Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  They were the responsible people. They were the ones who were careful and capable. They were responsible and capable and hemmed in by all this social wreckage. Rose and Fred were making their way and surrounded by so many people who wouldn’t or couldn’t. So many people lost and adrift in their lives and unable to cope. Floaters and drifters. Floating and drifting. They were like a magnet for these kinds of people. For the young girls flowing in and out of the house Rose was becoming like a young mum cum big sister. There were girls on the run from local homes; boys who had nowhere to go for the night. Endless parties. Fred spent a lot of time with the lodgers and the girls who hung around 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. 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. In the seventies people drifted all over the place. They were anybody’s.

  When they got back from their holiday in Westward Ho! in the summer of 1973 there was a message that another of life’s casualties was trying to get in touch with them and firing flares in their direction. Margaret McAvoy was somebody Fred had had a fling with when he was living in Scotland. He had taken her out in the ice-cream van and potted her, as he liked to put it. And that baby, whose name was Steven, was now eight years old. Steven was eight and Margaret McAvoy had brought him up by herself without any help from Fred in all those years. But now life had taken a turn for the worse and brought her close to a breakdown and she was appealing to him to take Steven off her hands for a while at least until she was able to pull her life out of the pit it was sinking in.

  Their own Stephen was only a few weeks old that summer. Heather was nearly three, May was a year and Anna-Marie was just turned nine. For the past six months, ever since the terrifying day in the cellar when she had had horrible things done to her while she was strapped helpless to the U-shaped frame, Anna-Marie had been made to have sex with her father on a regular basis. Most of the sex took place among the pots of paint and bags of cement and work things in the back of his van where Anna-Marie was going to be forced to have sex with her father for the next eight years. There in the back of the van or on building sites or at the houses where she would have gone to help her father with his work. Whenever she was with him in the van on their way to or from a job and a little purple light came on in the van and the van stopped, she always knew what was going to happen next. But it was the only kind of love she knew from her father or really from anybody, and so she never complained. She didn’t mind keeping it a secret from Rose. In a way it was something Anna had over her – something Anna knew and Rose didn’t. Something to have over Rose. He would ask her not to tell Rose and give her a few pounds to buy sweets. Some make-up or powder or some sweets.

  Quite soon after the first attack on her in the cellar had happened Rose had asked Anna to go again in the cellar and tidy up the toys. She was very apprehensive but she did as she was told and again there was this object against the wall. She wanted to go back up but Rose was behind her on the stairs. She felt frightened because her dad wasn’t there. She was told to undress. She didn’t want to but Rose got agitated. And then she was strapped to the contraption, the instrument, whatever you could call it. The instrument. No need to ask this time what was going on; what was happening. She was tied to it. She was frightened. She was completely naked. Her legs also were open. She was gagged. She started screaming. She was screaming in her head. She was trying to scream where she was with Rose in that room where little of the larger world was allowed to enter.

  However near the prisoner the torturer stands, the distance between their physical realities is colossal, for the prisoner is in overwhelming physical pain while the torturer is utterly without pain; he is free of any pain originating in his own body; he is also free of the pain originating in the agonized body so near him. He is so without any human recognition of or identification with the pain that he is not only able to bear its presence but able to bring it continually into the present, inflict it, sustain it, minute after minute, hour after hour. The distance separating the two is probably the greatest distance that can separate two human beings. The larger the prisoner’s pain, the larger the torturer’s world.

  Rose lifted her skirt up and she had a belt on and a vibrator in the top. She started hitting Anna with fists and hands and swearing at her, calling her names. Anna was gagged. She started screaming. She was screaming in her head. Rose raped her. And then Anna remembered her father being there and he had his work overalls on. She remembered pleading with him with her eyes. Her father raped her. She presumed it was his lunch hour. She was warned not to tell anybody what happened. She was told that she wasn’t to say anything to anybody. And then he went.

