Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  May and Stephen left for school at eight the next morning. They walked the four miles to Hucclecote School and the four miles back every day to save the bus fare which was the only money they had. It was something they had been doing for the past few years with Heather. When they came back from school at around five o’clock on the Friday, Heather had already gone. ‘Oh,’ their dad said, ‘your sister’s gone.’ They could see that their mum had been crying, which was unusual. And their dad took May and Stephen outside to the converted security van that was his work van and sitting in the back at the bench table told them the holiday-camp job was back on and that Heather had left at lunchtime with a lemon in a Mini. He took them up into the van and said, ‘Look, your mum’s a bit upset ’cause of Heather’s leaving.’ He was quite upset as well, shaking a lot and quite tearful. Rolling a roll-up in his chipped working fingers. ‘It’s just me and you now.’

  Fred West in these years had become an addict for the news. The news was all he watched. The one o’clock, the six o’clock, the nine o’clock, the ten o’clock, the graveyard-shift news. Peter Kurten, the German mass murderer, was a similar addict for the news, although it was the radio news in the twenties in Weimar Germany when Kurten was prowling the streets of Düsseldorf abducting and murdering scores of women and children. Kurten claimed to derive as much, if not more, sexual satisfaction from the response to his murders as from the actual killing. He claimed that the excitement and outrage expressed by participants in a spontaneous protest staged after the discovery of another corpse had aroused him sexually and led to ejaculation.

  Fred West would come in and switch off whatever anybody else was watching to watch the news. The one o’clock, the six o’clock, the nine o’clock, the ten o’clock, the graveyard-shift news. Watching to see if he was on it yet. Watching to find out if he had been caught. Like a child playing hide-and-seek who doesn’t know what he fears or wants more: to stay hidden, or to be found.

  Chapter Fourteen

  In his first interviews with the police in 1994, seven years after he had murdered Heather, Fred West would tell them how he had strangled her while she was lounging with her hands in her pockets against a washing machine he was working on in his tool room. It was the Friday morning. Friday, 19 June 1987. He had waited until Rose had gone out to do her shopping. Heather was standing with her hands in her pockets cheeking him. Her belongings were packed in a suitcase and carrier bags and waiting by the front door. She was lounging and leaning (he said) and cheeking him. ‘And I said to her … now what’s this about you leaving home? … You know you’re too young. You’re a lesbian and there’s AIDS and all that. I mean, you’re vulnerable for anything.’ But Heather just stood there and looked at him.

  He told them that he had said, ‘Well, Heather, I’m not going to let you go’, and she had said, ‘If you don’t fucking let me go I’ll give all the kids acid and they’ll all jump off the church roof and be dead on the floor.’ He told them how he had gone to slap her face and had suddenly remembered a previous occasion when he and Rose had had an argument ‘and I slapped her across the face and I dislocated her jaw … moved ’er jaw over’. So he had grabbed Heather by the neck instead. He had grabbed her by the neck and held her until she turned blue. ‘I’m strong in the hands because of the job I do … When you’re using big spanners an’ things like that, you get strong in the arms … I spotted she’d gone blue. So I let go of her quick and, of course, she just started to fall backwards on to the washing machine and slide forward.’

  He told them how he had dragged her through the tool room and down the few steps into the living room and how he had gone and got wet cloths and flannels and put them on Heather’s face. He had taken a brass mirror off the living-room wall and put it over her mouth to see if she was breathing ‘and there was nothing on it’. He told them how he had dragged her body into the bathroom then and stripped Heather and put her in the bath and run cold water on her ‘and still I couldn’t get nothing … So I can remember standing there and thinking, how do you know when somebody’s dead?’

  He told them how he had taken Heather’s body out of the bath and dried it and then ‘put something round her neck … to make sure she was dead … I mean … if I’d have started cutting her leg or her throat or something and she’d have suddenly come alive … That’s what I was thinking.’ He had taken a pair of tights and tightened them around her neck. And then he had brought a dustbin in from the small concreted-over space at the front of the house and dismembered Heather and put the parts of her body in it. He told them how he had cut and twisted off his daughter’s head (‘I remember it made a heck of a noise when it was breaking’) and cut and twisted out her legs at the groin. She ‘filled the bin shoulder-ways’. He had hidden the bin behind the Wendy house that was actually a bicycle shed at the bottom of the garden and buried the remains by the interwoven panel fence by the Leyland pines under cover of darkness.

