Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  The move to Clarence Road in Cheltenham might have been another attempt to get away from Rena, as well as escape the threats being made against him by Rose’s dad. But Rena tracked him down to Clarence Road and she tracked him to Midland Road in Gloucester when he moved on to there. Rena had form in Gloucester. She had been done for soliciting in 1969 and for burglary the year before that. And many years later Fred would claim that in 1971 Rena was ‘working for some Irish blokes in Gloucester – prostituting’. Alternatively he would claim that she was working for a Jamaican pimp from the White City estate called Rolf, who Rose would certainly remember working on cars with Fred outside the flat in Midland Road. ‘I can’t get the idea out of my head that you are going with someone else,’ Rose had written to Fred just a few months earlier, when she was still living with her mother and father in Tobyfield Road. ‘You told my aunt about Rena. But what about telling me the whole story even if it takes all day. I love you, Fred.’

  Rose West still maintains that she never once in her life met Rena. That on the day Charmaine was collected from the flat by Rena, she had taken Anna-Marie over to Bishop’s Cleeve to keep out of the way. Rena could be vicious, Fred had told her. That was a vicious woman. She was a nice-looking woman but, boy, you upset her and it was best if she kept out of the way. Rena always used a knife. All prostitutes carry knives. You didn’t mess with that woman at all. That woman fought like a man.

  When the children were in care and Rena visited them she had always had a tendency to take Charmaine out with her and leave Anna-Marie behind. And Rose on her visits to Fred in Leyhill Prison told him about the stories she was hearing that Rena was meeting up with Charmaine on her way to school. She was hanging around and meeting her and taking her away with her for the day some days. Just the odd day.

  He would start forcing Anna-Marie to have sex with him within a year of coming out of Leyhill, when she was eight. But Anna-Marie’s coaching and conditioning by her father would almost certainly have started some time before that. A long time before. Abusing her. Creating fears. Reassuring her that it’s what all daddies do with their little girls. Fun. A game. They choose the children. They have the children or they select. That’s about vulnerability and being available. They initiate that contact. They overcome the victim’s resistance by seduction. They condition the victim to accept that what is being done is normal. If they can get the victim to agree that this is normal and OK, they’re safe. He’d say: ‘Shut up. It’s going to help you in later life.’ He’d say: ‘This will make sure you get a husband when you’re older.’ He’d say: ‘It’s a normal thing, so stop carrying on.’ They trap and control.

  He had started abusing Charmaine when she was just a baby. Rena’s friend Margaret Mackintosh had seen that. And the abuse had almost certainly continued up to their time in Midland Road. It was to be an unwritten house rule among future West children: no girl was to be on her own with their dad.

  They have to control the environment. They have to be aware of other people. They have at some level to control those other people, because those people can tell. And then they have to overcome the victim’s resistance. Because they don’t want the victim to tell either. But he was in prison. And Charmaine was out and probably seeing Rena. And Rena was open with her mouth. When she had been drinking Rena could have a very loose mouth. Various members of the West family saw her in the fields close to Moorcourt Cottage one afternoon in August, talking to Walter, Fred’s father. Rena walked down to the fields where Walter was working and the two of them stayed in conversation for several hours. Within weeks of Fred being released from Leyhill Prison at the end of June 1971 both Charmaine and Rena were dead. ‘I had too many people to watch at once,’ he said more than twenty years later. ‘That’s what went wrong.’