  On 6 July, ten days before her ninth birthday, Anna-Marie had fainted at the swimming baths when she was there with her school and had been taken to Gloucester Royal Hospital where they kept her in overnight for observation. The staff noticed small cuts and bruises on her chest and breasts but she was a tomboy and always falling off things and they had accepted her explanation that the marks on her body had happened as the result of an accident.

  Just over a month later Stephen had been born. And then they had gone on holiday with Grampy Letts in a caravan in Devon. And then soon after that they had gone off with Grampy Letts in his car and brought Anna back a new brother. Another Steven. Another new brother but not a baby – one who was almost as old as herself this time. Fred went with Rose’s father up to Preston to collect Steven McAvoy who had dark hair and dark skin and bore an unmistakable resemblance to Fred who that day was seeing him for the first time. He was like a duplicate picture. Because she had designed him like that – designed his hairstyle and his thick black hair to look as much as possible like Fred. Fred could see that. Anybody could see it, Fred thought. Fred and Margaret had worked together on the Mr Whippy van. She didn’t have many friends. She was a lonely sort of a girl, really. But she thought the world of Fred. And when she got his son, that was her life made. She wouldn’t let another man touch her. She wanted Fred to again, but he said no, once was enough. But now she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, that was the whole problem.

  Preston had been settled on as a pick-up point because it was roughly halfway between Gloucester and Glasgow, a route that held memories for Fred. They drove in Bill Letts’s new Mazda which was a good deal more reliable than Fred’s old A35 van. Rose’s father replaced his car every year with a new one. Toyota. Mazda. Simca. He had a renewal thing with the garage that allowed him to do that. But it was at the root of most of the arguments between him and his wife: why he had to have a top-of-the-range TV or stereo; how they were going to pay for the new car. He lost his temper quick. She got annoyed because he used to like to buy things new. Went off fishing with the bosses from work. They weren’t really flash sort of cars. Just cars that Rose’s mother thought at the time he couldn’t afford. The main thing he liked was to have a nice car.

  They drove up to Preston and met Margaret McAvoy and a man who was with her in a car park and brought Steven back with them. ‘If the boy’s yours’ is all Rose had said. She was all for it. Rose had been in complete agreement with this development. That is until she realized that although he was eight Steven was used to being hand-fed and was still wearing nappies. She had a six-week-old baby in nappies and an eight-year-old who still needed nappies and Fred had already started buying Sanatogen wine for her because she was run-down and feeling drained and on a short fuse. And now Anna had an ally; a co-conspirator.

  All the West children would grow up knowing they weren’t supposed to talk to anybody outside the house. Fred and Rose n
ever wanted anybody to spend time with any of the children unless one of them was present. They didn’t even like the children to talk or laugh among themselves when they were together playing. As soon as the children had a laugh themselves, that was it, Rose would step in with a slapping. ‘Stop bloody giggling.’ One night when Stephen was about five, Stephen and May and Heather were dragged out of their beds in the cellar where they were sleeping and bundled out into the garden. It was winter and wet and freezing and they were kept out in the garden clinging to each other for quarter of an hour before being allowed back in. Their crime was talking when they should have been sleeping, and being thrown outside into the cold was the punishment.

  Steven McAvoy started the autumn 1973 term at St Paul’s Juniors in New Street with Anna and he went about a lot with Anna and she was very proud of him, both of them looking so much like their father. They got on great with each other and liked drawing and playing and could never understand why this would send Rose into a rage every time she saw them. And there were other things that Steven didn’t understand that were different from the home he came from in Scotland. The fact that there were no locks on the bathroom and toilet doors, for instance, and how this would lead to embarrassing incidents. Quite soon after arriving he walked in when Rose was using the toilet and he was flustered and embarrassed but Rose wasn’t. In fact she made him stand there by her and watch her. She was completely naked but she made him wait and watch until she was finished. Another time he got up in the night to go to the toilet which was through the living room where his father and his father’s wife as he called her were sleeping. When he walked in it was obvious they were having sex with each other but again he was made to stay and see everything and they laughed and seemed to enjoy him watching.

