Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  Fred wasn’t told what had happened to Rose until some time later. He didn’t find out what Rose had tried to do until he was sent to a bail hostel in Birmingham in October where Rose was finally allowed to visit him. By then Mae, thinking she was doing what all the family wanted, had given a statement to the police saying her father was a brilliant father who would never do any of the things he was being accused of doing. She had had a secret meeting with her sister who had been raped and they had agreed that to keep the family together they would both lie to the police. The evidence removed from Cromwell Street had been enough to ensure that the younger children were never going to be allowed to return to live with their parents again. But Mae thought that if the charges were dropped her brother and all her sisters would be able to come back and pick up their lives where they left off. So she said her dad was a brilliant dad and couldn’t be persuaded to say any bad thing against him. And also by then Anne Marie had retracted the statement that she had given over so many hours to Hazel Savage and which had cost her so much pain. She was scared. She had got frightened. She knew that neither her father nor Rose could get at her half-brother and her half-sisters who were in the care of the local authority. But what about her own two children? ‘I knew who Fred and Rose could get at,’ Anne Marie wrote in her book about her life. ‘And I knew they wouldn’t hesitate to do it … So I retracted my statement, saying it was all a figment of my imagination. I claimed I had lied.’

  She’d lied. She had dreamed it. Anne Marie and Chris Davis had separated by then. But when he found out about her withdrawing her statement, knowing what he knew, Chris Davis was angry. ‘We had one helluva fight in the street about it. One fuckin’ helluva row … I wouldn’t say that she had been threatened by them. What I would say was that she was scared shitless of Fred and Rose. If they got off, she was dead. That’s how she put it … DC Savage came to see me at my mother’s. I told her if she wanted any information about what went on from 1987 onwards she better find Heather. I said Anne and me had tried to track Heather down without any success. I’d made inquiries up and down the fence. She gave me a very knowing look.’

  Rose was allowed to visit Fred at Carpenter House, his bail hostel in Birmingham. And she would take the train up to Birmingham and back two or three times a week. Sometimes Mae or Stephen would go with her. But it could be embarrassing if they did. Once they were away from the hostel and somewhere like Edgbaston reservoir, Fred and Rose would fall on the ground and start having sex with each other more or less in full public view. They would jump in a bush and start having sex and Mae and Stephen would be left standing there and half the road could see them. ‘We bought them a little tent in the end,’ Stephen says, ‘a little igloo tent, and said, “Right, fuckin’ go in there and stop embarrassing everybody, for Chrissake.”’ After one visit Rose wrote to Fred, ‘To my darling. Well, you really tired me out on Saturday, but it was a wonderful day … Remember I will love you always and everything will be alright. Goodnight sweetheart. Lots of love, Rose.’ She had drawn a large heart on the letter with an arrow through it and the words ‘Fred and Rose’. On the phone at home she started calling him ‘darling’ and ‘sweetheart’, words they had never heard her use before.

  They were finally committed for trial on the charges against them on 19 November 1992. Five days later full Care Orders were made at Bristol Crown Court in respect of the five younger children. Rose and Fred were denied access unless the children themselves officially requested it; neither of them was to be allowed to see their children at any time without a social worker being present during a supervised visit, which they weren’t prepared to do. If it meant not seeing their children then they would rather not see their children than comply. They wanted to see their children alone and that was all they wanted. They refused to compromise.

  Fred was allowed home for Christmas. And then in recognition of his exemplary behaviour he was transferred to an even more self-regulating hostel in another part of Birmingham in March 1993. Rose still went on making trips to see him. But now under the more relaxed regime he started to sneak down to Gloucester by train every few days. He kept coming back to Cromwell Street from Birmingham and then nipping back to be there for the check they made on him every three days. He started meeting up with the younger children in Gloucester Park. He had brought them up to believe that anybody in authority was evil and wrong and would try and take you away from the family who were there to protect you and look after you. And the children started wandering back to Cromwell Street from the foster families they had been placed with in other parts of the city. They would sneak out of care to come home and he’d warn them to keep their mouths shut. He’d tell them to say nothing to nobody about anything that had gone on. If they cared anything about the family. If they loved their mam and dad and wanted to be all living at home with each other together again. They would sneak out of care to come home and he would say to them then, ‘Look, keep your mouths shut. If this goes to court, you keep your mouths shut.’ Anne Marie had already been kicked out of the family. They put the phone down on her whenever she rang. Then when it came to court they just said nothing. Said nothing happened and all this. But they still had enough evidence to keep them in care.

  Fred West was charged with three offences of rape and one of buggery. Rose West was charged with causing or encouraging the commission of unlawful sexual intercourse and cruelty to a child. When the case was heard in Gloucester on 7 June 1993 the witnesses indicated that they were not prepared to give evidence against their parents. The barrister in the case asked the children directly on the day in court if they were prepared to give evidence. They had been prepared for giving evidence by the staff in the residential children’s home where by then they were staying. But on the day they declined to go ahead with it. The decision not to proceed was taken by the judge. Not guilty verdicts were recorded. Fred and Rose hugged each other in the dock and walked out of the court and walked hand in hand with each other the short distance home.

