Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  Some time in the night Caroline managed to make herself upright and got over to the window. Outside had become a place that seemed not even to exist. There was no way of opening the window with her hands bound behind her back. She thought of throwing herself through it, but quickly dismissed that idea. So there she was. Her mouth was still filled with cottonwool. A figure at a window.

  Very early in the morning, before it was light, there was a knock at the door and he jumped up and pulled on a sweater and his trousers and went to answer it. Caroline could hear voices and she knew that the door to the room where she was being kept had been left slightly open because light from the stairs was coming in through it. It was her chance to bring help by attempting to make some noise. She tried to yell out, but Rose immediately grabbed a pillow and smothered the yell with it. She pressed it down over her face very hard and went on pressing.

  Caroline struggled with her but she could feel herself beginning to pass out and so she played dead. Rose didn’t stop until Fred had got rid of the visitor. He took the pillow off her face and his face was twisted with anger. Now Caroline thought she really was going to die. They were both very angry. He shook her about and they were both cursing her and calling her bitch. Rose looked furious. Caroline thought she was going to get another beating, but instead he said something about keeping her in the cellar and letting their black friends use her and then burying her under the paving stones of Gloucester.

  After that, Rose went to see to the children and Caroline was left alone with him. He stood over her as she lay crying on the mattress. He was speaking softly to her to hush, then he removed his trousers and raped her. It was all over in seconds. He raped her but he didn’t ejaculate. He had done it while Rose was out of the room and it didn’t even last long, just a few thrusts and it was over and suddenly Fred was crying and begging her not to tell Rose because she was there for Rose’s pleasure, not his, and she would be angry with him. He pulled his trousers on and sat next to her down there on the mattress. She was sobbing. He looked at her with tears in his eyes and said he was so sorry for what they had done to her but that she mustn’t tell Rose what he just did. He said that Rose was pregnant, she had just fallen, and that was the explanation for what had occurred. He said, ‘When Rose gets pregnant her lesbian urges get stronger and she has to have a woman and she really wanted you.’ He said, ‘If you promise not to tell anybody what happened and come back, I know it will make Rose happy.’ He said, ‘Why don’t you come back here to live and everything will be OK?’ He was crying as he said all this. Caroline felt almost sorry for him now. She couldn’t believe the change. She said, ‘I promise I won’t tell Rose if you don’t kill me’, and it was a deal.

  Fred left her in the room alone, still gagged and bound, and went to pass on the good news to Rose. Minutes later they were both back happy and smiling. Rose was very happy that Caroline was going to move back in and gave her a hug.

  She was allowed a bath. Rose helped her to get the gum from the taped gag out of her hair. Her hair had come out in handfuls when they had removed the tape and it was all floating in the bath. They changed the water and Caroline bathed a second time. Gum had stuck to the side of her face. It was sticking to the downy hair around her jaw. Her head was hurting from the punches she had taken to the side of the head when he knocked her out in the car. There was puffiness around her cheeks and some grazing. She had weals at the top of her inner thighs and bruising on her legs and arms. She had rope burns on her back. She couldn’t remember but thought at one time she might have been tied to a chair.

  When the light came, and the day began to take on the appearance of a normal day, Caroline behaved like nothing had happened and helped with the housework and the children and went with them to the laundryette on Eastgate Street nearly opposite Barton Baths.

  *

  By eleven thirty that morning she was walking. She started walking and kept walking and she didn’t dare to look back. She avoided Eastgate Street and Westgate Street and the busy shopping area around the Cross and kept instead to the noisy main road along Bruton Way, past the main railway station at Gloucester, where there was less pedestrian traffic. Some memory of walking. She kept her head down and walked.

  She had crossed Westgate Bridge and was heading in the direction of the roundabout at Highnam when she became aware of a car pulling up alongside her. Her heart was beating so fast. She kept staring ahead. At the ground and straight ahead. She was sure it must be Fred. She heard a man’s voice offering her a lift. ‘Carol, do you want a lift?’ It wasn’t a familiar voice but it wasn’t Fred West either. She stopped and turned to see that it was a Mini and that the driver was the brother of a friend of hers from the Forest. She said, ‘Yeh. I do. Thanks’, and got in the car but hardly addressed another word to him after that. She didn’t tell the man what had happened to her because she could hardly believe it herself.