  At the beginning Steven used to call his father’s wife ‘step-mum’. But she would hit him when he did this and tell him to call her mum. She would hit him often and it seemed to Steven not for any good reason. She would punch and kick them – him and Anna – and drag them around the living room by their hair. One day they were on the floor playing with his grandfather’s coin collection that he had brought with him from Scotland when Rose found them and screwed her foot in his face. She was wearing stiletto heels and the sharp heel caught him close to one eye and opened a wound that when it healed was going to leave a permanent scar.

  She thought nothing of kicking you. Feet were nothing. She’d hit one of them and then she’d want to hit them all because she was in the mood. She could seem impervious to pain and seemed to expect the same of everybody else. She could be quite seriously physically injured and not even flinch. One evening in August 1974 when she was still only twenty she was admitted to Gloucester Hospital via the Accident Unit with a laceration across the ring and little fingers of the right hand. Both flexor tendons of these fingers were found divided. Which in layman’s language means both fingers were virtually severed and hanging off. It had started as a game with Fred. Fred had come home from work and found her in the kitchen stirring something on the cooker and he began poking her with his finger and jumping back out of the way. Poking her and jumping out of the way. Poking and giggling and prodding although she was warning him to stop. A prod and a punch. ‘Watch it, boy, just watch it look or I’ll fucking have you.’ Poking and prodding and punching and laughing until he eventually went a punch too far. She swung round and snatched up the carving knife and chased him out of the kitchen and across the living room and up the three stairs that led to a door. He slammed the door straight in her face and the knife came bang straight in the door. Straight through the door and he heard a scream on the other side. When he opened it one of Rose’s fingers was hanging down and the other one was hanging off but she wasn’t crying. ‘Right, feller, you’ve got to take me down to the hospital,’ she said, but she wasn’t crying. Her fingers were hanging off by the tendons and almost severed but she wasn’t crying. She went into the kitchen and wrapped a tea towel around her hand to prepare for the hospital but she didn’t cry.

  When she got her temper up Rose grabbed whatever was handy. A rolling-pin was one of her favourites. But if it was a knife it was a knife. She was constantly on the look-out for reasons to give one of them a beating. If she couldn’t find any, she would make them up. She’d accuse them of things they hadn’t done. For some reason she picked on May one tea-time and came at her with a knife. May was still little then and sitting on the top step in the living room and she suddenly lunged at her with a knife. May was screaming. She was crying and telling her no. No! No! She kept slashing the knife at her and there were little nicks all over her ribcage by the end. All up under her vest. She was only wearing a vest and pants. You never knew what Rose was going to do next. She would use anything; knives, belts. The house itself – walls, ceilings, windows, doors – could be a weapon. Fred always said that he brought in the money and everything else was down to Rose. He worked and the rest was Rose. If the kids were doing something they shouldn’t in front of him he’d say, ‘Rose, take care of that.’ She would go then. She didn’t care how loud or how violent or who heard her in the street. She would go. She would lose it. She would just flip.

  When the time came and his mother wanted him back with her in Scotland they wouldn’t let Steven McAvoy go. The Social Services contacted them and said that Steven’s mother had recovered and she was wanting Steven back home now but they weren’t keen to let Steven go. Letters from Glasgow were left to go unanswered. But the Social Services persisted. Pen-pushers and briefcase-carrying nosey-parkers busy-bodying and nosey-parkering around. Buzzing at the door. Standing at the door. Steven’s mother was pining and the briefcases were bothering. His mother had somehow been able to drop back into her life and the authorities were noticing them. The authorities were becoming aware of them. They were being noticed and they had to let him go. Steven had come in the autumn of 1973. It was now the early spring of 1974. Two more women had been murdered and buried underground at 25 Cromwell Street in that time. By the spring of 1975 they would have murdered three more. Altogether five girls and young women murdered and mutilated and buried underground in Cromwell Street in the space of eighteen months. Sexually brutalized and murdered and buried roughly in a circle in narrow shafts opened in the floor of the cellar in the order of their deaths.

