Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  Juanita’s mother was from the Coney Hill area of Gloucester. Her father was a US serviceman from Texas who probably gave her her Mexican name and dark-hued skin and then returned to live in America without Juanita or her mother when she was still young. She was dark and attractive with a fiery, wilful side and, like dozens of the other girls who washed in and out of Cromwell Street, was trying out what even in those days, just a year away from the anti-hippy rantings and posturings of punk, was still seen as an ‘alternative’ way of life. Juanita was difficult. Her family found her difficult and on a number of occasions she had been taken into care. She left home when she was fifteen and moved into a flatlet in Stroud Road in Gloucester on the other side of the park (the side of the park where Lynda Gough had also lived and where Anna-Marie was going to school). She was testing herself and feeling her way and she had become pregnant when she was sixteen. But it was an ectopic pregnancy and so she had lost the baby and had gone on having her wayward but in its own way by then conventional young life. Drugs probably came into it as they had come into Caroline Raine’s life two or three years before. Another new experience. She was looking for experience and up for it and obviously running a bit wild and always on the go. Nita, as her new friends called her, went around with a girl called Mary, also from the flatlets, and before that a lodger at 25 Cromwell Street. Mary worked at a café and gaming room in the town called the Golden Goose, and Mary and Nita regularly used to go to Tracy’s on the bus station and then on to Snobs and the Top Hat club, which used to stay open late. Snobs or the Top Hat. The Top Hat or Cinderella’s. Sometimes Maxi’s. Their social circle at that time involved a large group of friends, several of whom used to leave the area for several months before returning to stay in the bedsits. And quite often they used to see friends in the night-clubs who they hadn’t seen for a few months.

  From the bedsit in Stroud Road, Nita moved to 4 Cromwell Street and while she was there she was charged with stealing a pension book and sent to Pucklechurch Remand Centre in Gloucester. She was given two years’ probation. She became a regular at the Pop-Inn café in Southgate Street which the Scorpions used as their headquarters and where Mary Bastholm had worked. She got a job in a bottling factory, and it was there she met ‘Jasper’ Davis who lodged with the Wests along Cromwell Street at number 25. She visited him there and it’s possible she might have lived there for a period. But by 1975 Nita was living with a friend of her mother’s called Jennifer Frazer-Holland in Newent and helping to look after her children. Jennifer Frazer-Holland was getting married on 12 April. And on the night before, a Friday, Juanita Mott left Jenny’s house, Horsefair Bungalow, to hitch-hike into Gloucester.

  Her remains were found at Cromwell Street at midday on Sunday, 6 May 1994, pushed into a narrow shaft in the cellar. He had taken out the bricks and made a hole and buried her head and her legs and the trunk of her body in the floor of the cupboard used by Frank Stephens and his other burglar friends to store their stolen property. Juanita Mott had been bound and gagged with her own clothes. Ligatures made from two pairs of tights, her bra and two white nylon socks were found wrapped around her skull, under the chin and over the top of the head. She had been trussed up with two lengths of plastic-covered rope, one ten feet long, one seven feet long. Loops had been knotted around her wrists and her ankles. Her skull had been massively fractured, probably by a blow from a hammer. Both kneecaps and many other bones had been taken away.

  Four years later Juanita Mott’s sister Belinda would become a regular visitor at Cromwell Street. Belinda had a friend called Gill Britt. Gill was going out with a boy named Graham George, and Belinda was going out with Graham’s brother, Phillip. Gill Britt was living on the top floor at 25 Cromwell Street in the summer of 1979, and Belinda and Gill and Phillip and Graham would sit up there listening to music and larking about and laughing and having a good time. On some of her visits Fred West or Rose West would open the door. But from the limited contact she had with them there was no way Belinda could imagine they would know that her sister was Juanita Mott who they had tied up and murdered and buried under the cellar floor.

