Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  And Rose seemed happy always to co-operate in his probings and schemes. To give him what she knew he needed to have. To assist and comply. It was a go-with-the-flow natural thing. ‘That is why our marriage worked out so well, for the simple reason that Rose had had no wild life, and she just blended in to my way of living,’ Fred West said. ‘I met Rose at sixteen an’ trained Rose to what I wanted. And that’s exactly what has happened.’ He had trained her, down to letters and commands, and she had complied. She was his slave in a way. But she was his willing slave. This was her life. Striving for abasement and humiliation in all her life with Fred. Striving to submit. Going with his men. Letting the men do to her what he had told them to do. Holding herself open to his gaze. Enabling him to stare right into her. Being interrogated by his camera. Surprising herself as well as him sometimes in how far she was prepared to go. And somewhere understanding that her submissive surrender had more power over him than if she were to refuse or rebel. To kick out. The obedience of the slave kills the commands of her master. Because she didn’t resist her enslavement she proved she could endure anything. He treated her coarsely. He made her into something compliant and corrupt. A second document in her handwriting found in the attic at Cromwell Street said, ‘I, Rose, will do exactly what I am told, when I am told, without questions, without losing my temper, for a period of three months from the end of my next period, as I think I owe this to Fred.’ There can be surprising shifts in roles between dominator and dominated, between ‘hammer’ and ‘anvil’. In a sense the dominated seeks indirectly to dominate as well. Her exhibition of her masochistic submissions became her badges of triumph.

  Whenever Fred West was in the room working the camera, he would focus almost exclusively on her vulva. But even in the long shots he tended to depersonalize her by framing her in a way that kept her face and head out of the picture. She was prepared to play dead for him. Become an object to be investigated. Even her self-pleasuring – on those occasions when it was performed in front of a camera – was done first and foremost to please Fred and confirm him in his position of power. At one point during one of the sessions she would grab the ankles of a Jamaican man who was lying naked on his back on her bed and haul his dead weight further into what she knew would be the centre of the picture, repositioning him in front of Fred’s camera.

  In the same way that Rose seemed capable of continuing her pleasure indefinitely (compared to Fred whose sexual performances rarely lasted more than a minute), he could never get enough of listening to and watching Rose have sex. As soon as he came in from work he would start unwinding the speakers and listening to Rose having sex. He would sit on the sofa with the speaker next to his ear, just listening. Nobody was allowed to speak to him while Rose was with a client. There would be a lot of talking and screaming, and the children used to keep turning up the television to drown out the groaning noises from upstairs. Wails. Noises. Shrieks. Wailing, thumping, thrashing about. If a man stayed overnight Fred would sleep on the settee downstairs listening to the close-up sounds of their pleasure.

  He preferred to listen and watch in this technologically distanced, sanitized way than to take part or even be present. It could be switched off and on. Turned up and down. Fast-forwarded or rewound. Saved or wiped. He stayed in control of these aural fetishes originating from inside the body. The sounds of pleasure erupting from the invisible places deep inside the body. The out-of-control confessions of pleasure.