  Rena was decapitated and dismembered and pressed into a narrow hole in Letterbox Field. Buried with her was a little red boomerang with ‘Boomerang Woomerang’ printed on the side. A boomerang from a Rice Krispies packet. Charmaine was murdered on the same night as Rena. Fred West gave many conflicting versions of these murders. But in the most believable – the least incredible – version he said he had arranged to meet Rena in a pub called the East End Tavern in Barton Street in Gloucester one night in August. When he got there at about nine thirty she was, as he knew she would be, already very drunk. She was with a group of Irishmen. It was the school holidays and she had Charmaine with her and she was falling-down drunk. Charmaine had also been given things to drink and was drinking something alcoholic, lager or something, from a bottle through a straw. He stayed long enough to let Rena get even more drunk and then poured her into the car. He put Rena in the front seat, Charmaine in the back and drove out to what had been his and Rena’s favourite spot in Much Marcle at Letterbox Field. Rena was unconscious by the time they got there. She was ‘absolutely paralytic’. Charmaine was also sleeping soundly in the back. He hauled Rena bodily out of the car and knocked her unconscious against the gate. ‘I just smashed her against the gate.’ He dragged her into the field and down to the tree that was a marker in the hedge. Using a ‘massive’ Jamaican sabre knife, a two-and-a-half-feet-long sugar-beet scythe that somebody had given him once for chopping nettles, he took off her legs and her head and jammed the trunk of her body into the ground. Using the sheath knife that he always carried on his belt, he removed a kneecap and a number of toes and fingers and set them aside to bring away. An actual dagger, used for laying felt. He washed his chest and his arms in a cattle trough and then took Rena’s clothes and bundled them and threw them over into an adjoining field where there were fires going. It was a country custom in Much Marcle and the villages around about for villagers to wheel barrowloads of household rubbish down to the cornfields in the summer and tip them into the burning corn stubble and burn them. It was that time of year with the field fires smoking and he threw Rena’s clothes there and burned them. He said he remembered Charmaine only when he got back to the car and saw her lying on the back seat sleeping. ‘There was Charmaine in the back of it. I thought, What am I going to do now? … So anyway I strangled her while she was sleeping ’cause there’s no way I could have touched her in any other way and wrapped her up in the back and drove back to Midland Road.’

  Charmaine was in the back and he was in the front and he turned around in the driver’s seat and held her by the throat until she stopped breathing. ‘The pressure’s in my thumbs. I mean, I can undo three-quarter nuts without a spanner – just lock ’em on, turn ’em like that, an’ I can do ’em … I’m strong in the hands because of the job I do. When you’re using big spanners an’ things like that, you get strong in the arms.’ Making and constructing. Working and making. Activities that always held more meaning for him than unmaking a person.

  Charmaine was discarded in the coal house under the kitchen in Midland Road where her body lay undisturbed until it was disinterred and reburied deep in the core of the building by Fred West many years later. He took it and placed it in one of the concrete footings when he was part of a small team helping to turn the three flats at Midland Road into six flats for Frank Zygmunt. Police diggers would have to go down through three layers of infill and mesh to a depth of nine feet in 1994 in order to recover the remains. Both kneecaps were missing in addition to a number of fingers and toes. The legs were not in the position they should have been in if the body had been buried in one piece.

  The register at St James’s School where Charmaine was a pupil in 1971 was marked ‘Moved away’. She wouldn’t be starting the autumn term a message reached them because her real mum had come to claim her and she had gone away to be with her real mum. ‘She’s gone to live with her mother, and bloody good riddance,’ was Rose’s reply to anybody who knew the trouble she had been having with Charmaine and who wondered where Charmaine had gone.

  *

  Heather had been born in October 1970. By August the following year Rose was pregnant again, this time with May. A gap of ten months. Fred was in prison for six of
the ten months and having sex with men was something Rose could do for Fred while he was away. Do it and tell him about it on her visits to Leyhill. She started having sex with a bus driver on Gloucester buses and that led to introductions to other crews based at the central bus garage. Men who drank at the Busmen’s Club. These men and other men. She was thin and she was tired and she was even sometimes hungry but she was never too tired or too hungry for a session of sex. Group sex. Serial sex. One-on-one. She was never satisfied and always hungry. Rose’s gift to Fred.