  *

  By November 1973 they had been living in the house a little over a year. The builders were still working on the church next door and the finishing touches were still being put to the bathroom extension like tar and sealant to keep the winter out. They called it an extension but it was really an outbuilding; a heat-leaking, flimsy envelope of space. So add dirt and treaded mud to the lodgers and their noise, and the runaways and misfits coming round and the dealers, and with the dealers the busts and the Bill, and you had what many of them living there at the time called pandom. Pandom, short for pandemonium. Beautiful pandom. Some would look back on their days at Cromwell Street as the happiest time of their lives.

  The busts were getting ridiculous. The busts were getting out of hand. The lodgers had always been out of hand in Rose’s opinion. And now you had the police raids to prove it. The police were raiding them once, sometimes twice a week. At one time they were raiding regularly and almost every day. If one policeman wanted to get in touch with another policeman, they radioed to Cromwell Street, because that’s where they usually were. They pulled out cupboards, ripped up carpets and lino, took up floorboards and vacuumed everything. But always only in the upstairs lodgers’ part of the house. Always in the lodgers’ rooms on the first and second floors and never in Fred’s and Rose’s part of the house, which consisted of the two ground-floor rooms and the cellar. Which gave rise to suspicions that Fred was on the payroll as an informant, which would have surprised nobody about Fred. The whispering grass. In addition to the lodgers and their friends, and the friends of friends of friends, the house was also a haven for a number of convicts and recidivist petty criminals. Before the ground-floor room at the
front of the house became Rose’s room, Rose shared it with Fred and a small-time crook who was a friend of Fred’s called Frank Stephens. Sometimes she shared a bed with Fred and sometimes she shared a bed with Frank Stephens. Fred would have liked it to have been the three of them in the same bed and he suggested this, but Frank Stephens – so he maintained – wasn’t prepared to go as far as that.

  On a number of occasions when Stephens was arrested on suspicion of theft and handling stolen goods he was staying at 25 Cromwell Street. He was involved in break-ins at Jason Tool Hire and West Midland Farmers among others and stored chainsaws, garden implements and other stolen property, mainly tools, with Fred’s permission in the cellar. It was using the cellar for hiding things in without telling Fred that that’s what he was doing that would lead to a major bust-up between them in 1979. Frank Stephens would be able to say that once Fred West found out that he had been alone in his cellar with regard to stolen property he had put there, he went absolutely mad. He didn’t lose his temper very often but when he did it wasn’t like normal anger: his eyes started staring; his body went rigid and shaking. The final parting of the ways between Fred and Frank Stephens would happen the following year when five stolen tape-recorders and a number of tape cassettes were found hidden in a wardrobe at Cromwell Street. The contents of one of the tapes was judged to be so shocking that when Fred West eventually came to trial for receiving, the contents were not read out in open court. Instead, the jury was simply handed a transcript. He had got into the habit of lending around tapes of Rose’s lovemaking to some of the men at work. And this one had been made during one of their nights out in the back of the van he had domesticated with a little gas fire and a carpet and a mattress, and it featured Rose and one of Fred’s black men friends. They would take some rope and a whip, some vibrators and a flask of tea and all go off together in the van. In future years, when video cassettes had superseded audio cassettes and he was building up a video rather than a sound library, Fred would take out some of the old sound tapes he had made of Rose and her partners and play them as a soundtrack to whatever solo act she might be in the process of performing for his camera. Rose panting and moaning in present time and Rose howling in ecstasy or talking dirty from another time in the past. Fred escaped with a £50 fine but Frank Stephens was never allowed in the house again.