Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  Many bones were missing, particularly from the feet and hands. Several fingers and toes and wrist bones had been taken away. Her head was separate and the legs had been dislocated at the hip. The kneecaps were not there. There were no buttons or zips or anything to suggest that Lynda had been wearing clothes when she was killed. Apart from her bones the only items recovered from the hole where she had been buried were a length of string, a disintegrated fragment of fabric and a packing-tape gag similar to the one that Caroline Raine had described being wound around her head in the Wests’ car just four months before Lynda Gough was last seen. It was a ring mask or gag, two inches wide and fifteen inches in circumference, brown in colour and containing brittle fragments of hair. The circular mask of tape had been excavated close to the skull, embedded in the pit wall.

  *

  Rose was five months pregnant with Stephen when Lynda Gough was murdered. She had just started on this pregnancy when the assault on Caroline Raine occurred and Fred told Caroline that ‘When Rose gets pregnant her lesbian urges get stronger and she has to have a woman and she really wanted you.’ ‘When Rose was pregnant she was always extra sexy,’ he would claim to the police many years later.

  May was nearly a year old, Heather was two and a half, and Anna-Marie was nearly nine in April 1973. Lynda had done some babysitting for Fred and Rose but that had stopped when she started hitting Anna-Marie. This anyway is what Rose told Dave Evans and some of the other lodgers when she went upstairs at breakfast time one morning to explain Lynda’s sudden disappearance from the house and why she wouldn’t be coming round to the house again.

  Major building work started at the beginning of the summer on the Seventh-day Adventists’ church next door. They tore down the old tin and tar-paper building and started to put up an extensive new brick building in its place. The new church was several times bigger than the old one. It came forward to meet the pavement at the front and extended to the edge of the Wests’ property all along the left-hand side. In order to construct the church’s south-facing wall, which as it happened was the wall where the altar was going to be, they had to put scaffolding in the Wests’ garden for what they said would be weeks but turned out to be several months. There was scaffolding in the back garden all summer and cement dust and brick dust. It was a hot summer and it was dirty and dusty and Fred decided to use the opportunity of the dust and confusion to do some building work himself.

  Rose’s special room was on the left as you came in the front door. On the right as you came in was another room of a similar size, with a window facing the garden. In the far left-hand corner of that room was a door leading down three steps into the kitchen, which was housed in a narrow, single-storey brick building jutting out into the garden. Just outside the kitchen was an outdoor toilet. And on the other side of the toilet was a potting shed with shingle walls and a corrugated metal roof and a window which had given a view of the apple and pear trees of Mrs Green’s ‘orchard’. And with three children and a fourth on the way and the lodgers monopolizing the upstairs, Fred decided to steal some extra space for the family by dropping the shed and turning the place where it had stood into a second bathroom. He would turn the toilet into a shower, add a combination toilet-bathroom, and house them all in one twelve-foot extension the same width (or narrowness) as the kitchen. He got some of the boys from the top floor to help with the shed and, when he needed her to, Rose helped him with the building. A workmate of Fred’s would remember coming round one night and seeing Rose up on a roof applying tar from a bucket. Men he worked with at Permali’s were regular visitors at this time, either to borrow pornography or to have sex with Rose. ‘It would be easier if people asked me who Rose didn’t have sex with, not who she did,’ Fred said. ‘When I was in Permali’s, the blokes were taking an hour off and going up and fucking Rose. I never thought nothing of it.’ Rose was up on the roof extension wearing a heavy coat and Wellington boots. She was obviously pregnant and working under light from a tilley lamp and applying tar from a bucket. The roof looked to be unsafe and was supported only by one wall and a telegraph pole and Fred’s friend from work found it to be comical. But he would also remember that visit for another reason. Anna-Marie was nine and Fred accused her of screwing in the park when she came in and this struck the man as strange.