  He told them all this over many days in a circular, self-contradicting, always revising and backtracking way. People often do this as a way of coming close to a difficult or elusive truth. He did it, he thought, as a way of keeping people away from one. He spoke in a becalmed, dissociated voice and with the degree of extreme detachment that the police and others who come into contact with them have come to expect from psychopathic killers. What was striking about Fred West’s account of how he had murdered and mutilated his daughter was the way in which the close details of how exactly he had decapitated and dismembered Heather and disposed of her remains frequently slipped into animated soliloquies on ordinary household things. With a sort of compulsion, a description of cutting or carrying would turn, within one or two sentences, into a hymning or inventorying of the objects he had done the cutting or carrying – or tying or washing or concealing – with.

  He said at one point he had left Heather’s body in the bath and gone into the tool room to look for something to take her head and her legs off with. ‘I looked up an’ I seen this knife sticking out an’ he was brand new. He came with something from Icelandic – summat we bought from Icelandic an’ the knife was free with it. And he was put up there out of the way of the children. Because he was deadly, this thing was. I mean the blade on it was terrible … So I just shoved him up in there. What I was going to use him for was trimming the trees. That’s what I was actually going to use him for … I was going to try an’ break him up, just bust him through an’ chuck him in the bin, because it was such a deadly weapon to have about … [But] it just ripped. It didn’t actually cut across. It just ripped across the skin, like. Cut bits out. So then I went in the kitchen and got the bread knife … I run the knife round the neck through the skin, and then just twisted the head round. And whatever bits was left, just cut that off.’

  He said he chose a knife because it minimized the possibility of damaging the bath. ‘The body was in an enamel bath. Pressed-steel enamel bath. So if you tried chopping in that, the thing would splinter all over you. The enamel …’

  In one interview he said he thought he had knotted a pair of tights around Heather’s neck. In another he said it could have been a length of flex. ‘It was thirteen-amp, ring-main cable. Grey. Three-core. Plain copper wire … We use it for pulling posts out of the ground, things like that. All you do is just pull it round and twist it. You can’t tie knots in it … I may have chucked it in with her; I don’t know what I done with it. Because there would have been blood on it … I mean, I knew she was dead before I did it, or as good as … It was a bit I’d cut off when I was rewiring a house. Probably two feet to a metre long.’

  He had rolled the dustbin containing Heather’s remains outside and hidden it behind the Wendy house at the bottom of the garden. ‘Stephen made the Wendy house – part on the lawn, part on the patio. Eight-be-four. Made out of eight-be-four sheets. I put her behind the Wendy house and covered it over with that blue polythene again … That blue membrane polythene, you know, they use on the floors … ’Cause there was loads of that
down the bottom. Stephen had it all over the place down there. Pulled across on strings from the front fence to the back fence. Stephen had a load of parts – spare wheels and handlebars an’ all that – behind the Wendy house.’

  When the time came to dig a hole in which to bury Heather – to make the narrow shaft to force the pieces of her body in – he found his spade kept hitting metal. ‘When I dug, these base bars went right across … [There used to be] a climbing frame in the garden – tubular steel. There was a scaffold bar attached to it, across to the church wall with an ordinary lorry tyre hanging from it on three chains, an’ they used to swing round in it. We found that on the corporation tip or somewhere. The chains were all on it when we found it … [Then] the frame finally got disintegrated and busted up … What’s sticking up there now is one of the angles off the corner.’

  After he had buried the remains of Heather’s body that night, he had swilled out the inside of the dustbin and washed himself with a hose attached to the side of the house. ‘I took the dustbin to the ’ouse and washed him, because we had a tap on the side – I’m not sure if he’s still there now – an’ put him back out the front. I washed off at the hosepipe outside. Washed Wellingtons an’ that in the bin full of water and then tipped him over across the yard.’

