Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  Of course he was right about where Rose had run to. Nothing about Rose Fred didn’t know. She had got on the bus to Cleeve to be with her mother and her father. Rosie back home and united with her mam and her dad. Back to being a daughter instead of a worn-down mother.

  So he gets there and he jumps out of the van because you had to go across the green to her place in Tobyfield Road and he crosses the green. By the time he gets to the door her father’s standing there protecting his daughter, and he says, ‘Rose has left you.’ Even twenty years later the idea would make Fred laugh. So he says, ‘What’s the crack then? What’s wrong?’ And her father says, ‘You treat her like a child.’ No mention of the lodgers or none of that. Drugs and police raids. And Fred says, ‘Right, tell you what. Tell Rose I’m going to sit in the van out the front there for ten minutes and if she ain’t there there’ll be somebody else in her bed tonight.’ And with that he walks back across the small green verge outside the Letts’ house and climbs in his van.

  ‘Somebody else in her bed’ meaning Liz Agius. Their neighbour from Midland Road who Fred had offered one of the rooms at Cromwell Street to on condition that she left her husband. Liz who Fred had put handcuffs on one day in the kitchen at Midland Road until Rose had shouted, ‘Get them off her!’ And within four minutes Rose is in the van with him with May and Heather and her father’s following and he’s saying to Rose, ‘Oh, he’s only kidding, he’s only kidding.’ And Rose turns round and says, ‘I know him, you don’t, so shut up, Dad.’

  Which is what she had said to her mother on the doorstep as she was getting everything together. Dashing around getting her things together and the children: ‘You don’t know him. You don’t know him. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do, even murder.’ Which they put it down to being the words of a highly strung girl. And so they went back home and they sorted it out. And from then on, that was where Rose had always had the say in the house, and he had had the say outside, with work, his work and everything. After that day, slowly but definitely, Rose came to be in charge of everything.

  He agreed to stop treating her like a schoolgirl which a lot of this had been about and which he admitted was how he had been treating her – as sort of Anna-Marie’s schoolgirl mate; as the schoolgirl part of that marriage. As for Liz Agius, she faded from the picture. Liz Agius stayed on the other side of the park on the other side of the tracks and was never mentioned. Not seen and not mentioned. And Rose even started to look secure and self-confident. She was in fact confident that her family was not going to fall apart. No longer afraid that Fred would leave her for anybody else.

  Still her mother so hated her being with him. The only thing you could say was that they had their own place to live in. Yes, they had that, for what it was.

  As proof that he no longer regarded her as a schoolgirl but as an equal, Fred started handing his pay packet over at the end of every week unopened. He preferred stealing anyway and going about with his eyes in the gutter looking for money. He would never wear new clothes when old were available and enjoyed going foraging on tips for clothes and whatever else was available to bring home. He would never wear clothes that Rose bought for him. He liked to wear clothes he found while out working.

  To mark the new balance they had established in their marriage Rose at last agreed to go the extra mile for him. She would do what he had been asking her to do since coming out of Leyhill Prison. Since he met her, effectively. But more insistently since the previous summer. She would go with some of his black men friends, who, he had been assuring her, were massive. His black men.

  In the brief time they had been in Cromwell Street, Rose had been hopping in and out of bed with the lodgers – Ben Stanniland, Dapper Davis, David Evans, Charlie Knight and others. Going to bunnyland, Fred called it. She had slept with Ben and Dapper on the night they moved in, Ben first and then Dapper in their room on the top floor. But for her convenience – and more importantly to make it easier for Fred to watch and listen, which even over and above Rose’s enjoyment was always the point of it all – Rose was given her own room and, before long, her own bell on the front door. From that point on there would always be one bell for Rose’s visitors and one for general callers. Two bells. One for the house and one for ‘Mandy’. ‘Mandy Mouse’. This was Rose. ‘Mandy James’. This had been Rena.

