Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  Although he would admit to many murders he would never admit that he had murdered Ann McFall. He preferred to talk about the concrete ramp for the cows that he had poured at the site of her murder with his father. The cattle ramp and how they had done it and what with. It was a tactic to take them away from the subject of murder and mutilation and to give himself time to think. A tactic he would use over and over. But it was also an obsession. Buckets of lime. Sacks of cement. Sewer pipes. Shovels. Back axles. Ice knives. Rakes. The sheath knife that he always carried on his belt. An actual dagger, used for laying felt.

  Making and constructing. Working and making. Activities that always held more meaning for him than unmaking a person.

  After he had disposed of Ann McFall he sluiced his arms and chest in the field’s cattle trough and went back to the caravan at Watermead in Brockworth where Rena was once again installed. It was going to be four years before he buried Rena in Letterbox Field in his village. Fingerpost Field was the next field over. And the following day he was back there looking for his father. He went to his father and told him what had happened and asked him to go up to Fingerpost Field with him because he couldn’t go up there on his own. And his father went with him to the field where Fred had started driving a tractor when he was nine. Your father used to take the tractor up and put him in the field. A little Fergie – a Massey-Ferguson. They stood at the spot where they had poured concrete on a farm field many years earlier and he told his father what he had done.

  *

  His mother died suddenly in February 1968, six months after he had murdered Ann McFall. She had a heart attack and died at the age of forty-four. The funeral was held at St Bathelomew’s, the Much Marcle parish church. And it was the subject of much comment afterwards that Fred was the only one of them who didn’t mark their mother’s passing with tears. Then back at the house when it was all over he upset the others by wanting to talk about selling his mother’s clothes. This was shocking.

  The death of his mother effectively ended Fred West’s association with the continuities of rural living and with that kind of settled country life. Countryside in the years ahead for him would increasingly mean a place to let the children out for a few hours on a Sunday afternoon. He’d take them there and let them run around and video them. They would go to a play area in the Forest where there were wooden bridges and climbing frames and a stream. Then he’d herd them into the back of the converted Group 4 Ford transit van with its blacked-out windows and welded security vents and put them back under lock and key at home.

  The country had become an alien environment in which things proliferated and grew and flourished and bloomed and constantly threatened to run out of control. He was attracted to the margins and the dark recesses of urban life where you could cease being the man you were and start over again as some other man instead.

  Almost his first act on taking possession of 25 Cromwell Street would be to uproot Mrs Green’s pear and apple trees in the back garden. Dig out what Mrs Green liked to think of as her orchard, demolish her raised beds and throw out her hen run. He was a town dweller by then and what he had in mind wasn’t a patch that needed cultivating but an urban garden. No more fruit trees with their blossom and shade. No more chicken coops and cinder paths and border plants. He wouldn’t achieve his objective overnight. But gradually over the years he introduced a barbecue pit, a climbing frame, a Wendy house (it was called a Wendy house, but it was actually a cycle shed), a fishpond, a paddling pool made from engineering bricks, plastic decorative lions, patio furniture, pink-and-white chequer-board-pattern patio paving over half and then all over the garden area. And at the same time the house was being steadily pushed out into the garden. The garden was slabbed over and extended into until there was no green left and there wasn’t a garden. No shrubs or trees. Only a stand of Leyland pines. Cypress leylandii. Which were hardly trees at all but things planted by people forced to live together in towns and used by them as screens to protect their privacy. Trees planted not for being pleasing to the eye but for shutting out the light and aggravating the neighbours. Trees as offensive weapons. Britain’s most common tree.

  By the time he had been in Cromwell Street for a few years, more or less the only signs of Fred West’s country beginnings would be the horseshoes nailed up over the front and back doors. Peter Evans the blacksmith used to make all their shoes. He’d have the horse there and he’d be shoeing in there, and you’d sit on the what’s-her-name and he’d make your boots and shoes. Mementoes of a world that was a dozen miles and already a lifetime away. Rusting horseshoes from Peter Evans’s forge. Small threshold gods.