  One minute they were committing their perverted acts on her, the next bringing her mugs of tea. One minute she was convinced she was going to die in unbelievable, horrible circumstances, bringing shame as well as grief to her family, and the next she was helping to look after the babies, helping Anna-Marie get off to school, tidying around and hoovering the floor. It was while she was doing the hoovering that Ben Stanniland, the hippy lodger from upstairs, had looked into the room where all of it had gone on and where she now was with Rose. Afterwards, nobody would be able to understand why she hadn’t grabbed this as her chance. Why she hadn’t run to Ben and begged him to call the police. Even many years later she would have people asking her the same thing. What they could never understand was how spaced and out of it Ben and the other lodgers there were.

  Caroline might not have been a dopehead herself, but she knew dopeheads. She knew what they were like. Whaaaaa’? She had a dopehead brother. And she knew that if something had happened and her dopehead brother walked in and she told him she had been attacked, he’d be like: Whaaaaa’? And by that time you’re dead.

  Same with Ben and the other boys at Cromwell Street. They were so stoned. So laid back they were horizontal, was that what they used to say? She didn’t have to imagine their reaction to her turning round and saying, ‘Look, they’ve kept me here overnight, I’ve been raped, you’ve got to get me out.’ She didn’t have to imagine; she knew. She knew it wouldn’t have been, ‘Let’s get her out of here!’, like they do in the films. Let’s get you out of here! It would have been: ‘What you on about? What happened?’ You would have had to have explained it all. And by that time you’re dead.

  One thing she knew: she had to rely on herself. She definitely had to rely on herself. Most of her life she had had that attitude around her: ‘Oh, you can get on with it yourself.’ She knew for a fact, if and when Alf found out what had happened to her, what his attitude was going to be: don’t get the police involved; she’ll get over it. He never wanted the police around. There had always been that attitude towards her anyway, all the way up through her life. ‘Oh, just get on with it. Take no notice. You’ll be all right.’

  Fred helped get the bags of washing and the youngest two, Heather and baby May, into the car, and they drove to the laundryette opposite the Barton Street swimming pool. Barton Baths was part of the recently opened leisure centre. It was glass-sided and situated on a corner so that the swimmers were visible from the street. People up on the diving boards and children splashing and a nice light, high, openly designed place. The baths and the launderette were only a three-minute walk from Cromwell Street, but they had the washing and the children, so they took the car. It was only twelve hours since Caroline had been beaten and gagged in it, but she tried to keep that from her mind and having the children helped. All that was holding her together was the thought of getting out of the house.

  When they got there he couldn’t park up, so Rose and Caroline took the children and the bags of washing in alone. He drove off either to do a job or go and see somebody, leaving Caroline with Rose and Heather and May. Sh
e didn’t want to alert Rose by just running away so she told her she would have to go home now and get her things and that she’d be back. She turned and walked out and pulled her collar up and kept walking. She didn’t dare to look round in case Fred passed her in the car.

  It was lunchtime when she got back to Cinderford. The friend’s brother who had given her the lift dropped her at Northwood Close and she sneaked into the Bradleys’ house at the bottom of the cul-de-sac.

  It was now Thursday and Doreen Bradley was at home because she wasn’t working. Five months had passed since their return from Portsmouth, and Caroline felt that Doreen was somebody she could go to because of the experiences they had lived through there together.

  Not much was said. She was exhausted. She had been awake all night and was tired and confused. Mentally battered. She was stiff and aching. She was bothered by the idea that it must have been her own fault; that she must have done something to give them the wrong impression. Even with somebody who knew her as well as Doreen, she felt she was hiding a dirty little secret. Holding the dirty thing back. She felt ugly and ashamed.