  The room they settled on was Mrs Green’s old ‘best’ front room, her special room immediately on the left in the hall as you came in the front door. The door to the living room was on the right directly opposite; and the stairs and the door to the cellar were in the middle, facing. The front street-level room is where Rose would receive her visitors and Fred went enthusiastically to work getting it in shape for her. Top priority was the bed and he put in a double bed, a double divan with a headboard of synthetic walnut, and surrounded it with satinized wallpaper and lots of pictures: a naked lady with a horse in a blond-wood frame; an oil-painting that he had done in prison of Rose – a ground of rose-red and Rose outlined in dense black silhouette against it. There were light shades on the candelabras on the walls, then a main light. A rubber plant that used to stand up into the corner. A big thing. Big leaves on it. With a synthetic-walnut vanity unit and an artex ceiling as the finishing touches. Her room, her private domain. ‘Rose’s Room’ painted by him in yellow on a wooden plaque. And hidden under the plaque a wooden plug with screw threads on it so it could be unscrewed and removed. A one-and-a-half-inch hole drilled into the door at just above waist-level – about level with the bed, giving a sideways-on view of the bed – where he could come when she had taken a coloured man in there with her and crouch and watch. He was a small man and he had placed the hole to give a sightline that was of maximum comfort to himself and he would hover there only slightly bent over and listen and watch. ‘Rose’s Room’ written in joined-up letters in yellow on jungle green on the plaque which he would fit back afterwards.

  From such a semi-public exhibition or performance – he encouraged her to make a lot of noise, to keep it noisy, and she obliged – it was a short step to get Rose to stop wearing knickers when she was in the house, something that was to become a lifetime habit. It would be a source of embarrassment all through their lives for her children, and it would embarrass many visitors. But her answer was always the same whenever Heather or Stephen or one of the others dared to go near the subject of her aggressively exposing herself: ‘If they don’t like what they see they shouldn’t be fucking looking.’ It didn’t matter who was there, Rose would just sit with nothing on under her skirt and her legs open. ‘Don’t bring her fucking round again if she doesn’t like it.’ And from there it was only a further short step for him to get Rose to go knickerless in public. She had never been shy and she started turning up on her own at the Prince Arthur public house, which was just a short two-minute stroll away along ‘little’ Cromwell Street. The Wellington on Wellington Street and then the Arthur. The Arthur was a pub that in the early seventies was a popular meeting place with West Indians, and she would sit on her own at a table or on a stool at the bar with no underwear on and her legs open. Drinking halves of lager and appearing shy and at the same time showing herself. She would always sit alone and would talk only if somebody joined her. The next stage in her willing fetishization of her body would be to invite a black man or men home for sex while Fred watched through the peep-hole in the door or watch with Fred while she demonstrated the use of dildos and giant vibrators.

  Fred’s face would often still be black on these occasions from the shift (sometimes several shifts) at Permali’s and his on-the-side car repair work and jobbing. And he would wear his black face like a mask – ‘De Dad’ as he would be called by one of his half-caste children who he in turn called ‘De Moses’ (her real name was Tara) in a parody of minstrel speak. Rose was to have three children with black fathers; their ‘love children’ as Fred called them. ‘De Da!’ ‘De Mo!’ Fred burlesqueing as black, his grubby palms pantomiming either side of his smearily blacked-out face
like a performer from The Black and White Minstrel Show. His darky routine. The rolling whites of the eyes; the deep red of the inner lips. Like the parts left exposed by a hood mask or a knitted mask. His blackface mask. The freedom conferred by masks.

  Pornographic pictures of Rose with her black lovers started to be passed around in the Arthur, the Vauxhall (where Rose had worked for a short time), the Raglan Arms and other Barton Street area pubs. Fred would show the same pictures to men at work, never failing to comment on the ‘massiveness’ of the man and the pleasure it gave him to watch another man ‘giving a good seeing to’ to his wife. One of the Jamaicans who was becoming a regular visitor to Cromwell Street told the story of going there one night when Fred was supposed to be in Cornwall and waking up with Fred in the bed between him and Rose, and drinkers in the Arthur would have a chuckle over that.