  *

  Kathryn Halliday left her husband in October 1988 and moved into Cromwell Street with her lesbian lover, Kimberley Stanton. They rented a bedsit at number 11, which was one of Alex Palmer’s houses. And they had been living there only a few days when Fred West was sent round to take a look at a leak in the ceiling. He came one morning when Kim wasn’t there. But Kathryn Halliday made no secret about her domestic set-up and the cheery little man said straightaway, ‘If you see my missus, she’ll sort you out. She likes a bit of both.’ He invited Kathryn along to number 25 for a drink that night and she went. Fred came to the door and took her upstairs to the lounge with a bar in it on the first floor and offered her a video to look at and a drink. There was a large mural of a tropical island and the sea, and a well-stocked bar. A tiger-pattern rug under her feet; a plastic pendant chandelier over her head. There were what she estimated to be a couple of hundred videos in a dark wood unit in the window corner, and he said, anything she wanted, he could put on. What was her taste? She said just straight would be fine – just a straight blue movie, and he threw one in. A few minutes later a woman came in and the woman’s manner left no room for doubt that she was the woman of the house. Rose came in and sat down next to Kathryn. It was a small, two-seater sofa and she sat down close to her wearing a very short skirt and a low-cut T-shirt and nothing else. She could see that. She started taking Kathryn’s clothes off straightaway. She was very pressing. No niceties, no formalities. Very urgent. Within a matter of minutes Rose had taken off all her clothes and stripped Kathryn and was dragging her – this was the word – to one of the bedrooms upstairs. They all went into the back bedroom and Fred took his clothes off and brought a camcorder camera. There were mirrors on the wardrobes and there was a double bed. She was pushed down on the bed and Rose joined her. She was quite aggressive. Fred joined them on the bed and had sex with her while Rose sat astride her, on top of her. He climaxed very quickly and went downstairs to bring another drink. He was very wham bam. Rose now became the aggressor. She became very aggressive and demanding. She held Kathryn down on the bed very hard and began to taunt her. Was she woman enough to do all the things they wanted her to do with them? There were various vibrators, all sizes and shapes. There were dildos, battery-operated and not battery-operated, and various shapes and sizes. ‘She wanted me to use them on her, but also to take them,’ Kathryn Halliday said seven years later. ‘I couldn’t physically take some of them … The ones she preferred were exceptionally large.’ He came upstairs and in and out but he didn’t join in again.

  The relationship with Kathryn Halliday lasted for four months, through the New Year and into 1989, until the threatening edge to the violence got too much for her. Rose would knock on the window at number 11 every morning on her way back from taking the children to school, although she told Kathryn not to come around on a Thursday in the morning because that was kept for men visitors who paid. There was a pattern that Kathryn Halliday came to recognize. Their meetings always started very gentle. Rose was very persuasive. But once she got you into the bedroom, she wanted to make you vulnerable. Vibrators were there to be used ‘very, very physically’. ‘When she got you into a vulnerable position physically and mentally she would use that against your person.’

  If she visited in the evening and Fred West was there, a video would always already be playing in the bar room upstairs. There was always a video in the background like background music. These tended to be home-made videos rather than the pre-recorded sort. One showed a woman tied to a bed in a spread-eagle fashion on her back. A very large dildo was being used on her. She seemed distressed and not just acting distressed. They looked like involuntary flinches of pain. Kathryn Halliday recognized the room as the top back room at Cromwell Street because of some of the furniture and by the wallpaper which she had come to know. Other videos showed other girls being subjected to various forms of sexual abuse. There was one of a girl with fair hair being whipped and tied to the bed by a man. There were others of girls being tied to beds with chains and straps. Kathryn was tied to the bed on many occasions herself and was then either blindfolded or stopped from seeing by having Rose lying across her face. Rose straddling her. Rose was quite a big woman by then and very strong. Most times she went in the evening it would end up with Kathryn having her hands and feet tied. It felt like dressing-gown cord. They blindfolded her several times and forced a pillow over her face twice. Fred would watch rather than take part. He took part sometimes, but not very often at all. He would be downstairs with the children. Ro
se threatened her and taunted her and pressed what felt like cold metal against her skin. On one occasion Fred used a bullwhip so hard it left marks. ‘They got more and more violent. They wanted to do more and more all the time. They pushed me beyond my personal limits, and they hurt me … Rose West wanted me to do things to her which were very, very aggressive … She wanted orgasms all the time, like a machine.’