  *

  He couldn’t believe what they had done to his house. What the bastard police had done when they’d come and ripped it apart. They’d been very thorough in their search for the tape of Fred West raping his daughter, which they had never found. Nine months later when he was being questioned on suspicion of murdering his oldest daughter, he would still be complaining how it had cost him three thousand pounds to put the house right. ‘The police have ripped my home apart so much over the last eighteen months … The people who went there in the big gangs and tore my home apart. Tore the floorboards up an’ just stuck it back down. Pushed the units on top of each other – there’s one unit upstairs, it’s cost us a fortune. There’s a massive unit upstairs, we saved up years to buy. Broke the top all off it … I’ve had enough.’

  He had to borrow off work. He had been working twenty-four hours a day to pay it back. But he had put it right. Put it compulsively back together again. First the house, then the old life of the house. Rose had signed a release allowing the police to destroy all the pornography and sexual paraphernalia that had been taken from the house, which he couldn’t believe. Could not believe. She had taken the video camera back to the Midlands Electricity Board where it had come from, saying it had cost her her children. But he soon started to make noises about wanting to start their collection up again. He started to go on again about Rose going with other men. On and on. Using emotional blackmail. He could be very, very persuasive. Pushy. He couldn’t leave it alone.

  He had gone back to working for Carsons Contractors. He was an excellent electrician. A very good decorator. The old people loved him. Carsons had taken him back on. He couldn’t get enough work.

  The extension living room was like a den or a bunker. An overground cellar. Apart from a narrow skylight at the end of the kitchen area there was no access for natural light. A window had been cut into the tongue-and-groove teak-look panelling running down the church side of the room, but it was a false window with a view only si
x inches away of the bricks of the church wall. The overhead lights were always burning in the family room and he went back to his old habit of pacing backwards and forwards in front of the small shelf with the telephone on it waiting for the phone to ring. By 1993 Carsons was affiliated to UK Maintenance, which meant he could be sent to any part of the country where there was a job to do. The phone would ring and he’d run for it and he’d be out the door. It was work that involved the possibility of call-outs at any time. Ideal work for Fred. Through the tool room into the van and away.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Hazel Savage had been around long enough to remember Rose when she had been young and thin and not wearing glasses yet and not yet a lump. Not the brass-mouthed mother of eight that she had in the cells at Gloucester police station on a humid warm night in August 1992. DC Savage had been part of the team who had arrested Rose at home that morning, and Rose was wearing what she had been able to grab before she left the house – a baggy T-shirt of grey or white or anyway a seedy, used-up colour, and leggings and sneakers. She also had a tracksuit-type top with her. The leggings had cotton knots clinging in various places as a result of indoor rummaging and domestic chores. These were the observations of Leo Goatley who hadn’t known Rose when she was slim and attractive and was meeting her that night – the night of 6 August – for the first time. Leo Goatley himself would usually have been wearing shorts and painter’s sandals on a night like that at that time of year. He did paint, and was tall and burly, occasionally bearded, rumpled and vaguely bohemian in appearance; he was an accomplished painter. But his full-time job was being a local solicitor. He was part of the duty-solicitor scheme that operated in Cheltenham and Gloucester and when he had received the call at home at half past seven he had changed into something more appropriate for a visit to the police station. The woman who was going to turn out to be more infamous than any client he could ever have expected to represent struck him on their first encounter as pleasant and housewifely if a bit sad-eyed and sallow. He would find out as time went on that she had a comical and engaging laugh and reminded him at those moments in her big glasses of the comedian Roy Hudd. Rose had eight children; Leo had nine young children and one or two of their children even had names in common. She made it absolutely clear to him that at no time had she ever sexually abused any of her children, and he wrote this down.

  DC Savage had taken an interest in the Wests at the time of the Caroline Raine case in 1972 and she had been in and out of the house over the years investigating drugs-related offences and offences involving the lodgers such as Frankie Stephens who used the cellar as a place for storing stolen goods. In Rose’s opinion, DC Savage was a vindictive, interfering cow. On one occasion in 1977 she had physically wrestled her out of the house. Whatever opinion Hazel Savage held of Rose would undoubtedly have been coloured by the materials that had been removed from Cromwell Street in the course of the day. In addition to the obscene videotapes of Rose, which she wouldn’t have had a chance to see, they included the photographs of erect penises and an album containing Polaroid pictures of anonymous vaginas.

  One of the main lines of questioning that Hazel Savage pursued in August 1992 was the whereabouts of Rose West’s oldest daughter – the oldest of all her children – Heather. There was no suspicion at this stage that Heather had been murdered. Heather’s whereabouts were of interest only because she might be able to provide additional information regarding the child-abuse investigation. It was important to know, for example, whether Heather had been sexually abused by her parents in the same way that her sister was alleging they had abused her. There was no concern as to her current safety. But from the outset DC Savage found it difficult to get any satisfactory answers from Rose. Even on basic questions such as Heather’s age and whether she had ever been reported missing, Rose seemed evasive. She had come home from doing her shopping one Friday about five years earlier ‘as per usual’ and Heather had simply gone. ‘She took whatever she had in her room,’ she said. ‘Her personal things. Clothing … She refused to know about all the normal things of living … She went off to Devon with a lady … I didn’t want her to stay here, not in those circumstances, not if she was going to practise what she was doing. She was a lesbian … And that was why she wanted to leave. She said it wasn’t good for the rest of the children.’

