Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  It was a big job and an ambitious undertaking, especially in the winter, and especially with Rose only a few weeks away from having the new baby. Fred had just got the water boiler off the wall one night – it was three in the morning – when Rose went into labour. It had to be done at night because the tenants would want it back on in the morning. Just as he had got it all apart Rose woke up and realized after having a cup of tea that she was in labour. He took her to the hospital and was with her when Tara was born on 6 December. Tara, who would always be called ‘Moses’, or ‘Mo’ – ‘De Da!’ ‘De Mo!’ – in a parody of minstrel speak. Fred’s darky routine.

  Tara was black. Her father was black. Tara was a half-caste baby and Fred was delighted. They were both delighted, Rose and Fred. She was their first baby in four years and she was what they had wanted and even planned for. He called them their ‘love children’, the children fathered by Rose’s black men. And they’d have two more: Rosemary junior (known as ‘Roe-Roe’) born in 1982, and Lucyanna (known as ‘Babs’) born in 1983.

  Fred West wasn’t close to any of his children. He rarely showed them affection and could never remember their names. He couldn’t give the police the dates of any of his children’s birthdays except May’s, which was easy to remember (May June, born June-the-first), when he was questioned in 1994. But he never discriminated between his five natural children and the children Rose had with other men. ‘I have never said to anybody that Tara, Rosemary and Lucyanna wasn’t my children,’ he said. ‘I know they’re looking at ’em because they’re dark and thinking, hey-up, what’s this. But it didn’t bother me. I couldn’t care less. They’re my children and that’s all there is to it.’

  Black children, in fact, were something he wanted and, again casting himself in the role of investigator and sexual experimenter, set out to get. He set up ‘experiments’ involving the sperm of the black men who slept with Rose. He ordered her to save their semen in condoms and then he mixed the semen of different men together and, using a home-made device consisting of a syringe and a length of copper pipe, injected it into Rose. To keep the semen in what he considered optimum condition, Anna-Marie was made to carry it in knotted condoms inside herself. ‘We go up in the hills … and use it the same night … within an hour and a half,’ he said.

  In addition to the rituals that involved bottling, and eventually cremating, Rose West’s semen-stained knickers, they evolved a ritual between them during which he would video her preparing to go out on the several nights a week he sent her to sleep with Jamaican men. Before putting them on she would hold up her invariably black knickers for inspection by his camera. He would be waiting when she came home early next morning – in time to get the younger children to school – and he would want to film the semen stains before he left for work. She would also hold up a number written on a card, giving the man she had been with the night before marks out of ten. It was a real ritual in that it happened not just once or a handful of times but dozens of times, the same things happening in the same place and time and in the same sequence (the top-floor back bedroom at around nine o’clock at night and seven in the morning), framed and shot in the same way. Filmed evidence not only of her compliance and obedience – her willingness to put herself in bondage to him; but evidence also of the loss of self-control and abandonment that accompanies an orgasm – the kind of little death that Fred West was so compulsively interested in witnessing in other people and so afraid of experiencing himself. Do as you like, Fred said, and she did and liked it and liked telling him about how much she had liked it no less than he liked hearing about it.

  Fred’s chargehand Ronnie Cooper got into the habit of parking in Cromwell Street when he went shopping with his wife and family in Gloucester on Saturday afternoons. They would leave their children to play with the West children at Fred’s and Rose’s and come back and collect them an hour or two later. Through the winter months of 1977 and 1978 Ronnie was interested to watch how the work on the jerry-built extension was progressing. He admired Fred’s nerve. It wasn’t something Ronnie himself would ever risk doing. It was clear that by doing this Fred felt he was going up in the world. ‘Where’s the cellar gone, then?’ Ronnie asked Fred one day, and with one of his sly grins on him Fred showed him. The coal-hole opening to the cellar had been made into a trapdoor with two opening parts to it instead of the single timber lid. Carpet that matched the carpet that had been laid in the new family area had been glued on top of the cellar hatch in a way that made it invisible to anybody who didn’t know it was there. Anna-Marie’s boyfriend, Rikki, had made a bench table and chairs which were hinged and fitted with the trapdoor and moved with it whenever it was opened from underneath. Heather and May and Stephen slept in the cellar and would need to come up to use the toilet sometimes through the night. The hatch door in the living room was the only way in or out. The door from the hall into the cellar from then on was kept bolted shut.