  One night after she had been going to the house for about two months they took Kathryn across the landing into the top room at the front of the house which she had never been in before. It was quite darkly decorated. She saw a four-poster bed with large hooks in the pelmet, and then she was shown the contents of the wardrobe. There was a cat-o’-nine-tails. Whips. Clamps and whips and harnesses and leather and rubber masks and latex and leather suits. There were clothes on hangers. All dark and black and sexy clothes. Little bits of lingerie like slips. Like nylon. Masks and hoods. In a suitcase in the wardrobe were black rubberized masks and suits. These smelled sweaty. Suits all-in-one with two little slits for the nose and some with no nose holes at all. They were giving off that body smell and had obviously been worn. Some zips across the mouth. She was frightened. ‘They played with me and the idea that I was frightened. They got their thing from seeing other people frightened.’ She never went into that room again and soon stopped going along to number 25 to see Rose and Fred. She ignored the raps on the window. Fred had the keys to her door. In March 1989 she moved out of Cromwell Street altogether.

  *

  Stephen West was going to be sixteen in August 1989 and his present from his mother that year was the news that she wanted him out. ‘Got a good present for you this year – I want you out.’ He was told, ‘You’re on your own, feller. Sling your hook. You’re out.’ And one day when he came home his things were packed and waiting by the door and he was told that from now on he was living in Mrs Taylor’s house on the other side of the church. He was given Anne Marie’s and Chris Davis’s old room. He recognized it from the cork tiles around the fire and he was out and living with Enid Taylor.

  At the beginning of the year, in March, a teacher at Stephen’s school had suspected that he might be being physically abused and had reported his suspicions to the NSPCC. Stephen had a series of meetings with people from the NSPCC between March and May, but they didn’t take it any further because Stephen insisted he was fine, he was OK and he asked them not to.

  Stephen had learned to cope with the way they were having to live at home by turning off when he was in the house and mentally shutting down. ‘I started my mind again’, he says, ‘when I was fifteen.’ It had always been going to happen. It was bound to happen. But when they saw Stephen starting to become alert to what was happening around him, obviously his mother and father took it as a warning. Like Heather, Stephen had never been comfortable with the idea of having three half-caste sisters. When people used to ask him about them he never knew what to say. He knew there was talk. And he started playing up at home, making remarks to Tara and Rosemary and Lucyanna about their colour. Abusive, hurtful remarks that would make them cry. Starting fights and making them cry. And they used that as the reason to get rid of him and make him move out. He had been running away anyway. Disappearing for a week, two weeks. He was told he could come back in if he wanted for one hour every Sunday. That would be his family time. An hour and then fuck off out of it.

  May – who had started spelling her name ‘Mae’ by this time after years of being mocked at school – also moved out of Cromwell Street in 1989. She had a boyfriend, Rob, and they moved two streets over to Belgrave Road. Mae had been sharing the back part of the cellar with Rob. Stephen had been sleeping in the front part with his girlfriend, Nicki, and they had put a curtain up between them. Mae didn’t sleep with Rob for the first weeks he was in the house. He was her boyfriend and she liked him. But in many ways she had brought him in for protection. Ever since Heather disappeared, Mae had become the main object of her father’s attentions. He was still grabbing and touching her. Pursuing her and using his body to pin her to the floor. Spying on her through holes in the floor. He carried pictures of her wearing only her underwear. He forced her to watch videos of her mother having sex with other men. He would grab her and take her bra off and fondle her. When she found a boyfriend they almost dragged him into the house to live. ‘How was she?’ her father would ask Rob in the mornings. He insisted on lending them videos. There was no way you could refuse. When Rob and Mae moved out she was told she could come round only on a Sunday and she had to hand over the keys to the house. Once they had left home, if they returned, it was the rule that they were not to talk to any of the other children, who ranged in age from six to eleven in 1989: Lucyanna, the youngest, then Rosemary, Barry, Louise, Tara. Three of them their ‘love children’; two of them Fred’s own.

  *

  There was a phone on a bracket shelf in the living room and when he was waiting for work Fred would spend the whole time pacing backwards and forwards in front of it. He was always waiting for work. He would put his boilersuit on even on a Sunday and if there was no job lined up for him to go to he would start pacing. Drove them all crazy. Backwards and forwards. Up and down. Pulling on a roll-up. Wearing a hole in the carpet. Then the phone would ring and he’d be off. A roofing job in Birmingham, Bournemouth, Nottingham, it didn’t matter. The phone would ring and he’d run for it and he’d be out the door. Derek Thomson still says it at least once a week now: ‘If only Fred West was here.’ An excellent electrician. A very good decorator. Brilliant worker.