  Fred West buried Lynda Gough under the dirt floor of Mrs Green’s shed, although he would choose to describe it as the ‘inspection pit’ of a garage. The implications of both, however, are the same: they were grave-size and grave-shaped and obviously suggested themselves to him as graves. But for this to make sense Lynda’s body would have to have been intact when he put it in the hole and we know that this wasn’t the case. There were cut marks on the femurs, or thigh bones, consistent with her legs having been severed at the hip, and her head had been removed. In other words, he had the space to bury Lynda’s body without mutilating it if he chose to do it. That he didn’t do it but dismembered her body instead shows that the dismemberment wasn’t done for time reasons or convenience, as he always claimed, but for compulsive and obsessive reasons and for the pleasure it brought. The arousal and the pleasure.

  He put plastic membrane over the hole when the cover of the shed was gone and mixed concrete and poured it and erected a structure with a bath and a toilet in it which he referred to from then on as his conference room or his office. He would sit on the toilet with his feet adjacent to the pit where Lynda Gough was buried and call out to one of his children to come and see him in his office. They would have to sit on the stolen bath and talk to him while he sat with his trousers around his ankles on the stolen toilet. Sit on the edge of the bath and talk to him across the space of a dead girl’s body.

  *

  The bathroom extension was completed in time for Stephen’s arrival in August 1973. Their first son. The son they had always wanted. Fred brought in Rose a massive big bunch of flowers and the biggest box of All Gold she had ever seen.

  By the standards of Cromwell Street in the seventies, which contained the whole inventory of urban anarchy, the people living at number 25 seemed a model family. Father with a steady job and a commitment to home improvement; hardworking young mother who still managed to keep herself presentable and attractive; a baby and three young children who were polite, quiet and well turned out. She would see him off with a kiss at the door when he left for work in the evening and there would always be a breakfast waiting for him on the table in the morning. And soon Fred fixed a sign to the outside of the house that was almost a badge of their standing and a declaration of their respectability.

  First, he coated the house in a suburban, biscuit-coloured cladding. Next he put up a suburban wrought-iron plaque with ‘25 Cromwell Street’ spelled out in white-painted metal letters framed in fancy metal scrolling. Everybody did their little perks at the factory where he was working and the ‘Cromwell Street’ sign was one of his. The man on the next machine did it for him. Drew it up on a piece of paper and cut out the letters with a computerized burner. Burnt it out in metal when the foreman wasn’t watching with a profile machine.

  This sign, the sign of his stability and respectability. The murderer posing as unremarkable father and working man. And a second sign, identical in every detail, the sign of his drives and perversions, which he fixed to a bed that he made. Using a lathe at work he made the pieces of a dark oak four-poster and assembled the pieces when he got them back to Cromwell Street. He got the whole family to help him fix the corner posts to the bed base and lastly the heavy oak canopy around the top. And after construction came decoration: four bulls, one on top of each bedpost; and on the side a bull and a cow – a toy bull and a toy cow; farmyard animals from a toyshop – stuck together as though they were having sex. The wrought-iron sign he had made went on the bed’s front pelmet and it said ‘Cunt’. In the same letters and to the same dimensions as the sign on the front of the house, framed in fancy scrolling and for their eyes only, it said just that: ‘Cunt.’

  Aft
er Rose – perhaps even before Rose – his most precious possession was his house. So he had two signs made. Two bells and two signs. Had the lettering burnt out for him and turned the scrolling and welded it together himself. One sign – ‘25 Cromwell Street’ – he put up by the entrance to his house. The second sign – ‘Cunt’ – he put up over the entrance to his wife. This obsession he had with entrances and thresholds. He would dedicate the remainder of his life to his lust to look and his need to explore orifices and holes. Holes in his house which he packed with the headless and legless torsos of girls and young women: he said he ‘always wanted the body to fit the hole’. And the bodily holes of his wife and other women and girls. He tried to take internal pictures of Rose using a torch and a zoom lens and, in later years, a video camera. Zooming in. Coming up close. He really wanted to get inside them. Such an appetite he had for looking. His ambition was to own a pencil camera of the kind used with pregnant women. He wanted to come as close as he could.

  This was something even his children knew about Fred. ‘He had a thing about women’s bodies – he was into internal bits … He’d think, “I wonder what that looks like” and have a look,’ Stephen said. ‘He wanted to go right into the body and look at the internal organs,’ May said.