  But the thing that would most stick in Ronnie Cooper’s mind about his visits to 25 Cromwell Street around that time had nothing to do with home improvements. Some time around the time that Rose came home from hospital with the new baby at the beginning of 1978, Ronnie and his family stopped by as usual one Saturday and Pam, Ronnie’s wife, went straight over to the Moses basket on the sofa where the baby was sleeping. The ‘babby’ as Ronnie called it, who was asleep in a wicker basket on the settee. ‘My missus went all the colours of the rainbow. She went pink and it was jet black. There was a babby on the settee as black as the ace of spades. “Where’s the new babby, Fred?”’ And Fred thought it was hilarious, of course. The colour Ron’s missus went. The look on Ron Cooper’s face. Fred knew who the fathers were. Tara’s father was one of Rose’s regulars called ‘Sheepy’. Rose didn’t want the fathers to know. That was supposed to have been the point of his ‘experiments’ when he started doing them. Rose wanted those children to be part of her family. But Fred told them anyway. Mouth almighty. Fred couldn’t resist letting them know.

  It soon got around the factory about Fred West having a black baby. Then two months after giving birth to Tara, Rose was pregnant again, this time by Fred. And this was another big joke in the factory, Fred having a wife and a girlfriend pregnant at the same time.

  One of Fred’s labourers on the house extension was Shirley Robinson. Frank Zygmunt had died a year or two after they moved into Cromwell Street. But his widow and his son Roger had kept on the properties and it was Fred West they still turned to for odd jobs and maintenance work and emergency repairs. And Shirley Robinson, frail as she was, had become his willing helper at these jobs. Shirley had told Fred that she was a lesbian when he first met her, and this wasn’t a lie. Her first sexual encounters after moving into Cromwell Street had almost certainly been with Rose. Rose West denies it. But Anna-Marie and others say it happened and it seems likely to be true. A few lodgers became a part of the family and Shirley Robinson was one of these. She had no family of her own, and she marked her freedom from local-authority supervision in October 1977 by electing herself a member of the West family. ‘These are my children, this is my wife and this is my lover,’ Fred told the sister of one of the other lodgers in front of Rose around that time. Shirley had been living in the house for six months by October, and things had apparently been going well. But that was also the month she got herself pregnant by Fred West.

  His account of how it happened contains characteristic elements of fantasy in it. More convincing is the (apparently inevitable) environment of building dust and building materials and ladders and tools. ‘Shirley worked like a man … I worked on my job by day [and then] went to work with Shirley till we went home at eleven or twelve at night … [One night] Shirley was undressing to change out of her working clothes. She said, “You want to have sex with me?” I said, “You’re a lesbian.” She said, “Lesbians have sex with men.” I had never made love to a lesbian. I wondered what it would be like. So I said, “Yes” … We started [on another occasion] to strip the wall
s. Shirley said, “I will take my overalls off … catch them.” So I look up. She kicked them off at me to catch them, so I did. I looked up and said, “You got no pants on.” She said, “No, it’s too hot to wear them.” So Shirley said, “Catch me.” So she jumped down to me to catch her. I did. We fell on the floor. Shirley held me tight and said, “Please make love to me. I am in love with you.” … So I made love to Shirley. Then we got on with the work.’

  As in the separate but parallel accounts they gave of the happenings at and around the bus stop opposite the Pump Room at Pittville Park, it is probably significant that Fred West’s version of how Shirley Robinson came to be pregnant with his baby – the event that would lead to her being murdered – corresponds closely with the story Rose West told people about how she became pregnant with Louise, who was also Fred’s. They had been working on the extension when it happened. Fred lifted her down from the ladder she was standing on, made love to her among the rubble, and set her back to work. What a surprise when she found out.