  When he came home from prison Fred started to offer Rose around. He offered her to a friend in return for work carried out on his van. Mrs Jaruga, the Polish lady who had the ground-floor flat next door, had heard rumours that Frank Zygmunt was very friendly with Rose, in particular during the time that this woman’s husband was in jail and that sexual favours were given instead of the rent to Frank. She could also corroborate this as Frank Zygmunt tried to proposition her if she experienced a difficulty in paying her rent to which she had hit him in the face. She was also aware from other female residents that he had tried it on with them. Women were sitting on a fortune. The trouble was they didn’t seem to know it. Fred had no hesitation in putting Rose with Mr Zygmunt. Old Frank. Of course he took Frank up on his offer on Rose’s behalf.

  Rose’s willing submissiveness to Fred – her eager and dedicated dependence on him – was something that was going to turn into a fulltime occupation as her life progressed. Her masochistic submissions to her husband her badges of triumph. A whole life used up, bit by bit.

  He made small holes. He drilled holes in the wall between the front and back bedrooms at Midland Road and watched her with other men. So this was why he no longer needed Rena. Rose also gave him this. Rose was young and pretty and sexually audacious. Quite a performer. She was young and keen to experiment sexually. She looked fourteen. And she let him look. Loved him to look. Did what she did not only or even mainly because she wanted to do it but because she knew he wanted to see what she did. The intensive desire to look as an erotic activity. Feeding his eyes. And their understanding in those early years was that he got to go with her when the other man had gone. As soon as the other man had gone. Mixing his sperm with the other man’s sperm. Coating himself with the other man’s sperm in order (he said) to defer his orgasm. He was habitually prone to premature ejaculation and this was the solution he had come up with to deal with that problem. A problem to which he would never admit. He would claim that one of the reasons he started getting after her to go with coloured men was because of the superior lubricating qualities of the sperm of the coloured man. That was his reason. Just one of the assortment of reasons he gave. She was a very young girl and she couldn’t just dedicate herself to cleaning and bringing up children. She’d miss her young life. And that was the beginning of his push to get her to go with black men. He could be very persuasive. On and on. Do it for me. Do it for the marriage. (Although they weren’t yet married.) Just as she thought he was getting the message that she wasn’t doing it, he would come back twice as bad. You’ve got to play your part in this marriage. It was a daily thing to be talked about. Here is how it began.

  One day they became married. They formalized their union, which is something she wanted very badly. One night Rose and Fred had gone to bed and made love and then got back up again. They used to do that now and again and eat boiled eggs but this night he had asked her to marry him. She said ‘Yes’ and they went back to bed and made love again. It was January 1972. The beginning of a new year. Last New Year, which should have been their first New Year together, he’d spent in jail. Rose bought a new dress for her wedding morning and wore baby buds here and there in her hair. She was five months pregnant with May. Fred wore oily overalls and oil smeared over his face until the last minute. He had been changing an engine on a car at the White City estate and he was still wearing work clothes and oil on his face at five to eleven. They were booked into the register office for eleven o’clock.

  None of the Letts family came to the wedding. Fred’s brother John acted as a witness along with a small-time criminal associate of Fred’s who signed in one name then crossed it out and signed in the name he happened to be using at the time. Just the four of them. Fred didn’t like parties and being clammed up to people. He described himself on the wedding certificate as a bachelor and they both signed. John had bought a bottle of wine and some bottles of beer. Fred had one drink and then said he had to go out to a job. Just one drink and then he dived off back to work. Mr and Mrs West for Ever.

  *

  Just before they were married a rare thing had happened. Fred had shown an interest in another woman. A woman as a person, that is, rather than in terms of how she looked and her appearance. Rather than as a collection of body parts. Although his interest in Liz Agius was inevitably sexual. Somebody to do a three in a bed with. Somebody to be developed in that direction.

  He introduced himself to Liz Agius by performing the act of a considerate neighbour. He saw her struggling with a pram on the steps of her house one day and offered to help. They were steep steps on the houses at Midland Road and she had moved into the next house. He quickly extracted from her the fact that she was a new arrival and that, for the time being, she was living on her own. She was married to a Maltese man who was still living where she had just come from, in Malta. She appreciated his friendliness and quite soon accepted his invitation to come in for a cup of tea with his wife, who turned out to be a pale girl looking young enough to be his daughter. Liz Agius was only nineteen herself.

  Rose had a baby and Liz had a baby. Rose also had Anna-Marie, a seven-year-old from Fred’s previous marriage, and a second baby on the way. So it was babies and children and cups of tea. How did she get her nappies so white. Baby talk. With Fred coming and going, hovering, on a scent, waiting for his chance.

  He took his chance, according to Liz Agius, one night when she had been babysitting Heather and Anna-Marie. They came back late. It was the early hours of the morning. And when she asked them if they had had a good time he told her that they had been driving around for hours looking for young girls, fifteen-to-seventeen-year-old girls, virgins and runaways, to put on the game. He said they would drive as far as London looking and that the best place to find them was Bristol. Bristol bus station where teenagers passing through on their way to London would do anything for money. You could get more money for a virgin. He enjoyed talking sex. He was a boaster. A braggart. Teasing and titillating. He was a romancer. Putting down lures. Trying to snag her. Nobody believed him.

  From then on he was always trying to persuade Liz Agius to have sex with him. He had taken Rose places and shown her things and now he would show Liz. She could do anything she wanted with him. Tie him up. Stub lighted cigarettes out on him. Anything she wanted with him. And Rose told Liz it was true. He wanted to do three in a bed and he gave Rose the task of talking Liz round. Girl/girl. Straight kinky sex. Rose told Liz that she was working as a prostitute. She was five months pregnant but she was still bringing men home to Midland Road with her and Fred watched them through a hole in the wall. A special hole he had made. If he couldn’t be there she told him what had happened when he came home. Mad things. Crazy stories. Stories invented for the purpose of bringing her in. But she had to wonder. Rose showed her the condoms. Showed her the special pills shaped like sugar cubes that might have been a stash of LSD that he was storing but which she said were meant to stop her catching VD. ‘Oh, what I could do to you,’ he said to her. She had to think.

  She had to think that they must have drugged her. That’s all she could think. They’d given her a cup of tea and that was the last thing she could remember. They must have laced it or something because the next thing she remembered was waking up naked in bed with Fred and Rose. They were both naked and he told her that he had raped her while she was out. This heavily pregnant woman and her chuckling husband and she had been raped.

  May West was born three months after they
were married, on the first of June 1972. She had been due in late May and she had been born in June and that’s what they christened her: May June. It was a straightforward delivery but all through the pregnancy Rose had been depressed. Ten days after giving birth she was still in hospital and refusing to budge until Fred came and took her home. But he didn’t come. He kept not coming. And in the end she had to gather May together and her belongings and take a bus home on the tenth day.

  Arriving at Midland Road she found Anna-Marie dirty and neglected and on her own. She was very clinging. She clung to Rose. Heather was in the cot. Dirty, messy nappy on. She was a mess. She put the baby in the front room and went to look to see where Fred was. He was next door at Liz Agius’s in case she didn’t know. She found the front door open at number 24 and went up the stairs. Liz Agius lived on the top floor. Rose had a white-hot temper. She was furious. She was very angry banging on the door, bellowing Liz! – Fred! Getting no answer. Liz! Fred! In a fury. Getting louder and louder. Until after a while Liz’s bedroom door opened and they both walked out. Flushed and hussled like they were in a hurry and he dived off a bit quick down the stairs and out of there. A cheeky grin though.

  Rose had come to Fred pregnant. She had been pregnant with Heather virtually up to the time he went into prison. Three months after he came out of prison she was pregnant again with May. And he didn’t like women when they were pregnant. They weren’t sexy. He said the bump in their belly wasn’t sexy and turned him off. May was born in June 1972 and by November Rose would be pregnant again with Stephen. Their first son and the first of their babies to be conceived in Cromwell Street.