  Sometimes Stephen would go off on weekend jobs with him. Sometimes Rose. It was the only time she got to see Fred. But Fred’s employers at Carsons Contractors, the Thomsons, had to put a stop to that because their customers didn’t like it. Their customers were well-to-do people in nice houses in the Cotswolds and they had complaints. When Fred had come for an interview for the job as a general builder he had turned up with his wife and kids. They had sat outside in the security van-turned-minibus while he was being interviewed in the house. They gave every appearance of being a normal working family, and he had got the job. He told them he could do all sorts of things that they didn’t necessarily believe, but give him his due he basically could. He could turn his hand to everything, not always to perfection, but he could get around it. He had difficulty reading and writing. But he would make notes and his wife would write them up, with the extras always in red. His wife filled in his time-sheets and his claims for incidental expenses which he’d get reimbursed for and which were always written neatly in red.

  The Thomsons had a contract to look after a home for the autistic in Minchinhampton, seven miles from Gloucester. And in the first four years he worked for them, from 1988 to 1992, it was Fred’s job to be on twenty-four-hour call to do odd jobs and emergency repairs at Stroud Court, where he had keys to all the buildings. Stroud Court was an old and rambling building with an underground network of passages, corridors and cellars. And Fred would use any excuse to drive there late at night. He would often be discovered wandering the narrow passageways and underworkings at Stroud Court apparently locked in some kind of reverie. He could stay down there for hours just wandering and never offer an explanation or feel the need to offer one. He couldn’t sleep. He was always getting up in the middle of the night to sort his tools or see to his van or go round the patio in an apparently zombie-like way, pushing a broom. He was prey at any given moment to puncture or depression and to patterns of compulsive behaviour. It was a problem for her to get him to bed. He was a bad sleeper. He had problems sleeping.

  Apart from when she went with him to unblock a drain or fix some guttering, Rose and Fred never saw each other. He was forty-nine in 1990 – coming up to the half-ton; she was thirty-seven. They weren’t old. But he wasn’t interested in making any kind of social life. All the social life he needed was in the house, watching Rose; filming Rose and watching her and listening to her going with women and other men. He would put her out on at least t
wo nights a week to go with West Indian men. They had their video ritual while she was dressing, then he would drive her to them and expect her to stay away all night. She wasn’t to have any life apart from the family and his other men. He always brought the subject up. It was a daily thing he talked about. This very, very strong persuasiveness and reasons why she should. He could be very persuasive. ‘I provide you and the children with a good home and all the money I earn goes to you. But you can’t do something for your husband.’ He could talk the birds out of the trees. And so she would go on doing it for their marriage. For her husband.

  He would never take her out. She had black men to take her out. Take her to pubs and buy her drinks and bring her presents of sex toys and clothes. Little bits of lingerie like slips. Like nylon. The black men were well aware that in having sex with Rose they were doing Fred a favour. They never paid. Only the white men paid. She would go through her book and look a black friend up sometimes and invite him around. Which was all right. But they were Fred’s. They could be relied on to report back to Fred what had happened. As if he controlled them the way he controlled everything. She did like sex. But she liked other things such as music. She liked country and western. She liked a change of scenery sometimes and a chance to meet some different people who weren’t totally answerable to Fred. Controlled by Fred and having their strings jerked by him, telling him where they were going and for how long and when they would be back. Rose had had her sterilization operation reversed at the end of 1989 and very soon afterwards had become ill with a pregnancy in a fallopian tube. It had left her house-bound for a while and depressed. She told Fred that she wanted more than just going out with other men. There had to be more to life. There was no baby on the way. The younger children were growing. She started to think of a life away from the house.