  DC SAVAGE ‘Are you a lesbian?’

  ROSE WEST No.

  DC SAVAGE Have you ever been a lesbian?

  ROSE WEST No.

  In another interview a few days later, Rose West told Hazel Savage that one of Heather’s friends had told her that Heather was ‘getting on with her life’. Rose went on to explain how she had spoken to Heather on the telephone and she had said she was all right. Sometimes, she said, Heather would be drunk or something. She was the only one who spoke to Heather. She refused to talk to her father.

  On the day that Anne Marie had given her statement to DC Savage at Tuffley police station, she had told her about her missing sister Heather and how some time after she disappeared she had taken the train down to Torquay to the holiday camp where she was supposed to have gone to work, looking for Heather. She had travelled the West Country looking for her, and she had even contacted the Salvation Army. When she interviewed Mae and Stephen about their father’s alleged rape of their younger sister, DC Savage told them that the one good thing that was going to come out of the investigation was that she was going to find Heather.

  But she hadn’t found Heather by the time the rape case came to trial in June 1993. She hadn’t found even a trace of Heather. No use of her National Insurance number to claim benefits in the past five years, no reported contacts with the DSS or the Inland Revenue, no visits to a hospital or a doctor or a dentist, no sightings, nothing. The only logical explanation was that Heather had changed her identity, left the country, or was dead.

  From about March 1993, when Fred West started slipping away from the bail hostel in Birmingham to spend days at home, the residential social workers looking after the West children started to pick up brief comments from them about the patio being laid at the same time Heather left home. Also about the family ‘joke’ of Heather being under the patio. If they were open with their mouths about what went on in the house, their father told them they would end up being buried under the patio like Heather. Or when the kids were going on about Heather he’d say, ‘Anybody would think I’d buried her under the patio’, and laugh. It was like a family saying. Anne Marie had mentioned this to Hazel Savage in the statement that she had subsequently withdrawn. Mae’s boyfriend, Rob Williams, taking his cue from Fred, used to say he knew which slab Heather was buried under. ‘It’s three up and nine across.’

  After the rape charges against him were dropped and he came back to Cromwell Street to live, Fred West would sometimes tell Mae and Stephen that he had had visits from Heather while he was in Birmingham or that he had seen her at a community centre in Gloucester. But Rose would just tell him to shut up. Mae and Stephen were continuing to have unofficial contact with their younger brothers and sisters without Fred and Rose knowing. And on a night when Prime Suspect 2 was being repeated on television, which Mae and Stephen knew was all about a girl that’s found under a patio and the trade in pornography, because they had seen it, they decided to test Fred and Rose by getting them to sit down and watch it with them. It was in two parts, with the news in between, and they knew he would be waiting for the news. And they sat in armchairs on either side of the sofa with Fred and Rose in the middle, but neither of them could detect any obvious reaction. The same happened when they got them to watch an episode of Brookside which was about a family murdering an abusive father and burying him under the patioed back garden. Not a flicker. Nothing. That seemed to prove to them that that’s all the rumours were: just rumours. The younger lot letting their imaginations run away with them.

  In those months Mae and Stephen did notice an uncharacteristic side to their mother. They had never known her be shy or bashful before.
But one day they were up in the bar room on the first floor messing about with the pots with their lids super-glued shut which stood on the mantelpiece, when she came in and caught them. Normally this would have triggered one of her eruptions. Instead she seemed embarrassed. ‘What is it?’ ‘Put it back.’ ‘Go on, tell us.’ ‘Just put it back.’ ‘Oh, come on.’ ‘No, I can’t tell you.’ ‘Oh, go on.’ Finally she says, ‘All right, I’ll tell you. I burn my knickers, right?’ ‘Oh, right. Is there any reason you do this?’ She almost blushed. ‘Shut up. I can’t tell you why.’ It had been on the fireplace like an ornament for ages.

  It was a side of Rose that her solicitor Leo Goatley would see on a number of occasions. The first time had been during one of the interviews between Rose and Hazel Savage in August 1992. The album containing small Polaroid close-up shots of female genitals had been produced and Rose’s reaction had been what it always was when she was invited to respond to any of the pornographic material: ‘What’s all this then – these are flippin’ private pictures. All of these items were kept in our private accommodation upstairs and away from the children.’ But Leo Goatley noticed that Rose gave him a curious look and was reluctant to look at the photographs. (Unlike the pornographic videos removed from Cromwell Street which were preserved, the obscene photographs in the possession of the police were destroyed between 1992 and the Wests being arrested for murder in 1994.)