  *

  Among all their children, the oldest, Heather, would be the one who showed the fiercest longing for the countryside. Heather, who they had fought so hard to keep and who they would murder and bury under the patio paving a few weeks after she left school in 1987.

  FODIWL. This was something that turned up inked on to all Heather’s belongings. On her books and her schoolbooks and her records. Heather’s private promise to herself written on nearly everything she owned. FODIWL. They didn’t know what it meant and she wouldn’t tell them. They kept asking her but she wouldn’t say.

  Then they murdered her and put her in a dustbin and put her under the patio by the Leyland pines. FODIWL. Forest Of Dean I Will Live. Somewhere far removed from the torments of her city life. Heather’s private promise to herself.

  Chapter Seven

  The house that she moved into with Fred in Clarence Road in Cheltenham was well known to the police. Costa, the Greek Cypriot who owned it, was also well known to them in his own right. Bikers lived there. And when you had the bikers you always had the runaways coming round. The runaways. The potheads. The drop-outs and schoolgirl alcoholics. The pill-poppers. The pushers.

  When the police were looking for runaways and missing persons, 9 Clarence Road would be one of the first places they would look. You had a frantic mother on your hands pleading with you to bring her daughter back, you went round there. And nine out of ten times you would find her. Rose had been found there herself only weeks before and returned to her parents, who had promptly placed her in a home. Fred had to call the law on a girl from Bishop’s Cleeve School who had followed him to Clarence Road. She stood outside all day shouting and followed him to his job at Cotswold Tyres and stood outside there shouting and he had her removed for her own safety because he knew what Rose could do.

  The house that Rose moved into with Fred, where she was living in one room with him and trying to bring up his two daughters, was well known for being a place where you could crash. You could crash there and you could score. Not bad blow. Decent five-pound deals. It was a whole scene there in the centre of Cheltenham. All these kinds of words that they were hearing all around them for the first time, coming out of a new way of living that Fred and Rose were intimidated and attracted by at the same time. In 1970 the wild behaviour was still new. The dropping of inhibitions. The kids going crazy. Bikers, druggies, drongos, pseuds, freaks and students. Pretty good shit. Bad mother. Outtasite. Bummer, man.

  Not many of the bikers living at Clarence Road worked. But those who did almost without exception worked at the Wall’s sausage factory butchering pigs. For many years their natural enemy had been the wearers of long hair – beatniks and poncy art-college students and so on. At every end-of-term party, Cheltenham Art College students used to be set upon by the rockers from the town who used to come in with razorblades between their fingers and chains and lay into all these middle-class art-student poseurs.

  But by 1970 many of those tribal divisions had faded away. Bikers and hippies had come to realize that they were generally speaking for and against the same things. They were for pleasurable anarchy and the carnivalesque aspects of life, and against the rigid, routinized order of the official, public city. The drugs squad in Cheltenham consisted of one person. It was still possible to feel that by taking drugs and living in a certain fashion you were being a
n outlaw against society. If you were somebody who had been on the road, somebody who was a bit lost and drifting, a set-up like the one at 9 Clarence Road could be like a security. There were many people around who wanted to belong to a house like that; to join an extended family.

  Fred and Rose looked pretty straight. But she was only sixteen and pregnant and living with a man who was twelve years older. So she passed for those reasons. And she was Fred’s old lady. Rose could appear disapproving of these drop-outs. She was probably strange and unsure and it came out as disapproving. She was keen to play the little mother, making dresses for Charmaine and Anna-Marie and cooking for them. She would take an old dress apart, using the pieces as a pattern, cutting them one size bigger and putting it altogether. She had a sewing-machine and she could get remnants of material quite cheap. It worked quite well. And at least they looked tidy to go to school. She was looking for the approval of the welfare. The Welfare were still keeping a check on the children and it was important to her to prove that she could cope. That she was capable. She loved to give them a bath. Charmaine’s hair was beautiful, a lovely raven black and it was long down to her waist. How it would shine. They had only a Baby Belling cooker. It wasn’t very big but she managed to get some pretty good meals cooked on it. On a Sunday she could get a full roast dinner cooked on that little cooker and pudding. The little mother. Out around the town people would take them for sisters. Charmaine was seven and Anna-Marie nearly six. Rose was sixteen. She was trying to be a homemaker and to the drop-outs and heads she could seem like she was on this other trip. The schoolgirl mum. She could seem disapproving.

