Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  Rose didn’t have a washing-machine so she used to boil the nappies in a galvanized bucket on top of the stove. Everybody used to ask her how she kept them so white. There was a Polish lady who had the ground floor flat next door, name of Jaruga. Mrs Jaruga who lived at 24 Midland Road the same time as Rose and Fred and the girls were next door at 25. She had a little girl. And she said to her as she was hanging out her washing one day, ‘How do you keep your clothes so clean?’ and Rose told her. The Polish neighbour said she was very good for one so young. She felt very proud. Because of this she liked the Polish lady, whose name was Kay. She passed on a lot of good advice about babies and Rose liked her telling her how the Polish people lived. Good recipes, wine punch, boiled puddings wrapped in cloths and what was good for babies. The Polish lady’s husband grew tomatoes and she would give her some straight from the garden. Great.

  And then Fred gets arrested for tax discs on cars. Rose had only been home two weeks with Heather when Fred was arrested for ‘swapping’ a tax disc from one of Frank Zygmunt’s vans to his own and changing the details. Two weeks later he was arrested again, this time for the theft of four tyres from his employers at Cotswold Tyres. He was sacked from his job as a tyre-fitter but him and Frank Zygmunt got on great together and he went to work for his landlord every day after he had come home from the milk round. Always a cobble on.

  On 4 December 1970 he was fined £50 and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for the theft of the tyres and the road-fund disc. It was a conviction that breached the suspended sentence he had been given the previous August in Cheltenham for the theft of some fencing, and that brought him a further six months’ imprisonment.

  Their first Christmas together was going to be spent apart. Rose was going to spend it on her own in a damp flat with bare floors and minimum furniture and poor metered heating with two hostile children who she had no money to buy presents for and a new baby. Fred spent it not far away across the park in Gloucester Prison. On New Year’s Eve he was back in court again to receive a further one-month sentence for another theft, which brought his total sentence to ten months. He was to spend the next six months and three weeks in prison, first in Gloucester and then at Leyhill Open Prison twenty miles away in Wotton-under-Edge. He would be in Leyhill from 27 January to 24 June 1971, making models out of matchsticks, rolling his own, painfully putting down his feelings of love for Rose in illiterate and all but illegible letters decorated with tattoo-style crosses and love hearts (‘Our family of Love … Mr and Mrs West for Ever’). While Rose sat it out at Midland Road without even the distraction of a television. The two girls spent a lot of the time locked in their room and were not allowed out even to go to the toilet. They would use a bucket and sometimes when they went to pick it up to empty it Rose would kick it over on to the floor, and so they had to pick that up. The television packed up early in the New Year and she didn’t have any money to fix it. No money and no television and a flat that smelled of urine. Dettol and wee. This was the life she had run away to; the life she had chosen for herself when she went straight from school to him.

  *

  Letter from 25 Midland Road, 4 May 1971:

  To My Darling,

  What was you on about at the beginning of your letter. I just can’t make it out for trying. Hey love that’s great, just three more visits, it’ll take up half the time I’ve got to wait for you. Blinking base people get’s on my nerves. Darling, about Char. I think she likes to be handled rough. But darling, why do I have to be the one to do it. I would keep her for her own sake, if it wasn’t for the rest of the children. You can see Char coming out in Anna now and I hate it.

  Love, I don’t think God wan’ted me to go to that dance. Because I didn’t go after all. Darling, I think from now on I’m going to let God guide me. It always ends up that way anyway (As you may know) Ha! Ha! Oh! Love! About our son. I’ll see the doctor about the pill. And then we’ll be safe to decide about it when you come home.

  Well, Love, keep happy, Longing for the 18th.

  Your ever worshipping wife, Rose

  Rose had drawn a heart at the top and written the words ‘From now until forever’ and ‘That ring that means so much’ in the top right-hand corner.

  *

  Letter from HM Prison, Leyhill, 14 May 1971:

  To My Darling Wife Rose,

  Darling be at home on Tuesday for your table Will be cuming so be at home all day until thy cum it will be in the morning if thy do cum then cum see me but dont cum till thy cum Darling.

  Darling you for got to write agen. Darling your caravan is at the prison gate for you. I have put your assisted visits form for the 18th or 19th and for the 15th of June. Will, it wont be long for the 24 now Darling so get the pill if you want it or will be a mum for son or to son Darling. I love you darling for ever my love. Your has you say for now untill for ever. Darling. Will, Darling, Untill I see you. All my love I sind to you. Your Ever Worshipping Husband Fred.

  Fred then decorated the letter with the words ‘for Heather’, ‘ANNA’, ‘CHAR’, ‘For Rose’ and a number of crosses representing kisses. Then he wrote:

  And more, 100 more

  Mr and Mrs R West for ever

  The caravan he refers to is a gypsy caravan he had made out of matchsticks which opened up to make a jewellery box. A wooden heart suspended from the front by a chain was inscribed ‘To Rose Love Fred’. The table was a heart-shaped table he had made in the prison workshop.