  Not very long afterwards the family had helped him to extend the patio over the rest of the garden, covering the place near the pines on the left-hand perimeter where Heather was buried. ‘We patioed it. Innsworth Patio Slabs. They come from out by the airfield there, where all the Air Force is … The ground has been levelled down, or hammered down. Refilled. As the end of the slab sunk, you put more soil under, or gravel, to level him. As the body sinks, then the slab was tipping … Actually I did it not so very long ago … Heather helped me put the original one down – just a toddler, like, but she was there rakin’.’

  These displays of intimacy and affection for inanimate objects – spontaneous declarations of the companionship he felt with objects; the easy friendships he made with things – contrast forcibly with the emotional nullness that Fred West’s children associated with their father. He never showed them any affection. He couldn’t remember how many children he had and he couldn’t remember his victims’ names. He was emotionally null. Morally delinquent. A moral vacuum. He was a moral blank.

  *

  Different people were given different reasons as time went on for why Heather was no longer around. Mrs Knight, a neighbour, was told by Rose a couple of days after Heather’s disappearance, ‘There was a hell of a barney here a couple of nights ago. We found out that she was going with a lesbian from Wales, and she has gone to Wales with her.’ Erwin Marschall, a window-cleaner (and a former boyfriend of Anne Marie’s), was told that Heather had gone away from home – she was uncontrollable and had run away and there was nothing much anybody could do about it. Ronald Marshall, a friend of Fred and Rose for twenty-five years and whose daughter Denise was Heather’s best friend at school, was told when he asked about Heather that she had run off after being given a good hiding by Rose for knocking the small ones around ‘and putting scratches in their face’. (This was the same reason they had given for the disappearance of Lynda Gough fourteen years before.) They said Heather was living in Brockworth in Gloucester. They didn’t know where in Brockworth but she was always phoning to say she was all right. The phone would go and Stephen and May and the younger children would often be told that it was Heather on the phone. If they asked to speak to her they would be told that she would speak to them some other time. In the years ahead their father would occasionally come home and report sightings of Heather – chance glimpses of her and a few times meetings with Heather in Birmingham, Devizes, Bristol, Weston-Super-Mare. She had turned into a drug-dealer. She was involved in credit-card fraud. She had gone blonde. He started a new job with a firm called Carsons Contractors in Stroud in 1988 and he would tell his employers, Derek and Wendy Thomson, that he had been to see his daughter Heather in Weston where she had got in with a bad lot of glue-sniffers and drugs users and a what’s-her-name drugs-running what’s-it. Bloody cartel. But the Thomsons, who had got used to Fred by then, would just go, Oh right. Walter Mitty, Wendy Thomson called him. He was just a character to himself like most people are. He’d screw up the dog-ends and put them in his donkey-jacket pocket. He was just a mucky little man. An excellent electrician. A very good decorator. Always on about his orgies. Orgies he had been to in London with the most unlikely of their customers. They were in the haute Cotswolds. Royalty and writers. People off the television and very well-to-do people. ‘They invited me up to London and oh it was a big orgy.’ Oh right. Oh yeah.

  Not long after Heather disappeared, Graham Letts and his wife Barbara received a visit from Rose and Fred, which was very unusual. They drove out to see them to say that Heather had gone away and that she was a lesbian. Rose did all the talking. ‘Heather’s left us. She’s disappeared. She’s a lesbian. And that’s it closed. I don’t want to hear any more about it. We won’t mention it again. I don’t want you coming round in future if you do mention Heather.’ That’s the way Rose was. She hardened up. She got very hard.

  *

  When she was little, about six or seven, May saw her father making a cat-o’-nine-tails. Of course she was too little to know what it was. But many years later, after Heather had gone away and the upper floors had been converted for their mother’s private use, Stephen and May came across the cat-o’-nine-tails on one of the days that Stephen picked the lock to the upstairs flat. It was a cut-off broom handle, and then just strips of leather nailed to it. Leather and plastic belts that Fred had spotted and collected with his scavenging eye. ‘About 13 million strips of leather. I think it’s supposed to be nine strips but he got carried away,’ Stephen says. A peculiar thing that looked like dreadlocks.

