Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  He could lift bricks out of the cellar floor and stack them and dig a hole and put the bricks back down again when the hole had been filled. The excess soil could be carried away through the old coal hatch and thrown on the garden. It was mud really. