Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  He didn’t like it and didn’t want to listen. He would hit her every time she tried to bring it up. There were fights. Constant arguments. Fist fights in front of the children and endless bickering. Until she threatened to stop seeing the men he wanted her to see unless he relaxed his grip on the leash just a little; stopped reining her in all the time. She noticed in the paper that they had started having singles nights at the Bristol Hotel on the Bristol Road where Fred used to go to watch the stag films and strippers on Sunday afternoons when he was a teenager. They used to have the blue films on a Sunday and Fred used to ride in on his grey Triumph, his small body at full stretch astride the big frame and the massive tank. The Bristol always had some entertainment going on of one sort and another and she read the ad out to him. It was summer. She could walk there across the park. It was going to be country and western. That was her favourite. It was only the Bristol. So, although it creased him to, he allowed it. He let her. She went on her own and she had a really good time. The barman, Alan, was really nice. And the landlady, Yvonne, was really friendly. She was made to feel really welcome. And after a couple of drinks her new friend Yvonne introduced her to her cellarman Steve who wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea – he had bright ginger hair and sticking-out ears and was known by the nickname Lurch. But Rose liked him. And he liked Rose. And once Yvonne introduced them it was obvious they seemed to hit it off straightaway. It was a singles night, after all, their second or third of the summer. So: mission accomplished.

  Rose became a regular at the Bristol not just on Thursday nights but on other nights of the week and was soon on first-name terms with Yvonne and Alan and a few of the others, and she would often go to Steve’s room with him. They would go out for a stroll around the block or she would slip off to Steve’s room upstairs with him. Needless to say, Fred wasn’t slow to spot the change in her, and he didn’t like it. He was jealous. He was boiling. ‘Fred’s got it on him,’ Rose would tell her friends at the Bristol, who knew she lived with Fred, her crabby brother, and Fred’s children. With Fred you could see it slowly build up. The look in his eyes. It would be a general build-up and then – watch out. She started going to parties and country-and-western dances. They argued almost every day. She was taking the family money and pissing it away – spending it on her friends. Couldn’t she see? They were milking her. Most days he’d kick her or hit her. So to stop it she stopped going to the Bristol and stopped seeing Steve. But she also stopped seeing Fred’s men at the house. If he wouldn’t agree to her doing anything she wanted, then it would all stop. So it did for a while. But she knew it wouldn’t be long until he was back to his other men. Back to his persuading. And of course she was right. To get her revenge she took a flat in Stroud Road without telling him in March 1991. A place of her own. Although it was more a statement of her separateness than somewhere to go. She intended him to find out eventually. She wanted him to know. And he found out what she had been up to when the doorbell went one day and Fred answered it and found himself talking to a man who was looking for a Mandy West of that address. The Mandy who had been renting a flatlet from him in his house in Stroud Road for five months and had disappeared leaving all her belongings behind, including a new hoover in its box. Being the kind of combative character Rose was, she always felt the need to offer something back. Something to indicate that she understood the game they were playing. Something to show that she was not quite the doormat to wipe his feet on that, even after twenty years, he might sometimes suppose she was. He had beaten her up when she came in late from a party at the Bristol on New Year’s morning in 1991. Ripped her clothes and laid into her and pummelled her black and blue. And the flat in Stroud Road had been her reply. He went up the wall, and that pleased her. It was a small victory, and he was sore about it for months. He retreated into the world of his blue books and his sound-box and his other compulsive behaviours. Sweeping the patio in a set pattern. Chasing the television news. He got up in the night to wander the cellar corridors at Stroud Court and grease his tools. He started seeing crashes on his way to work at Carsons Contractors every morning – flowing blood, legs and arms floating about: he’d hear the report of an accident on Severn Sound and talk about it as if he’d been there. He let his hair go into a bush.

  In March 1992 Fred’s father died. He had been living with his youngest son Doug and his wife at Moorcourt Cottage in Much Marcle where the children had all grown up. Walter West was seventy-eight and Fred hadn’t seen him for quite a long time. Fred hadn’t spoken to his brother John since the late eighties following a falling out over money. And he went on ignoring John’s messages that his father was ill in hospital and kept asking for him: ‘Fred hasn’t been to see me.’ Where was he? John West called Fred on the Wednesday and he said he’d go in on the Friday. When his father died on the Saturday, Fred still hadn’t been. There were drinks after the funeral in Marcle village hall. Rose and Anne Marie went with Fred. John told his brother that as far as he was concerned he didn’t like the way he treated their family. His mother was dead, his father was dead now and that was it over and he’d never speak to him again.

  *

  By the summer of 1992, Heather had been gone for five years. Mae and Stephen were hurt that Heather had never been in touch. They had always been so close. Five years was a long time and they did worry about her. But every time they brought the subject of Heather up at home their mum would tell them that if Heather wanted to contact them she would contact them. She knew where they lived. Mae and Stephen filled in a Salvation Army form for missing people. They wrote to Cilla Black at Surprise! Surprise!, the TV show where she brings people together who haven’t seen each other for years. And they wrote to another TV show called Missing, which tries to find missing people. They never heard anything back. When they told their father that they were going to report Heather as missing to the police, he sat them down and told them that Heather was involved in credit-card fraud and that if they went to the police it would be like grassing her up. They had been brought up to resent and distrust the police.