  But Fred seemed to revel in all the upheaval. The police coming was just a joke to him. He didn’t care whether they came or not. Fred was cool about drugs and drunkenness and crazy bombed-out behaviour. He was a familiar figure at the Full Moon, the drug pub in the High Street in Cheltenham. Fred seemed to like it in there and he seemed very much at home at Clarence Road. The noise at night and the falling around. The raids. The busts. Completely comfortable with that kind of out-of-it, anarchic atmosphere. He would remember it and try to re-create it when he had his own house at 25 Cromwell Street a couple of years into the future.

  The one thing there weren’t any of at Clarence Road were black people. There were no spades. It was very rare to see a black person anywhere in Cheltenham. Cheltenham was old and straight and down on any kind of non-conformist behaviour. There was a lot of animosity towards hippies and homosexuals and unmarried mothers and a great deal of animosity towards blacks. More than twenty years later the selection of a black barrister as Conservative candidate for Cheltenham in the 1992 General Election would lead to a mass defection of the Tory faithful which would cost the party a previously safe seat.

  Gloucester, on the other hand, whose eastern suburbs were starting to join up with the western suburbs of Cheltenham in those days and join up completely with them now, is a working-class city with a strong industrial and manufacturing base. Somewhere where the people ‘only care about fairgrounds and fish and chips’ according to a former Cheltenham lord mayor. Gloucester and Cheltenham are two cultures united by a common antipathy, as somebody once perceptively said. The cathedral and its closeness to Cheltenham and the fact that it mainly sells itself as a touring centre for the Cotswolds obscure the fact that most people who live in Gloucester work in foundries and factories and – this was truer in the seventies than it is now – the docks. Most of the West Indians who were drawn to Gloucester in the years straight after the war were drawn there by the availability of menial and labouring jobs which they were very often over-qualified to do. Foundry jobs and dirty jobs in factories where aircraft and railway carriages and motorbikes and matches were made. Gloucester Aircraft Company. Gloucester Wagon Works. England’s Glory matches.

  Most of the immigrants who settled in Gloucester came from a handful of neighbouring parishes, mainly the parishes of St Ann and St Catherine, in Jamaica. It was a strange and often hostile environment with colour-bar policies and quota policies in operation in clubs and pubs and other public places. In Gloucester as in the rest of the country there were serious problems with housing, many men having to share rooms in a house, sleeping on the floor, sharing a kitchen, toilet and bathroom (if there was one). It was not unknown for ten or twelve to be sharing rooms in a house. With so much shiftwork some would be resting while others were working. In pooling finances through ‘pardners’ many were able to put a deposit down on their own home when their ‘hand’ became due. Hard work, sometimes to the point of holding down more than one job at a time, was, and still is, part of the immigrants’ creed.

  Fred West’s reasons for moving to Gloucester from Cheltenham in April 1970 were in many ways what the immigrants’ reasons had been half a generation earlier. He was an unskilled but hard worker looking for work to support a growing family; he had a third child on the way. He had difficulties with the language; with reading and writing. And he was adrift in a strange and what to him must have still seemed an alien culture. It has often been argued that the differences between the agricultural South and the industrial North for the hundreds of thousands of American Negroes who made the trek north in the early decades of the century were even greater than the differences between the white and black races. And his poor country background was one of many things Fred West had in common with the members of Gloucester’s small Jamaican population. His children would find it funny when they went back to visit his father and his brothers in Much Marcle and they had tea bags hanging out for drying and reusing. All his life Fred would come in from work and pick up an onion and start eating it as if it was an apple, or lift a lump of lard out of the chip pan and eat it on bread. He would retrieve things that Rose had thrown in the bin as being too good to throw away. Retrieve them and eat them. His children couldn’t believe what he would eat. Still a hillbilly mesmerized by the pace and possibilities of the city.