  Tara had been born in December 1977. Shirley’s baby was due in June 1978. Louise, Rose’s fifth, was due in November, five months later. Two pregnant women and four demanding children and a few-weeks-old baby and a house that was still a building site. And Fred as usual was nowhere to be seen. Mr West was the breadwinner and Mrs West was in charge of the domestic scene and childcare. He had taken an allotment in Saintsbridge a couple of miles away and constructed a small shed there at the beginning of 1975. Which gave him somewhere else to go when he didn’t want to be around the house, which seemed to be all the time. He could work on the extension at night. He seemed to prefer it that way. Late at night. Through the night. Going back to the wagon works filthy in the morning. There was an atmosphere of tension building and he wasn’t able to handle tension very well. His way of breaking the tension was to tell people that Shirley, who was carrying his baby, was going to be his next wife. He’d put his arm around Shirley and tap her stomach and say she was going to be the next Mrs West. That was Fred’s idea of a way to lighten the tension. His idea of a joke. As Shirley’s pregnancy had started to show more she had started going around the house in only a bra and pants. He’d tap Shirley’s bare stomach, cup her stomach and in front of Rose say she was going to be the one to succeed Rose. Shirley who to Rose was silly, carefree and irresponsible. Rose’s successor. She was just like having another child around the house. Mr and Mrs West for Ever. The next Mrs West.

  It was very tense. Shirley didn’t come down so often. There was a jealous atmosphere in the house. Anna-Marie was very much Daddy’s girl. Anna would go down to the unemployment office on a Thursday with Shirley. She liked Shirley. Rose wasn’t her real mother. She hated Rose. There was a competitive element. Rikki Barnes left the house at the end of February. Anna told him that Fred thought he was being too friendly towards Shirley and this was the reason he would have to leave. Fred was taunting Rose. Shirley was flaunting her relationship with Fred. The children were demanding. The house was a building site. Within a week of leaving Rikki came back to Cromwell Street to live. In April 1978 Shirley had been with them for a year. Her baby was due in two months. She had to come downstairs to use the washing-machine and the telephone. Shirley was becoming emotional, saying she loved Fred. In just briefs and a bra walking around the house. Then one day she was gone. One day Shirley just moved out. She had a girlfriend who lived near by in Gloucester and she went to stay with her. But this was a short-lived arrangement. Suddenly Shirley was back. Her room was small. It was the smallest room next to the bathroom and toilet on the first floor. Liz Parry, top-floor front, had a bigger room and Shirley started spending a lot of time with her. Liz Parry let Shirley stay in her room during the day and sleep on a couch in her room at night when she came back from Tracy’s where she had a bar job. Shirley was seeking sanctuary from the rows and the friction and she did that by going to her friend’s room. Fred made a special trip to Liz’s room and told Liz that Shirley had a fantasy about ripping her knickers off and this was what she was going to do. Shirley told Liz she was frightened of Fred and Rose and she wanted to stay in Liz’s room to keep away from them. She was last seen at the health centre in the park for an ante-natal check-up on 2 May 1978 at the beginning of the eighth month of her pregnancy. And she was certainly alive on 9 May because that day Shirley and Liz Parry were in Woolworths in Gloucester and a photograph was taken in a photo booth. Shirley wrote the date, 9 May 1978, on the back of one of the photographs and gave it as a keepsake to Liz. The rest of the strip she kept herself. Woolworths was where they socialized at that time. And the last time Liz saw Shirley was one morning when she went off to meet some friends in the Woolworths café. Shirley seemed fatigued and depressed about everything and she left her drinking a cup of tea, saying she’d see her later.

  When she came back later to find Shirley not in her room she thought she must have made it up with Fred and Rose and gone back to them. But Fred told her no. She had gone to visit relatives in Germany. In which case Liz expected her to come bouncing back full of how they were all getting on again. But Shirley never came back. And quite soon afterwards another lodger, Claire Rigby, who was a friend of Juanita Mott’s sister Belinda Moore, saw Rose in Shirley’s room and a bundle of Shirley’s clothes on the chair and other items strewn around the room. The door was open slightly until Rose pushed it closed and she saw Rose on her knees bailing Shirley’s belongings into plastic bags.

