by Gordon Burn
They took possession of the house in Cromwell Street in July 1972 and moved in towards the end of August. There was a light at the very top of the stairs leading down to the cellar, but apart from that nothing. By the end of the year Fred had managed to make the cellar habitable. He divided it into three interconnecting rooms including a room where his tools could live. He kept his tools in the back room nearest the garden. He began work on converting the front room into a playroom for the children. The narrow middle room, where the stairs came down from the hallway, for the time being he left empty. He would work down there all day after grabbing an hour or two’s sleep after his job at Permali’s, sometimes bolting the door from the hallway behind him. He worked. He just worked. He was a what’s-her-name. He was a workaholic. It was even a problem for Rose to get him to bed at night.
He started working doing odd jobs and repairs for his neighbours in Cromwell Street and the other streets crowded in between the school playground and the park. In addition to working for Frank Zygmunt, he started taking on jobs for a West Indian called Alex Palmer who let out bedsits in several houses in Cromwell Street. It was an arrangement that suited Fred because it gave him access to the homes and the lives of many of his neighbours and he was an inquisitive person. He was a snoop. He was nosy. But his casual, self-effacing manner disguised the pleasure that nosing about in other people’s business gave him. He was the kind of neighbour who needs to know everybody’s business but fiercely protects his own. He seems to have set himself the task of quickly getting to know the territory after moving in. Twenty-two years is a very long time but, as his police interviews show, he never tired of gathering information in that time and making himself familiar with the most intimate details of many of his neighbours’ lives. He was able to tell the police who was living where with whom and when. He was able to tell them who was an alcoholic and who was a child-molester. Whose daughter was taking drugs and who a lesbian and who was having an affair with whose wife.
The hitman hired to murder two lovers at Barrow Wake beauty spot, for example, lived at 1 Cromwell Street and was called Norman White. He had worked with Fred on the renovations at 25 Midland Road when he had used it as an opportunity to rebury Charmaine’s body. The purpose of this interview was to investigate the murder of Charmaine. But he couldn’t resist going off on digressions intended to show his inside knowledge of Norman White, who is a Jamaican, and the White family. ‘He worked with me in Midland Road, putting up ceilings. When I did the six flats there. Me an’ him got on great together. He was a great guy, till he got on that ganja … He always treated me like a gentleman. Still does to this day. Always called me Mister West. If anyone said anything about me … He thought the world of me … I’ve known his sisters since years. I mean, Marcia’s about the same age as Anna. Very big fat girl she is, ever so pleasant … Lives there on her own. I know why, an’ all. [Her father] potted two of his daughters. One was shipped off to America. The other daughter lost the baby in the bathroom of that house, on the floor … I did the whole of that house inside, decorated it some years back when Euan got married, married a Welsh girl …’
A long-term tenant directly opposite at 26 Cromwell Street was known for interfering with children. Also at number 26 was a girlfriend of Alex Palmer’s and a good friend of Rose’s who used to live with ‘a short black-haired kid, always had a black dog with him. She lived with him for years. Bit of a headcase. “The screwball” we used to call him. Used to do demolition work and that … She had been in Coney Hill for a nervous breakdown and she was hooked on – what’s that stuff I had the other night? – valium.’
Fred was beaten up by the boyfriend of a girl who was living in a bedsit at number 19 in the mid-eighties. The boy came in and found Fred West with his face pressed up against the glass shower cubicle where the girl, Carol, was showering. He had the keys to the house where he was always doing odd jobs, and he had let himself in. About a year later, towards the end of 1985, when she had moved away from Cromwell Street, Carol and her cousin Hayley were trying to trace a third girl in Gloucester. Their search took them to the Wests at number 25 and he was very friendly and welcoming and invited them in. He didn’t seem to recognize her from when she had lived in the street and he brought them in and before they could say anything took them on a tour of the house. It seemed a strange thing to do but he appeared proud of the place and led them through to the kitchen at the rear where his wife was sitting surrounded by a lot of young children. It was tea-time and there was a pornographic video being shown on the television and the woman and the children were watching it. He took them to a bedroom on the ground floor at the front of the house where there was a big camera mounted on a stand at the bottom of the bed. He opened a wooden trunk and a wicker basket which Carol saw were full of videotapes. On the walls of the room were Polaroid photographs of naked men and women in various poses. She could see from the satin-finish wallpaper in the background that the photographs had been taken in that room. He showed them all of these things as if to impress them but they just felt embarrassed and uncomfortable and said that they had to leave.
