and put out for display. People who were subjects have become objects, corpses. They are no longer anything. The ability to perceive subjects as mere objects – to turn people into things – is something that Fred West had to a murderous degree.

  Just two months before he went up to collect his special load in Glasgow, he had gone with his brother John to visit John’s fiancée in hospital. She had been standing in front of a fire in her nightdress and her nightdress had caught fire and she was in a critical condition in the burns unit of a hospital in Birmingham. They had to fight to get in to see her. The doctors didn’t want them to see her. She had suffered burns over most of her body and she was lying in an oxygen tent wearing only dressings. Kitty, a village girl soon to be John’s wife. And Fred had turned to his brother and said to him – and she heard him say this; she would be able to repeat it later; it was imprinted on her brain – he said, ‘Christ, you’re not going to marry that, are you?’

  The cattle market in Gloucester used to be close to Cromwell Street, in the centre, where the bus station now is. But when Fred West was sixteen, in 1957, it moved to a new site away from the congestion of the city centre. The old tree-shaded market was replaced by a series of buildings based on a style of architecture made popular during the Festival of Britain. Fred West was a regular attender at the cattle market. He also became a familiar figure at Gloucester’s ‘Private Shop’ – its one licensed outlet for sex aids and pornography and so on. The Private Shop also used to be close to Cromwell Street. It used to be on Barton Street for several years. But the pressure of public opinion eventually pushed it to the outskirts of the city. The move was resisted by Darker Enterprises, the shop’s owners. But in 1987 they finally gave in and moved to a premises on St Oswald’s Road, part of the South Wales–Birmingham ring road, well away from the town centre. The Private Shop now occupies a cabin in the cattle market. A unit in the Trade Exhibits block which is surrounded by agricultural wholesalers and butchers’ shops and men moving around sheep and cow carcasses on their shoulders; meat and feed and holding pens. The customers are fairly average-looking men – and a few women – who pull in off the ring road. Pull in, make their purchase and go. But on livestock days the sex shop, which is still Gloucester’s only sex shop, inevitably attracts cowhands and farm workers and men with blood over their aprons and white coats. The noises made by penned-in and panicked animals and the auctioneer calling in the bidding ring – ‘What grand heifers they are … Two super heifers there, gentlemen, right the way off the top of the Cotswolds … Good bulling heifers, look at those’ – and slaughterhousemen and butchers thumbing through magazines showing women opening themselves for display and doing difficult, unnatural things. Painting by Otto Dix or George Grosz.

  Fred West’s pet name for Rose was ‘cow’. He constantly referred to her as his cow. He called her this for many years. He was always talking about wanting to put her with a bull. ‘I, Rosemary West, known as Fred’s cow …’ one document recovered from the attic in Cromwell Street begins. And it ends: ‘I must always dress and try to act like a cow for Fred, also to bathe and wash when I am told. Signed Mrs R. P. West.’ Fred would do some cow paintings for Rose, oil-paintings of Jerseys and Friesians, varnish and frame them and hang them in her bedroom. Paintings of cows hanging on the wall at the end of her bed so that every morning, right up to the morning she was arrested on suspicion of murder, they would be the first things she would see.

  *

  Two of the three women Fred West delivered to Gloucester from Glasgow in his abattoir lorry would be murdered by him. Decapitated and dismembered by him and buried in the fields he had worked as a boy in Much Marcle. There were flat fields and valleyed ones. Letterbox Field was a valleyed one, and he had gone there on his occasional trips down from Glasgow with Rena. It was his favourite place in Much Marcle. A place to sit on the bridge and watch badgers come down to the stream to drink. Badgers. Foxes. Various animals in the dusk. There was a coppice. The steeple of Marcle Church in the distance. You can’t see Moorcourt Cottage from Letterbox Field because it’s valleyed, and you can’t be seen. It was romantic and it was their place. And it would be to this place that he would bring Rena on the night he killed her.

  It was one night at the end of August 1971, a full five years after he had brought her south with Ann and Isa in the meat wagon. He murdered her. Nobody will know how. He removed her head. He removed her legs at the hip, twisting her thighs out of their sockets. He dug a hole. The ground was rock hard. It was the middle of summer. The field was planted with corn. He dug a hole under the canopy of a tree where the grain wouldn’t grow. Using a pickaxe and a spade he made a hole and he put Rena’s remains – her legs, her head, her torso – in it. He removed a kneecap and several of her fingers and toes and carried them away with him. He would always do this. He would do it with eve
ry girl he murdered. It was part of his method; his need. A man who couldn’t write. It was a part of his ‘signature’.