  *

  When the floor of the cellar was filled up with bodies he concreted it over. In a few years he would concrete it properly using ready-mix which he would pump in through the narrow vent on the church side of the house from a tanker. But just then in 1975 he couldn’t afford ready-mix. He couldn’t buy it and he couldn’t steal it. And so had to do what he always did: he did it by hand. Bodged it using sand and gravel mixed by hand and carried down in buckets. The same process as the cattle ramp in Fingerpost Field that he had poured and made with his father. The ramp under which Ann McFall and her baby’s body lay. The field where he had started driving a tractor when he was nine. A temporary solution involving mixing and carrying and covering up. Then it was concreted, but by hand. Sand and gravel mixed. Just brought in the van and bucketed and dumped down there. Making and constructing. Working and making. Buckets of lime. Sacks of cement. Sewer pipes. Shovels. Back axles. Ice-knives. Rakes. The sheath knife that he always carried on his belt. An actual dagger, used for laying felt. They stood at the spot where they had poured concrete on a farm field many years earlier and he told his father what he had done. ‘Come and see what I’ve done, Ron.’ He loved the house. He was so proud of the house. Every penny they had for many years went into the house. The house that they built with their bare hands together.

  In these first years in the house he was prone to black moods and fits of depression. He was prey at any given moment to puncture or depression. Depression would come in a flood and he would be gripped by a foul mood and grow progressively more violent. Rose wouldn’t know what to do to please him. She had to pretend to the man who was with her that she was having a good time. But if Fred thought she was really enjoying it then he’d go straight in and punch her. He was often unable to sleep and would sit up all night in his working clothes or stay up all night working. Not only could he not sleep, he became fretful and depressed to the point of desperation. It was a black mood and condition that would make him physically sick. He wouldn’t join the family for meals. It was a problem for her to get him to bed. He would vomit. He was physically sick. On such occasions he was inconsolable.

  Chapter Eleven

  It is said that no other English city stands more precisely on its Roman plan. Its traffic lights work in the four main streets laid out by the Romans. Northgate, Southgate, Westgate and Eastgate Streets meet at the Cross and all Gloucester life goes on up and down and through and along and across and around them. For his fifteenth birthday, Fred’s mother and father had brought him to Gloucester and bought him a suit from Burton’s up on the Cross. That was when the old tramlines used to be up there. It was sort of a family thing, a tradition among the Wests. When you were fourteen you got a gun. When you were fifteen you got a suit. And he had always loved Gloucester from that day, the day of the suit.

  The cathedral is built like a cross and there are ‘period’ tea rooms and craft shops and trinket shops in the alleys close to the cathedral precincts. But the only time Rose went anywhere near the cathedral was to spend the night with one of Fred’s Jamaican men on a council estate known as ‘Colditz’ at the bottom of Westgate Street, and to a pub called The Lampreys close to the cathedral cloisters on country-and-western nights. She would sometimes meet men in The Lampreys and have sex with them up against the wall in the deeper darkness close to the cathedral.

  All but the extremities of Westgate and Eastgate Streets have been pedestrianized since the late seventies. Cromwell Street lies east and south, just off the part of Eastgate Street that is full of take-aways and still permits traffic, and close to the part of Southgate Street that leads to the docks and the Victorian factories and the new retail parks sprawled out along the Bristol Road. The city-centre branches of W. H. Smith, C & A, Boots and Marks & Spencer were always only a four-or five-minute walk from Cromwell Street and became less than that when the shortcut was
opened up across the car park that was once the schoolyard at Tommy Rich’s.

  The area around the Cross with all the big shops in it and the cathedral and Shire Hall and the museum and art gallery and the lawyers’ and insurance offices is the official, public city. Rose and Fred tended to stick to the ancient, unofficial routes. The centre where they lived is riddled with rat-runs and mossy alleys and long narrow walks, like the dark passageways running behind the walls of grand houses in such a way that the servants, ceaselessly running to and fro laden with coal scuttles, baskets of firewood, bed linen and tea trays, never had to cross the paths of their betters. It was possible to run all over the town without going into the streets. And Rose could frequently be seen dragging Heather, who was five in the autumn of 1975, May who was three and Stephen who was two, plus Anna-Marie who was an obstinate, lumpen eleven-year-old, down cobbled shortcuts and narrow passageways, shouting at one or other of them, clipping another, shouting and bawling and disappearing with them down cuts or dragging them in the side or the back entrances to Eastgate market.