  *

  Letter from 25 Midland Road, 22 May 1971:

  To My Dearest Lover,

  Darling, I am sorry I upset you in my previous letters I didn’t mean it (NO joking). I know you love me darling. It just seems queer that anyone should think so much of me. I LOVE You. Love I don’t mind what you make me, because I know it will turn out beautifull. Darling I would like to get a horse for our caravan & put it in a showcase. We’ve got a lot of things to do darling in the next couple of years. And we’ll do it just loving each other. Well Love, see you on the 31st, Better not write to much incase I go putting my big foot in it. (Ha! Ha!) Sending all my love & heart your worshipping Wife, Rose.

  P.S. Love I’ve got the wireless on and it’s playing some lovly romantic music. Oh! how I wish you were hear beside me. Still remembering your love & warmth, Rose.

  At the top of the letter she had written ‘From Now Untill Forever’ with a heart.

  Letters that would be found twenty-three years later, boxed and stored in the attic at 25 Cromwell Street. The archive of their life together. A whole life – their life as a couple – preserved in scraps of paper. A graveyard at the bottom of the house. Bodies taken apart and roughly buried in bits by the drains in the cellar and left to decompose. A museum at the top of the house. The scraps of their lives carefully kept and preserved. A museum of themselves.

  *

  A week after her eighth birthday in March 1971, Charmaine was taken to the casualty department of Gloucester Royal Hospital shortly before seven one evening and treated for a ‘puncture wound’ to her left ankle. The ‘accident’, which had possibly involved a knife, had happened at the flat in Midland Road where she was living with Rose and Anna-Marie and the new baby. Fred was still in prison. The incident with the breakfast bowl which resulted in Anna-Marie having stitches in her scalp also happened around this time when Fred was away.

  Charmaine was a bedwetter. This meant more work every day for Rose and did nothing to improve her mood. She was on a short fuse. There was the money to get sorted out with the Social and bills to pay and food to put on the table. They lived on chips and bread and butter. She had to feed the meter. She was still making them things herself, school dresses, play clothes. She was on a short fuse.

  While Rose lived and slept in the big room at the front of the house looking out over the park with Heather, her baby by Fred, the children of Fred’s other marriage were frequently kept out of sight at the back of the house; locked up and shut away. Charmaine on the narrow bed under th
e window; Anna-Marie on the narrow bed against the wall. Rose adored children until they were about one year old, Anna-Marie would remember. She loved the helplessness of them and she loved to do things for them. But the moment children developed signs of independence, such as crawling, walking or talking, things changed. Then they became a nuisance and would feel the sharp end of her tongue and her temper.

  She was unpredictable. Sometimes your legs were tied open, and sometimes your hands were tied behind your back. She’d lock the door behind her when she came in. Make you strip off, push you back on the bed. Perhaps the rope was on the bed all the time, under the spring. Plastic washing line. Strips of sheet. Perhaps they were there all the time under the mattress. It might have always been there. Sometimes tie your hands around your back and tie you to the bed. It depended. It depended sometimes on whether she was going shopping or something like that. This was their hope. In the end in a way they were quite happy being tied up, because it meant she would leave them alone.

  Some time before she saw Charmaine for the last time Anna-Marie opened the door to the bedroom at Midland Road and saw Charmaine naked, tied to the bed, lying on a piece of waterproof sheet. Her eyes looked frightened. She looked like she had been perspiring or crying and she never cried. Her fringe – her fringe or her forehead – looked wet.

  One day in that summer when she had her seventh birthday Anna-Marie came home from school and was told that Charmaine was gone. She was gone with her mother. And although Anna-Marie wondered why their mother wanted just one of them not both, she was pleased for Charmaine. She was settled and content to stay with her dad. But Char had always wanted to be with her mum and so she was pleased. She had no clear picture of which one was her mother. All of her life she would remain unclear about which of the many foster mothers and carers and baby-minders coming and going, passing through, had been her. Rena. The Rena one. But if Charmaine was with her she was happy. Happy for Charmaine. Anna-Marie was told by her father that Char had gone to Scotland with her mother. Rose told Anna-Marie that Char had gone off to London with her real mum. All the same place to her. Scotland. London. But if Charmaine was happy. She didn’t know where these places were.

  *

  Rena was here and there. She was here and then she was gone. She stuck to this pattern – or it seems was compelled to live by this pattern – all her life. She was a good mother when she was with them. She looked after them well when she was there. When they were together Fred and Rena could be quite happy together without any problem. But Rena had this thing in her where she would just disappear for a month. For you didn’t know how long. She had to go on her way. He was always trying to get Rena to settle with them or get out of the way completely and let him get somebody else to take her place. And he would get somebody else and then Rena would reappear. And it would be ‘Right you, out.’ This went on from the day they went to Scotland. When she had been drinking Rena could have a loose mouth. He had a quick temper. The boot would go in. He wouldn’t hesitate to use his feet. The fists would fly and the feet would go in and that would be Rena off again.