  It was a small hole. Two and a half feet by a foot and a half across, and not quite four feet deep. Vertical rather than horizontal. A small, deep, well-dug hole. A vertical shaft. He pressed what remained of Rena into the ground, and fitted her legs in around her.

  There was one tree in that field; a marker in the hedge. And he buried Rena under it. Rena, his first wife. It’s the only tree there.

  *

  ‘I had a special load on last night. Three girls in the back.’ You can hear him saying this. It’s what he said. He was a boaster. A braggart. Nobody believed him. He was a romancer. He was a bullshitting liar.

  Sandhurst Lane caravan site, which is where he took Rena and her friends Ann and Isa on the day he brought them in the abattoir lorry from Glasgow, was, as it happened, close to the cattle market in Gloucester. The site and the market were near-neighbours on a water meadow adjacent to the east channel of the river Severn. The cattle standings and the sale-ring block were visible from The Willows, which is what Sandhurst Lane was officially called.

  A caravan is not what they had been expecting. He had got word back to them that he had found a house which had plenty room for all of them, plus the children. A lot of space and a new start. But he had bought a caravan with the help of one of his sisters. He had gone to his mother first and asked her if they would guarantee a hire-purchase agreement that would allow him to buy a ’van for £600, but his mother had told him no. She knew Fred. Not much about him that she didn’t know. After some persuasion, though, his sister Daisy and her husband Frank had agreed to act as guarantors. He had given his blue Vauxhall Viva in part-exchange for a new caravan. It was brown and cream; a four-berth. He liked a ’van. Something about the restricted space and the thin shell seemed to appeal to him. A room, the simplest form of shelter. And he had arranged to have it delivered to the Sandhurst Lane site close to a reservoir and a tar works and a loop of the river on the edge of Gloucester.

  It wasn’t much. But it was enough for the authorities to let them have the children back again living with them. Fred and Rena had a partitioned-off part to themselves at one end. Charmaine and Anna-Marie slept in put-away beds that dropped out of the wall in a small room in the middle. There was a built-in table with padded benches going round it in the shape of a U. Isa slept on the bench on one side, and Ann slept on the other. Ann and Isa were good friends. They had worked at a knitwear factory together, sewing the necks on to polo-neck jerseys at the same table. And Ann, because of her age they supposed – she wasn’t quite seventeen – was infatuated with Fred West, who was eight years older.

  Ann hadn’t had a happy life. In truth, it had been a bleak, horrible existence. A miserable life blighted by drink and poverty and violence. Tommy McFall, her father, wasn’t married to her mother. He kept a wife and a second family in another part of Glasgow. He would come and go, making demands, arriving drunk, being violent. Jeannie, Ann’s mother, was a cleaner and a chronic alcoholic. She cleaned people’s houses and lived in stripped-out, almost empty rooms surrounded by bottles. No electric, no gas very often, just chaos and filthy lino and tins and bottles. Tommy McFall beat her. She was beaten by a son who had acquired the nickname ‘Scarface’ McFall. Ann’s brother. He beat Ann as well. Came out of prison and took anything that was worth taking from her and beat her. All this in a close in Malcolm Street, just by Parkhead, the Celtic stadium. Tommy McFall was an attendant at the Parkhead Baths in addition to working as a street-corner bookie.

  Ann had been placed in care in Nazareth House, a Catholic children’s home in Aberdeen, when she was ten. She had returned to living in Malcolm Street when she was fifteen and by then her mother, who couldn’t be considered an old woman, was already failing. She wouldn’t eat. She liked the drink and eating took the edge off. Eating kept her from getting where she wanted to go and so she didn’t like eating. Ann used to try to make her but it was useless trying. When she eventually died of malnutrition in 1969 a tin of beans would be the only food anywhere in the house. That was it. Just a small tin of beans.

  Ann had a boyfriend. Duncan McLeish, nickname ‘Kelly’. She had his nickname tattooed on her arm. But a short time before she left Malcolm Street to begin her new life in Gloucester, her boyfriend was killed in an accident at work, electrocuted while climbing into the cabin of a crane. One less thing to hold her there. Another reason for leaving.