  Caroline Raine would occasionally see Rose, and each time she saw her she seemed to have become heavier bodied. She was still quite pretty but she wore her hair in a short, plain, single-parted cut, about down to her collar. A middle-aged style, in other words, for what was still really a pretty young girl. Rose turned twenty-two in November 1975. But she didn’t seem to put a great deal of effort into her appearance. She didn’t seem to care very much what she looked like and she didn’t care what people thought. She just didn’t care. Sometimes in the winter months the children would plead with her not to wear her bobble hat and mittens when she took them shopping. But always the answer was the same. ‘If you don’t fucking like it, you shouldn’t be fucking looking.’ An eccentric figure pushing a supermarket trolley down the back alleys of Gloucester in schoolgirl knee-socks and a matching set of bobble hat and knitted scarf and mittens.

  Rose and Fred were completely unaware of how other people behaved. She answered the phone by saying ‘What’ and nothing else. Then somebody would say something and she would say ‘OK’ and slam the phone down. She never said goodbye or anything like that. She was so rude it was funny. In a shop when an assistant would approach her with a smile and ‘Can I help you?’ she’d snap back, ‘Is there a law against looking?’ Shopping for a fridge she walked around the shop opening the doors of all the fridges and kicking them shut again with her foot. She bought the one that closed best with a kick. Heather and May and Stephen hated going shopping with her because you always knew something was going to happen. She’d think nothing of going into a clothes shop and trying to tear the sleeves off sweaters. If she could do it she’d shout, ‘Rubbish.’ The same happened with shoes, but this time she’d rip off the soles. These were her tests of quality. She’d pull the children’s pants down in front of customers and give them a slapping when they started crying. You’d be standing there and suddenly your pants would be off. She never used changing rooms.

  They wore really old-fashioned clothes. Jeans from Oxfam, big flared things. They were called the Waltons because they wore dungarees. They were cut off in the summer. Heather and May had to wear boys’ shoes because they were harder wearing. They’d have short-back-and-sides haircuts because they were told their mum couldn’t handle combing long hair. They had one set of school clothes and one set of play clothes and that was their wardrobe. They were allowed one Christmas present. She’d get out the Argos catalogue and they were allowed to choose one present, anything as long as it was under £10. What made them feel bad was that their mum couldn’t even be happy at Christmas. She’d still be shouting and bawling. Yelling and laying in to them and going ballistic.

  In the summer Rose would take them paddling in the public fountains in the King’s Walk shopping centre instead of swimming at the leisure centre where all their schoolfriends went but where it cost money to get in. They would fish about in the water for two-pence pieces that people had thrown in for good luck. The shoppers stopped and looked but she never cared what anybody thought. Children in their bathing trunks playing in the civic fountains and scooping out the good-luck coins. She washed her hair in vinegar and the children used washing-up liquid. It was always Co-op starched shirts and every item of clothing was three sizes too big, like a clown’s suit. She told them, ‘You’ll grow into them.’ They wore really old-fashioned clothes.

  Anna-Marie started smoking in the summer between St Paul’s Juniors and Linden Secondary when she was eleven in 1975. She had been making roll-ups for her father when he wanted them for years. And she always had a packet of ten No. 6 in the big brown briefcase she had been given for starting at the senior school. She was the only one in the school who had a briefcase. Everyone else had a proper satchel. And she had her hair cut so short that she looked like a boy and she was quite big and so she got the nickname ‘Tank’. This big heavy-set girl dragging this big brown attaché case like a doctor’s.