On another occasion when he was helping to move a fridge for a girl who was living in a bedsit at 4 Cromwell Street he casually mentioned that he knew her mother and that he had had sex with her and so she could be his daughter. When she asked her, her mother told her that Fred was not her father but that he had raped her when she was fifteen years old. The girl’s only contact with Fred after that was when she went to the house with her boyfriend to borrow pornographic videos from him which he kept all over the house.
The police investigation of 1994 succeeded in tracing a hundred and fifty people who had lived in the house at one time or another, some for a night or two, others for longer. Fred West would remember many of them for something unattractive about the way they looked or for something unpleasant that they did. But he would remember a surprising number of them. ‘She was a little tiny piece … She was a massive big fat piece … She was a little fat bird with straggly hair … She was the biggest, tallest girl I think I’ve ever seen. Strong; solid-built … She had tattoos. Her father worked at the same place I worked at, Cotswold Tyres … She’s a copper’s daughter. CID’s daughter. She lives across the back here. I know her mam. Her mam’s a little short woman … The mother was a little skinny piece. The daughter was the most disgusting animal you ever seen in your life … She was heavy into drugs. Anything … [She was] some duchess’s daughter or summat. She had a chauffeur-driven Roller. Her daughter was a big fat girl and [the police] come and dragged her out one mornin’. There was one almighty gang-bang going on … She was there with them and the drugs. That’s what she was there for. All the girls was there for the same reason … It was just like a meeting house for … I mean, Rose used to go crackers at me to get rid of them.’
Not a lot that they did – very little that they did – got past him. During the years that they had the lodgers in Fred was constantly on the prowl. It wasn’t a big house. The one room back and front on each of the three floors was separated by a simple wooden staircase. The cellar was kept locked. But he would roam the house at all times of the day and night. On the nights when he wasn’t at work and she couldn’t find him, Rose knew what he would be doing. He would be roaming the house but she would be too tired to get up and argue with him. He was doing the house up and there was always something to be done. He was buying second-hand furniture and bringing it home. Stealing beds and miscellaneous odd items of furniture and installing them in the rooms. He could always come up with a reason to take him into their rooms. He would get to know them by holding them in conversation in their rooms or wherever he could grab them. In the bedrooms or coming out of the bathroom or on the stairs. There was no lock on the lodgers’ toilet door and no lock on the tiny bathroom. It would become standard in the house: no locks on any of the doors except the door into the cellar and the door of Rose’s special room. It was almost impossible not to walk in on somebody using t
he toilet or the bathroom on the first floor but the lodgers and the space cadets who hung around with the lodgers were mostly too out of it to care. They were going in and out of the door all night long. And he made it his business to know who was coming and going when and which room they were going up to and for how long and to do what and with whom.
But he had the knack of doing it not in a proprietorial or a heavy-handed way, but in a discreet way. He was old enough to be most of these girls’ father but he didn’t act like that. He didn’t present himself in that light. The hippy trail led to Cromwell Street. And although he might look pretty straight and was straight – he didn’t touch drugs or drink himself – he was anxious to let them know that he was relaxed about all that. He was also especially keen to impress on them the broad-minded, free-and-easy, anything-goes attitude he took towards sex. He was obsessed with sex. You could never get away from sex. He saw sex in everything. Driving to work he would say a girl had run at him waving her knickers in the air to try and stop him. Or that a hitch-hiker he had picked up had hitched her skirt right up to her waist while he was steaming along in the van. Or that some high-class people who owned the house where he was working had invited him to an orgy in London that weekend. If he crossed the park he would see people at it on park benches. And having the lodgers in meant that within the four walls of his own home he was able to let his imagination run riot. They were taking drugs and having orgies. Gang-bangs and bombed-out orgies. What did they think, that he was stupid? All the girls, all the blokes. There were girls on the run from local homes; boys who had nowhere to go for the night. Endless parties. He smelled the smells. He heard the noises. They burned that what’s-her-name but he smelled through that. They played their loud music but he knew what they were doing. These little junky birds coming and going, they didn’t care who they did it with. They did it with anybody. Floaters and drifters. Floating and drifting. They were anybody’s.