  She quite soon fell asleep and stayed in a deep sleep in Doreen’s room right through to the next day. The next day was Friday, and Caroline slipped into her own house a few doors away along the street when nobody was about. She knew that the details of what had happened to her would upset her mother, and she didn’t want her to know what the full details were. She stayed in bed through the afternoon and into the evening, but then it couldn’t be put off any longer. As soon as her mother saw the state of her, she called the police.

  An episode in Caroline’s childhood had brought home to her how determined Alf was not to get the police involved in their affairs. When she was aged about nine or ten she had gone into hospital to have her appendix removed, and a small girl she was sharing the room with had died. They had taken her away from the ward to be operated on and brought her back, and then suddenly there were nurses and doctors and a nurse pulled the curtains shut around Sarah’s bed. Caroline had to watch the Gloucester Carnival parade, which was just then coming past their windows, the windows of the Gloucester Royal Infirmary where they were patients, from another room.

  A few weeks later a man Caroline recognized as Sarah’s father came to Cinderford to ask her some questions, and Alf Harris sent her to her room while the man explained why he was there. It seemed that he suspected that his daughter had been given something to eat before her operation in spite of the ‘Nil by Mouth’ sign over her bed. And Caroline told Alf that yes, that was right, Sarah had been screaming and yelling that she was hungry all night and the nurses in the end had given her some squash and a couple of biscuits to shut her up. She told Alf this up in her room – the room she shared with her mother and her two sisters – and he had said, no, to shut it, to tell the man nothing, he wasn’t going to have the police coming round. He didn’t want the police up there. And she had done what he said. She had gone down and told the man, who was very upset and angry, which scared her, that she had seen and heard nothing because she had been asleep at the time.

  And, as Caroline had suspected, Alf took the same position again now. Don’t get the police involved. She’ll get over it. Meaning: she must have asked for it. She was asking for it hitch-hiking on her own. Betty usually gave way to Alf in these situations. Usually she sided with Alf. But not this time. She put her coat on and went down to the phone.

  Fred West was arrested leaving work at Permali’s at seven thirty on Saturday evening. Police Constable Kevan Price and Detective Sergeant John Pearce, two officers from Gloucester Central police station, had been around to Cromwell Street at lunchtime, but found nobody in. It was almost seventy-two hours since the Wests had picked up Caroline Raine hitching outside Tewkesbury when Price and Pearce intercepted him coming off the late shift at Permali’s and cautioned him and took him for questioning down to Gloucester Central nick. It came as naturally to Fred West to call it this as to the two policemen, because he wasn’t a stranger to the place. He was no stranger to Price and Pearce who, in addition to their other duties, functioned as the drug squad in Gloucester, and they were no strangers to him.

  Of course he wasted no time in telling them about Caroline and the two lodgers. And Tony the boyfriend from Tewkesbury who slept with her at Cromwell Street once a week. And then there was the sailor who’d been and given her a good seeing to just a few weeks before. He denied the charges of indecent assault. She had stayed with him and Rose at their house on Wednesday night, but only at her own what’s-her-name. You know. She had got stuck hitching through Gloucester and had come knocking at their door and asked to stay. Request. She had slept with them and left the next day. The three of them had slept together.

  ‘Look, to put it right,’ he said, ‘I kicked her out ’cause the blokes in the top flat was fucking her and I didn’t want that in my house ’cause I was going to buy the place. That’s why I told her to pack her bags and go. She’s saying this now to get her own back on me and Rose.’

  This was a lie of course, but there was a truth at the heart of it. It would have appeared a small truth then, if it was noticed at all. But it looks like a bigger truth now. Fred West was desperate to stay the owner of 25 Cromwell Street. He had worked a lot on the house in the three months they had been there and he was fiercely committed to it becoming their home. The abuse of Caroline Raine was the first exercise of the new freedoms it had brought him. In time to come it would become apparent that there were deeper-seated reasons than the house’s practical advantages to explain its importance to him. And there were some hints now. Most of the questions were about what had been done to Caroline Raine. Many of his answers were about how she had become a threat to his ownership of the house.