  Going to school got Anna out of the house so she rarely played truant. She liked school but she often wasn’t there. Her attendance record wasn’t good because Rose would often invent an excuse to keep her at home. All the children as they were growing up would be rewarded for staying away from school rather than for attending. They used to encourage them not to go to school. ‘If you don’t want to go – don’t go.’ There were always the younger children to look after and the housework to be done, or perhaps Rose had miscalculated and some of Anna’s bruises showed. In her whole school career only once did anybody become suspicious about her family circumstances and that was when she was in junior school. The PE teacher had become anxious when she brought in a note yet again saying she couldn’t take part in games. There were bruises on her legs. The teacher made her roll down her socks and hitch up her skirt to expose the big black bruises on her legs. She was allowed to sit out the lesson and for the rest of the day no more was said. But no sooner had she got back to Cromwell Street that afternoon than the doorbell rang. It was one of the people her father was always warning her against. There were people out there who could only do you harm. Buzzing at the door. Standing at the door. She got the hiding of her life when the lady had gone. One of the worst beatings. The smartly dressed woman introduced herself as being from the Welfare Department and Rose was ‘Oh, come in’ and all this. Hospitality itself. Oh, come in. She went out of the front door quite reassured and never came back again. ‘Oh well, that’s fine, Mrs West.’ One of the worst beatings. It taught Anna-Marie a lesson about the Welfare – they couldn’t help and any attempts they made to do so could only rebound on her. So there she was. Really a prisoner. Rose wore the master key on a string around her neck. They knew what time school finished and exactly how long it took to walk home across the park. If she wasn’t in that door bang on quarter past four they wanted to know why. They never had people round. You were locked in. If you went to the shop you were followed.

  It was rare for Anna to get new clothes. Mostly she wore Rose’s cast-offs. She hated the huge flower-print dresses she gave her but she had no choice but to wear them. It was only when Rose had dished out a real beating or Anna had pleased her in some way with her ‘friends’ that Rose might buy her something, a lipstick or a packet of cigarettes or some clothes.

  One day in the first half of 1975 when Anna was in what was going to be her last term at junior school and so hadn’t quite turned eleven, she had been introduced to some of Rose’s coloured gentlemen with the funny names. They had nicknames instead of names. ‘Bonnie’, ‘Sonny’, ‘Sheepy’, ‘Suncoo’, ‘Duke Roy’, ‘Bigger’. She had seen these men in the house waiting for their time with Rose. Passing the time until it was time to do whatever it was they did with Rose. She had a good idea. It was what she had been having to do with her father for three years. She had been submitted to his devices. But it was just an idea. She had heard things. Funny sounds and noises coming out of Rose’s special room. But she hadn’t seen anything until the day her father to
ok her and made her look. Took the plate with ‘Rose’s Room’ written on it off the door and unscrewed the wood screw and had a look first with his eye pressed up to it and then made her look. Cackled without making any noise, only jiggling his shoulders, and made her put her eye to the hole and watch what was going on. Rose was naked on the bed with a black man who was quite old. He was about thirty years old. And he was doing things with Rose that she knew she was soon going to have to do with the man. With this man and with other men. Her dad didn’t say anything to her straightaway. Not then. But she knew. In addition to having sex with her father at houses where he was working and on building sites and in his van, and having sex where and when Rose wanted it with her, she was going to have to start doing things with Rose’s black men. With Rose’s coloured gentlemen friends. She had been made to perform oral sex with Rose on more than one occasion and all the time it was happening Rose was squeezing and scratching her breasts. She had long fingers and quite long nails and she scratched her until she bled. She grabbed the skin at the base of her throat and twisted it until she could hardly breathe. It was sex on demand with her father and sex on demand with Rose and now she knew it was going to be sex whenever they wanted her to have it with ‘Bonnie’ and ‘Sonny’ and ‘Suncoo’ and ‘Bigger’ and these black men with the funny names.

  She had to have sex with Rose’s black men once a week. There were about five regulars and occasionally somebody new. Sometimes Anna went first and then her stepmother. And sometimes her stepmother went first and Anna waited outside. Rose was always in the room when Anna went with them and she would touch Anna and her father was always peeping through the door. Shuffling about outside the door and peeping. He would want to talk to her about them afterwards. Ask her about them. About their size. About their bigness and how it felt.