  Frank Zygmunt, an elderly immigrant Pole with very poor English, was one of the few landlords in Gloucester who was prepared to let to Jamaicans. Most of his houses were occupied by Irish, Poles and Jamaicans. Fred West and his family were given a flat by Mr Zygmunt. Fred stayed working as a tyre-fitter and earning extra money by being on call to Frank Zygmunt as a jobbing builder. And his ability as an odd-job man and builder spread by word of mouth from Zygmunt’s tenants into the wider West Indian community. He became well known for being reliable and personable and very reasonably priced. A laugh and a joke and a cheeky grin. And there was another reason. He took every opportunity to encourage the black men he met to consider having sex with Rose, not least because he was obsessed with the idea of them having ‘larger ones’ than white men. ‘Rose only had big fucking blokes,’ he said. ‘She didn’t want little worms playing about with her.’ She didn’t like ‘some little thing wriggling about’ in her. The bigger the better. The bigger and the blacker the better for Rose, Fred decided.

  Fred West had an obsession with size. ‘Big’, ‘huge’ and ‘massive’ were his most frequently used words. Big this. Massive that. Used equally of people and things. The following exchange would take place when he was being interviewed by the police after his arrest in 1994:

  QUESTION … you find [Rose] so perfect for your needs, and the fear of losing her is beyond belief to you?

  FRED WEST Yes … Yes.

  QUESTION Because for all those years, as you say, you’ve trained her, down to letters and commands, and she’s complied, and she’s got a very wide and open …

  [The questioner is about to say ‘attitude to sexual matters’ here. It is a woman officer, WDC Hazel Savage. But before she can finish, he says:]

  FRED WEST … vagina, isn’t it what they call it?

  SAVAGE And that all pleases you?

  FRED WEST Yep.

  SAVAGE And that has taken a lot of years for you to perfect?

  FRED WEST Yep.

  ‘Rose didn’t want the gentle part of it,’ he would say in the last mo
nths of his life. ‘She wanted some big nigger to throw her down and fucking bang on top of her, and treat her like a dog … that was sex to Rose. “I don’t want any of that soppy shit,” she said. “I want fucking. Not fucking about with. Or chatting up” … She’d been fucked all day, and I’d come home from work and she’d sit deliberately on the edge of the settee with her legs wide open and … say, “Look at that … I bet you wish you had something that could fill that” … It never stopped. It didn’t stop at all. There was no let-up.’

  Fred was a masochist in this way. He pushed Rose out to go with the black men he had picked for her. Or he had the black men in so he could listen and watch. After so many years he would be able to tell the regulars what he wanted of them. Keep her with you for this long, give her this to drink, she likes this done to her, etcetera. In the end he had them like robots. And he would want to hear her version of it afterwards, whether they had done what he said. His mind was filled with fantasies of Rose with other men. On and on about going with other men. They were usually black. Almost without exception black. And the black men were well aware that in having sex with Rose they were doing Fred a favour. They brought her presents sometimes, a bottle of Malibu, a toy for the children, sexual accessories, some Bacardi rum. But never money. They never paid. Only the white men paid. If Rose ever did go out with Fred it was with Fred and the black men and it was to make sure that she was put to bed with them. He was always touting. The one who had the obsession with the sexual potency of black men was not Rose but him.

  She had a red and black book in which, at his insistence, she would keep all their statistics – penis size, performance marks out of ten, what they liked to do to her, what she liked to do to them and all the names. There were about seventy names. They also had an album of close-up pictures of men’s erect penises which was kept locked in a briefcase in Rose’s ‘special’ room. It was one of his rules that both the diary and the album had to be available for him to consult at any time. Eventually he even installed a two-way mirror in the upstairs toilet at 25 Cromwell Street so that he could see for himself the size of some of the men Rose was going with. Also what they did in those intimate moments when they thought they were alone. He would creep up the stairs after them to peer through the mirror while they were standing at the bowl. Trying to catch reality offguard.