  One day at the beginning of August 1992 Stephen got a visit from some policemen at work who told him that his father had been arrested for raping one of his sisters (who for legal reasons can’t be named). His mother had been taken into custody as well for her part in what had happened. The story as Stephen pieced it together was that several weeks earlier his sister had been vaginally and anally raped by their father on three separate occasions. On the first occasion she had been ordered upstairs into the bar room in Cromwell Street. Her father had told her to carry a bag of wine bottles upstairs. He had told her to sit on the small sofa with the hand-crocheted coverlet over it and had then turned on his video camera and raped her and buggered her while she kept her eyes fixed on the television as he had ordered her to do. Two of the other children who were watching television in the family room downstairs had heard screams and shouts and had started banging on the locked door to their mother’s private part of the house but their bangings had been ignored. Their father had then been seen having long conversations with Stephen’s sister at the bottom of the garden telling her (she told them later) that he had done it wrong and would have to do it again. He hadn’t done it properly and it would cause medical problems if he didn’t finish the job. He raped her again in the upstairs Black Magic bar and this time her mother was in the house. She had gone to talk to her afterwards in the bathroom and told her what did she expect, she had been asking for it. The next morning, a Saturday, Fred West had taken his daughter with him to a place near Reading to a warehouse he was painting. As soon as they arrived he forced his daughter to have sex with him for a third time in the deserted building. It seems that he frequently wavered in his idea of himself as invulnerable and special and that those of his actions which seem most irrational and ugly had to be attempts to defend his faith in his powers. Depression would come in a flood. Sitting alone in the van at the end of the day he had patted his daughter’s thigh and said, ‘I’l
l leave it alone now.’

  At the end of the first sexual assault on her, Stephen’s sister had been told by their father, ‘You mustn’t say anything, you know, because I’ll go to prison for five years. We’ll all be split up, and you need a mum and dad at your stage of life.’ But when she had recovered enough to go back to school, the girl piece by piece told another girl, and the other girl eventually, some weeks after the rapes had happened, in a roundabout, would-be casual way told a policeman. He was the Cromwell Street community policeman and around six o’clock one summer Sunday evening in 1992 the twelve-year-old asked him, ‘What would you do if a friend was being assaulted?’ It was banter. It was an English summer evening. But then the girl told him that actually she had a friend and she was worried that her friend might have been ‘mucked about with’ by her father, who had made a video of what he was doing. The policeman made some notes in his book.

  Four days later, on Thursday, 6 August 1992, Rose West opened the door at Cromwell Street just before nine o’clock in the morning. Fred had already left for work. It was the school holidays and the younger children were in their pyjamas in the living room watching television. There was a team of two detectives and four policewomen and one of them explained that they had a warrant to search the premises for pornographic material following a serious allegation of child abuse. Rose immediately threw a fit. She had physically wrestled women police officers out of her house in the past when they had turned up without a warrant to make inquiries about the activities of Anne Marie. ‘And good fuckin’ riddance!’ Her instinct was to go on the attack. It was a small army. And she started kicking and lashing out and had to be physically restrained by one of the men grabbing her and twisting her arm up her back. She was arrested and taken to Gloucester police station and the children were dressed and taken to a local-authority home near by to be introduced to the team of social workers who would be looking after them. ‘Don’t you dare say anything’ had been their mother’s last words to them as she was taken away. The main aim was to find the video cassette that had apparently been made of Fred West raping his daughter, and the search team were very thorough: they looked in vacuum-cleaner bags and in the freezer as well as the more obvious places, and they would search behind the skirting boards and under the floorboards before they were through.

  They didn’t catch up with Fred West until later in the afternoon. He was arrested in the garden of his employers, Derek and Wendy Thomson, in Water Lane, near Bisley, near Stroud, seven miles south of Gloucester, around half past two and there was no resistance with him. He didn’t struggle or try to fight them off. Their elderly customers loved Fred. He was very kind to old people. If they had a problem, Fred would sort it out. They were always asking for Fred. ‘Nothing you need worry about,’ he said. ‘Nothing you should worry about.’ It was a lovely day in August. Another lovely day. Slightly humid. The birds that Derek bred were singing in the aviary. A lovely day in high summer in one of the most beautiful places in England. He was almost affable as they took him away. ‘Absolute rubbish,’ he scoffed when they told him what the charge was once he was in the car. ‘Lies, all lies … I never touched her.’