  ‘All I want is to buy the house and settle down’ was his reply when he was asked whether it was true that his wife ‘had sucked Carol Raine’s breasts and private parts’ after he had tied her up. He went on: ‘Nothing like that happened. She is making it all up. The only thing is that some coloured blokes did it and she’s trying to blame Rose and me.’

  At ten forty-five that night, Price and Pearce, together with a woman officer, WPS Digweed, went to interview Rose West at Cromwell Street. Many years later, she would claim that Caroline Raine had been her first experience with a woman. ‘With his persuasive nature, Fred did persuade me that Caroline had agreed to try it out. I told him I didn’t believe Caroline was that way inclined, but still I allowed him to. He was acting as a middle-man between the two of us … He was just so good at talking, making excuses, making promises … I was a young girl. I realized I’d been conned into this. I wanted it over with … I knew it was wrong to force anybody to do anything.’ Fred had been wanting to ‘put her’ with a woman and she had eventually caved in.

  But ‘Don’t be fucking daft. What do you think I am?’ Rose West said on the Saturday night in December 1972, when she was asked if the allegations made by Caroline Raine against her were true. When they asked if she had any objections if they searched the car or the house, she replied, ‘Please your bloody self.’

  When they searched the Ford Popular, which was parked between the church and the front door at the right side of the house, they found a button from Caroline’s coat under the nearside door. They removed a partly used roll of parcel tape from the rear living room.

  Caroline had been brought to Gloucester and interviewed and photographed at the Central police station earlier in the day. It was only after she was finished with the doctor, forensics, the photographer, etcetera, and she was walking across the car park to go home that she was asked by the policeman she was with if any penetration had occurred during her assault by Fred West. ‘Oh yeh,’ she said, ‘but it was just a second. It didn’t hurt.’ She went back in and made another statement.

  At nine o’clock the next morning, the Sunday, Kevan Price travelled out to Cinderford to re-interview her. PC Price was from New Zealand. Or South Africa. Somewhere. He had an accen
t. Caroline didn’t take to him. His attitude from the beginning seemed to be that she was a scrubber who had asked for everything that had come her way. That’s how it looked to her anyway. ‘You knew the lodgers, didn’t you? You were into it, weren’t you? You were no innocent. You were into this. You just complained.’ Price was saying it, but she knew it was what her stepfather, to name just one person in Cinderford, thought. That she had been a willing party to what happened and had decided to complain when it got a bit rough. Shagbag. Slut. She got this from her brother, Phillip, her full blood relation, when she saw him in pubs or whatever up the town. Under his breath and accompanied by a mean look.

  ‘You like your sex, don’t you? Don’t tell me you weren’t loving it.’ He kept hitting the same note over and over. There was quite a lot in this vein from Kevan Price.

  And it worked. Caroline was nervous about having to go to court because she knew that her mother would want to be with her and she didn’t want her to hear the horrible details of what had gone on or the fact that she had had sex with so many men in such a short space of time. The Wests would each plead guilty to the two lesser charges of indecent assault and actual bodily harm if she dropped the more serious charge of rape. Their guilty pleas meant that she wouldn’t have to be in court.

  The case was heard by Gloucester magistrates on Friday, 12 January 1973. Fred West and Rose West were fined £25 on each count, a total of £100, and advised to seek psychiatric help. Fred West bowed to the bench and clasped his wife’s hand. He was thirty-one. She was just over eighteen. It was her first conviction. She was pregnant for the third time. She just went on staring straight ahead.

  An article appeared in the next day’s Gloucester Citizen, with the headline ‘City Pair Stripped and Assaulted Girl’. ‘We were asked by the prosecution not to put the girl in the stands,’ he was quoted saying, ‘so we pleaded guilty.’ The article was cut out by her and kept and became one of the first items in the archive of their life together which would be found many years later, boxed and stored in the attic at 25 Cromwell Street. Part of an obsessive, and more or less exhaustive, collection of holiday postcards, birthday cards, Mother’s Day cards, hospital appointment cards, bills, idle scribblings, faded photographs, summonses, hire-purchase agreements, prison letters, love notes, receipts, dockets, brochures. A whole life – their life as a couple – preserved in scraps of paper. A museum of themselves.