  Before long Rose was going down to the Jamaica Club in the afternoons with two of the girls who had become Cromwell Street regulars and having sex with some of the club members in a dusty small room behind the stage. One of the girls was known as ‘Run-Around Sue’, ‘Yankee-Doodle Sue’ and ‘Sue Sparrow’. She was heavily tattooed and wore a black biker jacket. She had a professional tattoo on her stomach which was in the shape of a heart. The other girl was tall and blonde and was almost certainly the ‘big buxom piece’ who took Caroline Raine to the Jamaica Club after accusing her of stealing her job working as a live-in nanny for Rose and Fred. Having somebody to live in and help with the children was part of Fred’s and Rose’s new understanding with each other. If he wanted her to go with other men then she needed help in the house. She had other men to keep her busy and if she had any spare time she would help with repairs to the house. If he wanted these other men he was going to have to act half civilized or he could forget it. She needed a mother’s help or – the word Rose preferred – a ‘nanny’. The blonde was the one who asked Caroline had Rose ever tried it on with her. ‘You know, tried to get into your bed with you or have sex with you or anything like that? Because she did with me. You want to watch her. Didn’t you know she’s both ways?’ That had been the first inkling Caroline had had that Rose might be that way.

  It was an encounter that took place not long after Caroline started living at Cromwell Street in October 1972, just over two months after Rose and Fred and the three children had started living there themselves. She left at the beginning of November and on 6 December was subjected to what a jury twenty-three years into the future would decide had been a ‘dry run’ for the abduction, rape, torture and murder of seven other women and young girls.

  But when they appeared before Gloucester magistrates on Friday, 12 January 1973, to plead guilty to indecently assaulting and causing actual bodily harm to Caroline Raine, Fred West and Rose West were fined £25 on each count, a total of £100, and advised to seek psychiatric help. A hundred pounds wasn’t a punishing amount of money even in those days. The defence had suggested that a degree of ‘passive co-operation’ had been involved on Caroline’s part and the magistrates were apparently persuaded that this was the case. It was a light fine which amounted more or less to an acquittal. A verdict that would have shored up Fred West’s idea of himself as being invulnerable. Confirmed his faith in his powers; his feeling of immunity. He was thirty-one and had already committed three murders. He had raped his sister and made her pregnant and he had walked away from that as well. He was special. Entitled to that which was forbidden to everybody else. Invulnerable. Fred bowed to the bench and clasped his wife’s hand. Rose was just over eighteen and pregnant and receiving her first conviction.

  ‘City Pair Stripped and Assaulted Girl’ was the headline that appeared on page 9 of the following day’s Gloucester Citizen, dated 13 January 1973. Three months later they would sexually brutalize and murder a seventeen-year-old called Lynda Gough and bury her mutilated body at the back of the house. In the two years between April 1973 and April 1975 they would murder five other girls and bury them roughly in a circle under the cellar in Cromwell Street, clockwise in the order of their deaths.

  Real owners of a real house.

  *

  The foundations were exposed in the cellar. The foundations were buried underground with earth behind them. The house stood over a cellar. It was the cellar where for many years Mr Cook the coalman came once a fortnight on a Friday and dropped four hundredweight of coal. The coal tipped through the wooden trapdoor under the living-room window into the back part of the cellar, and Brian Fry’s train layout was in the part of the cellar nearest the street. A small 060 truck and The Duchess of Atholl going around the big chipboard trestle measuring four feet by eight that Brian’s uncle Ray had made him. The sounds of his grandmother moving about in the house over him and sometimes on Saturdays, the Seventh-day Adventists’ sabbath, the sounds of hymn-singing coming in from the church next door. ‘Amazing love!’