  He had two pictures of Rose that always fascinated him. One was of Rose sitting on a gearstick in a car. The other was a picture of Rose taken when she was pregnant. She was sitting back with her feet far apart and her legs open in the stirrup position and on her stomach she had written the words ‘My black hole’, intended as a message for Fred. A message written in lipstick with an arrow pointing to between her legs for Fred who was behind the camera.

  What it all does and how it all works. The opening to a strange and secret place. This unheimlich place which is the entrance to the former home of all human beings. The place where Fred lived once upon a time and in the beginning. A place of unaccounted secrets and horrors.

  ‘We’ve found another hole,’ Mr Bennett, the policeman in charge of the search for bodies inside 25 Cromwell Street would say whenever another body was found.

  Chapter Nine

  Fred was going to be as famous as Elvis Presley. One day. He told this to his workmates at the wagon works. Bullshitter Fred. It was semi-skilled work. Repetitive, terrible, boring work, bending the same job or drilling the same job all day. Minute after minute; hour after hour. And a piece of Fred’s bullshit, some of his bull, could lighten the day. The Elvis Presley crack. The stories about bringing a couple of prostitutes in from Birmingham to go three-in-a-bed lesbian with his wife. This. That. That little lisp. That chipped front tooth. A likeable kind of a bullshitter is what he was.

  He had left Permali’s on the Bristol Road with an anti-testimonial or reference. ‘Do not re-employ this man. If anybody thinks of re-employing this man, do not.’ The personnel officer of Permali’s was a magistrate. A JP and a woman. He was in court for a few different things then, and that’s how that came about when he left. She met him in the corridor and had a right old go at him. He went to get his cards and she flew at him. Massive big fat woman she was. She had done her worst but he had come out of Permali’s and walked straight into another job.

  In 1974 in the summer he moved to a job that he was going to keep longer than any job. He started at Gloucester Wagon Works that summer and he would stay there for the next ten years. From the ages of thirty-three to forty-three he worked in the machine shop at the wagon works, formerly Gloucester Wagon and Carriage Company, a canal-side firm with a hundred-year history, a ten-minute walk away from Cromwell Street directly across the park. It was a noisy shop and it was dirty work. The wagon works was where they made the shells for railway carriages and trains for the London Underground. Panel plates for dumpers, diggers, earth-moving equipment, rolling stock. In the early eighties they would repair all the vehicles that came back from the Falklands War – diggers from the landing strips, transporters with their wheels blown off. It was a patriotic job. Dumpers and diggers with the dirt of the Falklands still on them straight off the television news. It was heavy, dirty work. And it was noisy. Heavy machines, big brake-presses, welders, drills, you name it, all running round you. Overhead cranes bombing over your head.

  But they were a good group of men grafting in a relaxed and happy atmosphere that was down to the foreman Ronnie Cooper, who was Gloucester born and bred. A fur-and-feather man and a skittler. A good old Gloucester boy. It was too noisy to talk even during breaktimes which were usually taken at your bench. It was a seven-thirty start with a break at ten for what was known as the morning lunch. But there were ways of communicating that didn’t involve shouting above the noise, visual signals and jokes, comical signs, and that was the atmosphere there. There were men who didn’t take to Fred’s boasts and jokes. He boasted so much to everybody that they didn’t want to know. Men who used to call him the biggest bastard liar out. All he ever talked about was women. Work and women. If he’d had one woman he’d say he’d had a hundred. Bullshit city. But there were others who would regularly go to his house and he would go to theirs. They borrowed tools from one another, small chainsaws and rotavators, and did each other small favours in return. Colin Price, who helped Fred guillotine the metal for his house sign, kept cold-water fish and so did Fred. Fred had a tank, Colin had a pond and they traded ornamental fish. In after-work hours, though, he wasn’t a joiner. Being near the docks there was a high concentration of pubs around the works which occupied a massive piece of land between Southgate Street and the docks. And the rest of Ronnie Cooper’s men would go drinking together regularly but Fred never wanted to go. He wouldn’t mix with anybody. Good worker, mind. Brilliant worker. He became known for moving large sheets of metal manually rather than wait for the crane to move them. He was very strong and wouldn’t wait because he was on piecework. Always at work. He’d work all the hours God sends. But he wouldn’t mix. He wouldn’t drink. He never drank. He wouldn’t go to a pub at all and always said he was too busy if they asked him. Said he had too much to do. But he was a good worker to Ronnie Cooper – he did his job – and that’s all Ronnie Cooper as foreman bothered about.