  Under questioning at Gloucester police station throughout the afternoon and into the evening he remained composed. ‘Me and my wife leads an active sex life … We make love every night, I mean perhaps twice, it just depends on what happens,’ he said. ‘I mean, you’ll find harnesses, you’ll find bloody God knows what in my home that we make up and things we do. You’ll find tapes where we’ve been out in the van, out in the lanes, making love, and we’re not frightened to show it. We enjoy our sex life, but not with our children … I mean, we got what we want. We don’t mess with our kids. We’ve got everything.’ But the officers searching 25 Cromwell Street had found photographs of two of the West children posing naked and home-made videos of Rose West having sex with both women and men. They were part of a haul of ninety-nine amateur and commercial pornographic videos that they had brought away, along with an extensive collection of rubberized suits and masks, a rice flail and a bullwhip, vibrators and dildos. The other visual evidence would also eventually include photographs of the erect penises of a number of naked men and Rose West sitting astride the gearstick of a car. The following day, Friday, 7 August, Lucyanna, Rosemary, Barry, Louise and Tara were made the subject of Emergency Protection Orders and removed to local-authority care. Their parents were forbidden to make contact with them and weren’t even told where they were.

  Rose West had been held at the police station overnight. The first thing she did when she got back to Cromwell Street on the Friday morning was pick up the phone and warn Anne Marie to keep her mouth shut to the police. ‘If you think anything of me or your dad, especially your dad, you’ll say nothing and keep your mouth shut.’ It was eight o’clock. At the same time as Anne Marie was talking on the phone to Rose, Detective Constable Hazel Savage was ringing the doorbell at her house on the White City estate. Hazel Savage had been in the police force in Gloucester for nearly thirty years. She had had a number of run-ins with Anne Marie in her knife-carrying, tearaway teenage days. In 1966, when she was a WPC, she had brought Rena, Anne’s mother, back to Gloucester from Glasgow to stand trial for breaking into caravans on the Watermead site. She knew Fred West well and over twenty years had become familiar with the house in Cromwell Street where he lived. Hazel told Anne Marie about the accusations being made by her half-sister against their father. And for the first time in her life Anne Marie found herself opening up. He had done the same thing to her, she told Hazel Savage, when she was eight, and it had continued until she was fifteen and had run away from home. Her stepmother had also been involved. She accompanied DC Savage and another officer to Tuffley police station and for a large part of the rest of the day found herself telling what seemed, even to her, the person who was telling them, the most barbaric, unbelievable things.

  Her father meanwhile, in another interview room in another police station just two or three miles away, was accusing his children of ‘ganging up’ on him and making it all up. He suggested that his daughter was making the allegations against him because, among other reasons, she was jealous that he was paying more attention to one of her younger sisters than to her. ‘It’s all made up,’ he said. ‘She copied it from somewhere … There ain’t one blade of truth in it as far as I’m concerned.’

  When Stephen went to see his father towards the end of the Friday, he found him in a bad way. He was worked up and crying in a way Stephen had never seen him cry before and seemed scared to death. He was crying his heart out and saying that he’d done stupid things at night when they were in bed. At the same time swearing that he hadn’t done anything and God-knows-what-else and that the police were trying to set him up. And he almost convinced Stephen that that was the case. But Stephen knew it wasn’t. He had had a chance to talk to his sister and she had told him what he believed was the truth. Knowing what he did about his father and wishing he didn’t, he knew it had to be true.

  His father said, ‘They’ve got medical evidence that I touched [your sister], but I haven’t touched her, it was one of her boyfriends.’ And Stephen said, ‘Well, I doubt it, she’s only [a schoolgirl], Dad.’ And his dad said, ‘No, c’mon, it is one of them. But they’re going to have me for it.’ He said, ‘You got to say you done it when you were a kid.’ He said, ‘I’m telling you. You’ve got to say it.’ Pleading with him. A pathetic plea. Then he got a bit nasty. ‘Look, you either do it, or I’ll kill you when I get out of here’ is basically what he was saying. His hard face now. Under his tears he put his hard face on. And Stephen said, ‘Don’t be stupid. I’m not sticking my neck out. I’ll get put in prison.’ But Fred said, ‘No, you won’t.’ He’d worked it all out. If Stephen said he was, like, twelve years old when it happened, they wouldn’t be able to touch him. The case would crumble. He had to do it. Stephen stood to leave and his dad cuddled him goodbye, another first. And as he cuddled him he said, ‘I mean it, boy
. I mean it.’ And after two days Stephen went back to the police station and sat down and gave a statement saying it was him who did it and they more or less laughed in his face. When they turned the tape off they told him they knew he was making it up. And two weeks later he thought ‘What are you doing?’ and went back and told them that, yes, they were right, and the charges against his father stood.

  Over that first weekend of 8–9 August, Mae and Stephen moved back into Cromwell Street to be with their mother who was now in the house on her own. On the Tuesday she was formally charged with ‘causing or encouraging the commission of unlawful sexual intercourse with a girl under the age of sixteen’ and with ‘cruelty to a child’. She spent the night in the cells and the next morning appeared at Gloucester Magistrates Court where she was granted bail on condition that she did not communicate with her younger children, her stepdaughter, or her husband. She returned to Cromwell Street early on Wednesday afternoon and on Wednesday night washed down forty-eight Anadin tablets with several drinks and had to be rushed to Gloucester Royal Hospital in the early hours of the morning to have her stomach pumped. Mae and Stephen found her slumped on the sofa in the extension living room, and to Mae she looked old and frail and nothing like Mum. It was as if all the energy had drained from her body.