  There was no window, only a narrow vent let into the wall by the church. The walls were brick and there were crude timber beams running from front to back. The floor was brick. But it was as if the bricks had been laid and then something had happened – some settling, a small shifting – to cause the bricks to lift a little and the ground to become uneven. The cellar was a damp place. Windowless and damp. Dank. You could sense dampness in the air there but there was no water. Not water as such. It wasn’t wet in a way that would require Wellingtons or special boots. Mrs Green wouldn’t have kept her coal there if that had been the case. Brian Fry wouldn’t have run the risk of floor-level electric points. And he is unshakeable on this fact: the cellar never flooded in all his years there. Never when he was there. No flooding or even minor seepage. No water.

  And so there is a small mystery: why the cellar at Cromwell Street filled up with subterranean water and sewage in Fred’s and Rose’s first weeks there. Or why Fred said it had if it hadn’t. As usual he had a story ready and it was a story that, after he was arrested, he would tell to the police. ‘What you got round Cromwell Street used to be the moat round Gloucester. Gloucester used to have a moat round it. The moat was filled in, so you’ve got a very high water table.’ There were embellishments touching on the soil pipe, the storm drains and a hidden underground spring. A small lesson in local history. And the cellar would gain a reputation among Rose and the others in the house for being like a cold wet dark cave. It was gloomy and dark. The floor felt wet under your feet and the atmosphere was wet and gloomy. Water just used to ooze up through the floor. Something to do with the storm drains. The dark entity of the house. And it is certainly the case that when Heather and May and Stephen were still little and being sent down to the cellar to sleep, it would sometimes flood: they would wake up and find themselves surrounded by water in the morning and get in a wooden toy box and paddle from their beds to the stairs.

  As a consequence Fred didn’t allow anybody down in the cellar in the beginning, only himself. It was no fit place for a pregnant woman or small children. He’d just lock off the doors and do what he was doing. He’d just bolt them shut and they would hear the sound of work being carried out. For years he would say he was going down to see to the drains in the basement to stop this water coming up. A preoccupation that started in the weeks before and the months immediately after moving into Cromwell Street. From the beginning the many possibilities of the cellar excited him. He was going to have it as a bar with card schools. He talked a lot about making films in it – bringing in prostitutes from Birmingham and elsewhere and making home-made pornographic movies. It would be a children’s room – a playroom for the children when they had parties. Or he could make it his torture chamber he joked to Liz Agius when he was showing her around the house when he was still working on it the summer before they moved in. He told one of his new lodgers in the first weeks of 1973 about his plans to convert the cellar ‘into a dungeon’. The Caroline Raine court case had brought him ‘loads of kinky letters’ which had convinced him there was an appetite for ‘parties’.

  In the last ye
ars of his life Fred West was on twenty-four-hour call as a general handyman at a home for the autistic in Minchinhampton just outside Gloucester. Stroud Court was an old and rambling building with an underground network of passages, corridors and cellars. And Fred would use any excuse to drive there late at night – to drive there even in the middle of the night – perhaps to see to a light bulb that needed changing. He would often be discovered wandering the narrow passageways and underworkings at Stroud Court apparently locked in some kind of reverie. He could stay down there for hours just wandering and never offer an explanation or feel the need to offer one. A break in the sewer pipe that ran under the house and a rise in the water table were the reasons he gave for the powerful attachment that became evident between Fred and the cellar at Cromwell Street. He could stay down there for hours apparently trying to work out a way to stem the rise of thick murky water that had reached ankle height and was relentlessly rising. To repel the inrush of the sewage – the thick, consistent water – that all the time now in their new home was threatening to engulf them.

  Not difficult to see from this how the cellar represented the unconscious for the psychoanalyst C.G. Jung. Jung compared the rationality of the roof to the irrationality of the cellar. Up near the roof all our thoughts are clear. In the attic it is a pleasure to see the bare rafters of the strong framework. In the cellar darkness prevails both day and night, and even when we are carrying a lighted candle we see shadows dancing on the dark walls. In the attic rats and mice can make considerable noise but they are easily frightened into returning to the silence of their holes. The creatures moving about in the cellar are slower, less scampering, more mysterious.