And he asked them the questions nobody ever asked. Questions about what it felt like and what they liked and about size. Who was the biggest? Who was the best? ‘Had sex with Tony tonight then?’ Smutty talk. Talking dirty to these little birds. The things nobody ever said. The questions nobody ever asked them. Rose considered Fred was advanced in his thinking when it came to sex. He would tell them things. And sometimes they might tell him things back. Startling disclosures about the sexual experiences they had had. Startling to him who considered himself an expert on the hidden insides of women’s bodies and the workings of the womb. He was fascinated with the interior of the female body – the insides, the mysterious organs of sexuality and reproduction. A fascinating territory. What it all does and how it all works. A voyeuristic fantasy of peering and prying. Opening up. And they would tell him, ‘Nobody has ever asked me about this before’, and he would look modest and examine the tip of his roll-up and say, ‘Well, yeah.’
He spent a lot of time with the lodgers and the girls who hung around – hung out, is it what they say? – with the lodgers. Giving them lifts to places. Running them out to places and coming back afterwards to pick them up. Decorating their rooms. If they wanted to run somewhere, he would take them. They were never slow in coming forward if they needed anything or were in any kind of trouble. Fred would just drop what he was doing and run and that went for everybody in the street as well. Always something. Always round and about with them and willing. Willing to take them and willing to wait. Casually pumping these little birds about their backgrounds and families. Making mental notes about their degrees of vulnerability and rebelliousness and isolation. Weighing the odds. And always trying to bring the conversation around to sex. Back around to sex if by some chance it had happened to drift away from it. He was obsessed with sex. ‘All the girls I got on great with,’ Fred said. ‘I used to talk fucking dirty to them and they used to talk dirty back.’
Rose had slept with Ben Stanniland and Dapper Davis, top floor back. She had slept with David Evans and Charlie Knight, top floor front. She was the landlady but she came up there now and again because she liked sex. Caroline Raine had gone with Ben and Dapper. Ben was a long-haired hippy. He was tall with long dark hair and a nice smile and he talked rather slowly on account of him always being stoned. Caroline liked Ben. He was a dopehead but she liked him. And it seems so did a lot of other girls. He never seems to have had any problems in that department. Ben was a chick magnet and able to pull. It was through Ben, who she met in a café, that Lynda Gough started coming to the house.
Lynda was unusual in that she lived at home in Gloucester with her parents. Her father was a fireman and her mother worked for the council and Lynda was the oldest of John and June Gough’s four children. She was from an unbroken family. In 1973 Lynda was nineteen and had a job working as a seamstress for the Co-op on the corner of Brunswick and Eastgate Streets, a short walk away from Cromwell Street. She could wake up in Cromwell Street and, by taking the shortcut across the playground at Tommy Rich’s, be at work five minutes later. ‘Seamstress’: an old-fashioned word for an old-fashioned job in a place where they still clock-watched and counted the minutes. Two girls and a senior, Mrs Ford. Whereas Lynda was breaking away. She wore ‘granny glasses’; a version of the wire-frame National Health glasses John Lennon had made popular even with people who had nothing wrong with their eyes. Lynda had prescription lenses in hers and she wore them with a long fall of hair in the Julie Felix folk-singer style. Both things counting as small rebellions in the house she came from; signs that she had broken off from her parents’ way of looking at things and was ready to go with the flow.