  All in all it was a good working atmosphere, as was proved by the length of service of most of the men there. Ronnie Cooper had already been at the wagon works for more than twenty years when Fred joined in 1974, and there were many among the men who worked under him who could come close to that. Close to a hundred men all with good service records. And there were perks. Everybody did their little perks. Wall brackets, hanging-basket brackets, fireguards, shelf supports, garden gates if they could get them out. And as long as it was within reason and done using what they called swarf and scraps, during the lunch hour or in break-time, Ronnie turned a blind eye.

  When Fred West was in Winson Green Prison in Birmingham many years later facing trial on twelve charges of murder and had come to the decision to kill himself, he would go about it in a typically devious, thorough and concentrated way. He volunteered to mend the shirts of the other prisoners at Winson Green. And having volunteered he started cutting off and collecting tapes from the laundry bags the shirts arrived in. At the same time he was also stealing narrow strips of material from the hems of his prison blankets and twisting and sewing them together to make a noose. A ligature measuring eighty-eight inches by seven-and-a-half inches thick when he finished, put together from slyly snipped-off, scavenged, stored and plaited bits. Innocuous pieces and fragments collected and concealed over days and probably weeks and made into the means by which to take his own life.

  And when he decided to build contraptions and devices on which to fasten and sexually brutalize his eight-year-old daughter he went about it using offcuts and bits of discarded metal from work in the same kind of obsessive, scheming way; with the same level of stealth and concealment.

  The high front gates at the entrance to the house and the sign outside the house with ‘25 Cromwell Street’ written on it were both constructed from the same basic
components: straight pieces of metal and pieces of metal bent into florets and curved into S-shapes then welded into patterns. An attempt to make hard metal look sorter and like something it wasn’t. Like something organic or plant-like. Like tendrils. Clinging creeper or tendrils which contrasted forcibly with the house’s slab-sided and unornamented flatness.

  With the church building finished there was now a solid wall down the right side of the path going to the house rather than the old wooden fence. And he didn’t waste any time in using the church wall as an anchor for one of a pair of arched gates that he brought out of the wagon works piece by piece and welded together when he got the pieces home. They were gates that Anna-Marie and Heather and May and Stephen and the five younger children when they came along would all be kept securely locked behind. He fixed a heavy silver lock to the tall silver gates and told them repeatedly all through their lives that they were better off behind them. He would tell them repeatedly that it was for their own good that they were kept shut up behind them and that it was safer. ‘We don’t want to have anything to do with people outside,’ he said. ‘We don’t need them … You’re with people who will protect you.’ They weren’t allowed to have friends to stay overnight and they weren’t allowed to stay with friends. They wanted the family kept really tight. They wanted the family kept a vacuum. The gate was fixed at one side to the wall of the house and at the other to the wall of the church. A double gate with two opening parts to it and only its height perhaps – it was head height – alluding to a bleaker purpose.

  He took the bells off the door and attached them to the gate when it was in position. One bell for general callers at the house and a second for Rose’s visitors who knew that they had reached the right house when they saw the mock suburban sign. A different ringing bell for ‘Mummy’s friends’. Fred had started advertising for partners for Rose in contact magazines and he would remain in the room while ‘Mandy’s’ visitors removed their clothes to make sure, he said, that she was all right. Rose was also having female visitors – what Fred called ‘lemons’, like the seventeen-year-old who many years later would remember having a mechanical dildo pushed into her which seemed to appear from nowhere. She hadn’t been aware of its existence until she felt it move in her: ‘She did it so quick it hurt me a lot and she held it up there inside me. I had to ask her to take it out because it was hurting so much.’ People were also being directed to the Wests’ house by the Private Shop, Gloucester’s only sex shop, which in those days was still in Barton Street, not far away.