  She had been with him when Ann McFall disappeared. She had been living with Fred and the children on the Watermead site at Brockworth and Ann had been living covertly in a little caravan at Sandhurst Lane on the other side of Gloucester when he told Rena that Ann had packed her bags and gone. She had been with him when he was being chased between Sandhurst Lane and Watermead by the hire-purchase people who he hadn’t been paying and who were about to repossess his ’van. She had been with him six weeks after he had murdered Ann and buried her remains in Fingerpost Field in Much Marcle in August 1967 and they had moved to the Lakehouse site at Bishop’s Cleeve in October that year. She had been with him when his mother died in February 1968. And Fred and Rena had been in one of their together periods when a fifteen-year-old girl called Mary Bastholm had gone missing just prior to his mother’s death: they had been in a VW beetle that Rena had borrowed from one of her ‘clients’ when they were stopped and questioned about Mary Bastholm’s disappearance during a random police check at Westgate Bridge in Gloucester.

  Fred West would never admit that he murdered Mary Bastholm. (It can only be assumed that she was murdered: her body has never been found.) But there are many things that connect him to Mary Bastholm’s death. In common with several of the girls whose bodies would be recovered from 25 Cromwell Street, she was last seen standing at a bus stop on the night that she disappeared. She was on her way to visit her boyfriend who lived on the outskirts in Quedgeley and she was waiting for a bus just outside Gloucester city centre at a spot where the Bristol Road runs parallel with the Sharpness canal. She was seen there shortly after seven o’clock on 6 January 1968. It was a Saturday night in winter, frosty and sleeting, she was carrying a game of Monopoly in a plastic carrier bag and wearing a navy-blue twinset and matching shoes and gloves, and she was never seen again.

  Mary Bastholm helped in the kitchen at the Pop-Inn, a café near the docks in Southgate Street in Gloucester where Fred West used to go; he had done some work on the drains in the yard there towards the end of 1967. His most usual reason for being in the Pop-Inn, though, was his friendship with a petty crook called Frank Stephens and Frank Stephens’s dealings with the owner of the café who was a well-known fence for stolen goods. Pornography changed hands in the Pop-Inn, among other under-the-table transactions. Frank Stephens was to become a regular lodger at 25 Cromwell Street between his periods ‘away’. A key link between Fred West and Mary Bastholm, although it was one that it wasn’t possible to make at the time, was that a watch with a strap identical to the one Mary Bastholm had been wearing when she went missing was found in Tobyfield Road in Bishop’s Cleeve. Fred West was living on the Lakehouse caravan site close by. Rose Letts was living at 96 Tobyfield Road and going to Cleeve School. She was fourteen. The watch was handed in to the local police station about a week after Mary disappeared but it provided no new lead.

  After their move to Bishop’s Cleeve, Rena went on being what he liked her to be and what she had learned to be, which was somebody who gave sex for money in a boozy, rough and ready, semi-professional way. She gradually built up her list of regulars from the lanes and villages and around and about. And then she started going with the men who were building a new section of the M5 motorway near Tewkesbury. To start with she drove the mobile canteen which provided Costain’s workers with sandwiches and tea. Charmaine and Anna-Marie were being looked after by a Mrs Nock, one of Fred’s old bread-round customers, near by at Stoke Orchard. And Fred was working on the motorway extension himself, driving a digger, digging a drainage channel. But nobody made a connection between him and the bottle blonde bringing teas around in the Land-Rover canteen. There was no contact between them and nobody ever made any connection, certainly not that they were man and wife. It was the kind of private knowledge Fred liked to have and the sort of wool-pulling he enjoyed. It gave him the edge to know who had been with Rena and sometimes to watch. He was stealthy and sly and it put him in a position of power to know something intimate about them that they didn’t know. There was a high turnover of manual staff because the motorway was hard work, but Fred was always there. After a time the foreman noticed that one man was always there.

  He still had the schoolgirls coming around to the trailer after school and it probably suited Fred when Rena went off on her travels again some time in 1969. It had been one of their longest unbroken spells together in their seven years of unconventional married life. And Rena finally broke it by going off to live with the Costain’s site foreman in his caravan at Sandhurst Lane in Gloucester, the place where Ann McFall had last been seen. The foreman, whose name was James, went up to Glasgow with Rena for Christmas and then Rena followed him to Reading when he went to work on the M4 near there at the beginning of 1970. He had been at Reading about a month when Catherine, as he called Rena, which was her real name, turned up at his lodgings totally unexpected. It was a Friday night. On Saturday morni
ng he put her on the train back to Gloucester telling her it was all over and giving no reason, although it was probably the drink and the repetitive patterns of behaviour that go with being drunk. Her being on the game and the drink.

  About two months later when the site was set up at Reading with all the Portakabins and canteen facilities, he was amazed one day to find Catherine working in the canteen. Her hair was dyed black now and she was calling herself Mandy and using his surname. There could be no doubt it was Catherine. Mandy James. She continued to work there for another four or six weeks before she left. She told him she had come to Reading because Fred, who he still didn’t know was the little digger driver from the M5 at Tewkesbury, had a girlfriend. ‘Young, attractive lady looking for employment. Anything considered …’ She had received a load of letters, many from people actually offering jobs. Which had given Fred a laugh. Letters addressed to Van 17, Lakehouse, Stoke Road, Bishop’s Cleeve, made out to Miss Mandy James.