Lynda became part of what appears to have been a regular pattern at Cromwell Street. She started off with Ben as his girlfriend and then after a while passed on to the friend he shared with, Dapper Davis. Over a period of probably a couple of months Lynda also slept with David Evans and several of the other lodgers at Cromwell Street, always coming and going and never living there herself on a permanent basis. In her fashion glasses and her folk-singer hair. She had an ankle-length black maxi-coat. Hanging out. The Oval, where Lynda’s family lived, was close enough to the city centre for June, her mother, to go home for lunch. And one lunchtime around the middle of April 1973, June Gough returned home to find a note on the kitchen table from Lynda. ‘Dear Mum and Dad, Please don’t worry about me. I have got a flat and I will come and see you some time. Love Lyn.’ Naturally Mrs Gough did worry, not only because the money she was earning at the Co-op wasn’t enough for Lynda to be able to afford a flat. Lynda had had a patchy history at school. She had gone to the local Calton Primary and then to the Longford School for children with learning difficulties. (Many years later the Longford School was to become Stroud Court, the home for autistic people whose labyrinth of cellar corridors Fred West would roam.) Lynda had completed her education at a private girls’ school in Midland Road run by a couple of elderly spinsters and left when she was sixteen with no GCEs or any other academic qualifications. So to find this note and all her belongings gone. 19 April 1973, a Thursday. Their first reaction was to go out and find her. Their second was to let her have her head for a bit and she’d be back. She had rebelled against their advice like a lot of teenagers in those days and today. So, OK, she’ll be back.
When they hadn’t had a visit from Lynda or heard from her after about ten days June Gough paid a call on Mrs Ford in the workroom at the Co-op where Lynda had worked since leaving school. Mrs Ford had trained Lynda and watched her come on. The conversation with Mrs Ford led Lynda’s mother to the house at 25 Cromwell Street which really was very near. Turn left out of the Co-op, left again down the alley between Limbars discount cash-and-carry and Jennings the printer, take the first right off the school playground and you were there. That was how close. She wanted to know if Lynda was happy. If she was all right.
It was a Saturday and a lot of people were using Cromwell Street to park in while they went to the shops. Mrs Gough walked past Mr Miles’s rose beds and the church and turned in up the all
ey-like path between the house and the church. Her knock brought a man and a woman to the door. Mrs Gough thought she recognized the woman as somebody who had come to collect Lynda to go for a drink with her shortly before she left home. But the couple denied having any knowledge of Lynda. They had never met Lynda, they didn’t know Lynda and they didn’t know where she was. But then Mrs Gough recognized the slippers the woman had on as Lynda’s slippers. They were the slippers Lynda had been wearing when she left. And there were other things. The woman was wearing a blouse or a cardigan of Lynda’s and there were further items of Lynda’s clothing hanging in the garden on a line.
Now the lady who was wearing Lynda’s slippers and who one day very many years in the future would stand in court and deny that she had ever been that kind of person at all – ‘I’m not the sort of person who would wear anybody else’s things. I’m rather proud that way’ – now the lady said that Lynda had gone. She remembered now yes, and she had gone. She had been there but she said she had gone and said something about going to Weston-Super-Mare. The couple thought Weston but they said they weren’t sure. Lynda’s mother and father were feeling very hurt that Lynda had gone and hadn’t contacted them. They felt abandoned was the word. They cared, that’s the point. They cared. Lynda’s mother said all this but she got no feedback. There was nothing coming back, and so she turned and went.
Lynda’s mother and father went to Weston to try and find Lynda but everywhere they looked they drew blanks. Although they appreciated that she was nearly twenty and therefore was not considered vulnerable, they reported her disappearance to a neighbour who was a policeman, contacted the Salvation Army and wrote to the DSS. But nothing. There was no trace.
Lynda’s remains were found at twenty-five past two on a Monday afternoon in March 1994 under the floor of the ground-floor bathroom area of 25 Cromwell Street, the eighth set of remains to be found at the address. Forensic evidence established that her body had been buried there for nearly twenty-one years.