  It was an image of Rose that would stay with Fred. The schoolgirl Rose on her knees in the trailer at the Lakehouse site bundling together the girls’ underwear and clothes that were Fred’s trophies. She took them and the other women’s clothes that were strewn around and put them all in a tea-chest and said to him, ‘Dump that.’

  Over the years that she knew her, Rose gave her sister-in-law Barbara Letts, Graham’s wife, lots of clothes, including skirt and jacket suits and a brown fur coat. She gave her underwear which looked new, bras and knickers, which fitted Barbara – she was size ten – but were too small for Rose, which had to make Barbara wonder what Rose was doing with them in the first place. Graham introduced Barbara to his sister for the first time only in 1978. And on that and future visits to Cromwell Street Rose would go off with Barbara in one room while Graham and Fred stayed together in another. It was something Graham always noticed: the way they would separate them up. Rose would often take her clothes off in front of Barbara, giving reasons such as getting changed or having a bath. She would talk to Barbara while she was doing it and Barbara would answer back but not look. Graham would go with Barbara and Rose would take Barbara to one room and leave him with Fred. You were never allowed to wander about on your own. They’d even go with you into the garden. You hardly ever saw Fred and Rose together in the house. Somehow Graham always had the feeling he was being watched in that house.

  After Shirley Robinson’s belongings had been sorted and bagged by Rose, Fred took them to the bottom of the garden and left them there for the bin men.

  *

  The extension to the house was still being completed in June 1978 when Shirley Robinson disappeared. The last part to be finished was a utility room with a washing-machine in it which opened straight off the garden and led through into the kitchen. Shirley Robinson’s body was disposed of in the garden immediately outside the door of the washroom, as it was called. Her dismembered remains were shoved down in the corner made by the back door of the house and the wall of the church so that everybody walked on them every time they went either in or out. She was the only victim at Cromwell Street whose remains were found without any sort of tape or rope, although several fingers and toes had been taken away and her kneecaps were missing. The skeleton of her eight-and-a-half-month-old unborn baby was found down in the hole with her. ‘I packed her up,’ Fred West said. ‘I didn’t have much room to put it in, so it had to be packed … just pushed her in with a spade.’

  The next day Liz Parry was leaving the house with her boyfriend Peter
when they bumped into Mr and Mrs West on the stairs. He repeated word for word what he had said about Shirley leaving to visit relatives in Germany and he struck Liz Parry as being very happy. They both appeared to her to be very happy on this morning. That’s all she could say, really. Just happy.

  *

  The living-room extension started where the old house came to an end. This left him with the part of the alleyway between the right side of the house and the church to fill in. It was a small caravan-or shed-sized space and this became his tool room. It was a good arrangement as far as he was concerned because it meant his materials and equipment were kept close to the front door for easy dumping and loading off and on the van. And there was the added advantage that every time he arrived home or was leaving the house he was brought into unavoidable intimate contact with racked-up hammers and grease guns and hacksaws and car jacks and concrete tampers and cold chisels and planes, and shelves full of sealer and adhesive and polymer varnish and electric cable and plastic-covered washing-line and paints, and lead sheet and pickaxes and mallets and sacks of sand and artex and gripfill and solvent cement. Brushing past all this and staying coated in layers of grease and oil and fine debris and dust and hardly or never washing. Forget a bath. The city version of the spores and burrs and pollen and light country rubble that his hair and clothes would collect from the lanes and fields around Much Marcle when he was growing up. As an adult he wouldn’t wear new clothes. He refused to wear them. He used a pair of new jeans as a draught-excluder for seven years once before putting them on. That’s how much he took care of his clothes and appearance. He preferred things retrieved from skips and dumps. He liked to wear clothes he found while he was out working. He hated spending. He loved hoarding.