  There were now two locked doors facing the old front door in the hall. One was the door going down into the cellar. The other was the door going up into Rose’s private part of the house. This part had been made totally self-contained. The small room at the back next to the bathroom had been turned into a kitchen; the room on the first floor at the front had become the Black Magic bar. There was a king-size bed with a white lace canopy over it and a convex mirror in the canopy roof, in the top-floor room overlooking the garden. The four-poster hand-made by Fred out of Dean oak timber had been installed in the top-floor front, which is also where their collection of vibrators and bondage suits and the other things they had amassed for their life together was kept. A built-in cupboard along one wall contained clamps and whips and harnesses and leather and rubber masks and full skintight second-skin latex and leather suits and other S-and-M paraphernalia.

  The house was full of blue magazines and blue movies. Dirty books and dirty films. There was hard-core pornography in magazine and video-cassette form all over the house. Fred was always keen for other people to borrow it and watch it. And Rose kept a written record of where each tape went – a title and who had it and when it was due back. Like a library, in fact. Fred liked the little ones to sit down with him and watch pornographic films and Rose had porn on in the kitchen while they were eating their tea. Chris Davis tuned in the video channel on his televisions for him because Fred wasn’t able to do that and borrowed a few tapes. Around 1988 a small video shop opened on the corner of Wellington Street and the connecting road into Cromwell Street, and Fred started more or less to live in there, offering pornographic Polaroid photographs and pornographic tapes for sale or hire to the regular customers.

  The brothel style of the rooms in Rose’s flat at 25 Cromwell Street was based on the tacky glamour of the rooms in the videos that, by the late eighties, Rose and Fred had been watching together for years. The avocado corner sinks, louvred cabinets, velour headboards, lace canopies, marbled vanity units, faceted mirrors and flouncy touches were directly traceable to the room sets in Disco Audition and Big Bill Banana and Debbie Does Dallas and Bangkok Boobs. The bedrooms had fake bla
ck beams in the ceilings and arched, ranch-style doors with latch handles and were separated by a heavy curtain from the lower floors. The life-size poster on the back of the door leading to Rose’s private part of the house showed a girl in a black négligé posing with blond-wood louvred doors and could have been taken in the room Rose took her clients to on the top floor. A gap eventually became apparent between the smudged bright colours and motel-room finishes and boudoir lighting of the rooms upstairs, and the downstairs rooms where the children were living which were neglected and sticky-carpeted and brown.

  At his granddaughter’s third birthday, two days before he murdered Heather, Fred West had gone up to the neighbour of Chris Davis’s who had volunteered to video Michelle having her party and asked him if he would be interested in coming round and filming sex scenes at his house. He hadn’t had a video camera until then, and had possibly never seen one being used. But he soon went out and bought one on hire purchase and used it to start photographing what he had always and only been photographing: human parts. Male and female genitals, only now with sound and in living colour. Rose was always a performer. She had never minded being watched. And she was an enthusiastic performer in this medium, alone and with others. Occasionally Fred would be present in the room with his camcorder, moving around the bed. But mostly he would set up the camera in the top back room and leave her having sex with a man while he listened on the intercom downstairs. The camera was simply there and things took place in front of it. It was a bare style that gave what he was doing the clinical, ‘scientific’ gloss that he always liked.

  There seems to have been no shortage of men who were prepared to be taped having sex with Rose. But there was also a lot of footage of Rose with devices in a room on her own performing solo. Rose bringing bigger and bigger and increasingly outlandish objects inside herself. Rose urinating on towels on the bed, on a sofa in the Black Magic bar and flamboyantly on the kitchen table. They evolved the ritual of him filming her dressing to go out to spend the night with one of the men he had approved for her, and then filming her undressing the next morning on her return. In addition to recording the semen stains on her underwear, he would carry out a gynaecological examination before she set out and again when she came home that involved a video camera in place of a speculum. She would lie with her feet pulled backwards over her head and wide apart and he would tape four-and five-minute close-ups of her nothing-to-be-seen. An obsessive, fixed stare into an absence, a lack, a nothingness – a hole. A torso and a hole which, because of how close he came in, could have been the hole where a head had once been. Blackness filling two-thirds of the frame. This was something even his children knew about him. He had a thing about women’s bodies – he was into internal bits. He wanted to go right into the body and look at the internal organs. He really wanted to get inside them. He wanted to come as close as he could.