  Life among them in the caravan on The Willows site at first must have been fun. The three lively girls and the two attractive children and the breadwinner with his suggestive stories and his cheeky cackle and his rabid imagination in this all-female household. Ann, really little more than a child herself and recently out of care, playing with the children who were out of care now, babysitting other children on the site for smokes and pocket money, and flirting with Fred West. ‘Flaunting herself’ at him, as Isa would say later. A slight girl with waist-length shiny brown hair. He called her a ‘dainty little piece’. Fun before the pattern of her other life came down and re-imposed itself on them. The oppressiveness and the restrictions; the violence and the beatings. It was true she wasn’t the target of the outbursts and the beatings. This was Fred beating Rena. But it was all so close to what she must have thought she had got away from and left behind and it was happening more or less on top of her because of the close conditions. Every intimate sound. Every kick and bruising. Even when you took the children to a neighbour’s ’van to protect them from hearing and seeing the sound still carried. The cursing and swearing. The smashing. The sound of something dully hitting against metal.

  Before long they came to feel like prisoners. He laid down rules and conditions and he expected them to be followed. No trips into town was one. They were perhaps a twenty-minute walk from the centre of Gloucester, the big shops at the Cross. But visiting Gloucester was not allowed. Leaving the site was not allowed unless he said they could do it. Leaving the caravan some days, depending on how the mood took him. And he would check. He would come by in the slaughterhouse wagon during the day just to make sure that they were doing what he was telling them and that they hadn’t strayed. Trying to catch them. He would come home from work covered in blood and smelling of the job and demand his dinner. Acting the big man. Throwing it about. Slapping Rena. Smacking the children. If Rena tried to stop him hitting Charmaine he would turn it on Rena and Ann and Isa would take the children out into the site until it seemed safe to return. Welcome to The Willows.

  After about six weeks Isa had had enough. Both Isa and Rena, who had come in the first place only to try and get her children back off him. She had been happy in Glasgow with John McLachlan. Happy enough. Things had been turning over. He had his name on her arm. Isa had been going with a friend of John McLachlan’s, a man called John Trotter. The two Johns. Neither of them small men. So Isa and Rena worked out a plan, a way to remove Ann and themselves from this Willows.

  There was a phone by the main gate opening off Sandhurst Lane. And Isa went down there one day and phoned the Victoria café in Glasgow, one of the two Johns’ regular haunts. All of them used to meet up there before their move south. She left a message for John McLachlan telling him to phone her at that number at a certain time. When he did, she asked him to come and collect her and Rena and the children, Ann and the children, really all of them, as soon as he could. She told him a day and a time when she knew Fred would be at work and went back to the caravan and waited. When the day came – it was by now towards the end of April in 1966 – the two Johns turned up at Sandhurst Lane in a rented car and hurriedly packed the women’s belongings in it. Only Ann seemed to be dragging her feet. Dawdling and not seeming to feel the same sense of urgency as them. Hanging on to Anna-Marie. Hanging back in the ’van. Of course she had told him. Told Fred what they were planning. That they were thinking of bolting. It was an infatuation. And here he came, looking very pleased and knowing. He wasn’t a
t work where he should have been, but back at the site and coming towards them. He made a grab for Charmaine. That was the first thing he did. Scooped her up and held her and used her as a human shield. John McLachlan punched him in the stomach anyway but he didn’t let go. Ann had Anna-Marie and he had Charmaine. Rena tried to pull Charmaine off him but he pulled back. He had a firm grip on her. He was determined. There was a scene developing. Nothing new at The Willows and a diversion on a weekday afternoon. A small crowd spectating. A lot of shouting. Rena crying and shouting and demanding to have her children back. John McLachlan gave him a slapping and punched him in the stomach again. Punched him low. Then Ann was shaking her head and saying she wasn’t going. She was stopping. She was staying to look after the children. Be a nanny. A shouting match going on among them. And then a policeman on a bike showed up and it went very quiet. Pedalling down the track that connected the ’van site to Sandhurst Lane. Rena and Isa got in the back of the Mini. John McLachlan and John Trotter got in the front. Isa would say later that Rena had cried all the way back to Scotland. Isa, whose family lived in the same street as Jeannie, Ann’s mother, would read cards and letters that Ann sent to her mother telling her how well she was doing and about the lovely children and the beautiful big house and the successful man. The tremendous man. Jeannie would call her over and she would look at the letters, written in a neat hand. But the cards and letters would stop arriving after a year or so. Isa would go ahead and marry John Trotter but she would never see her friend Ann again.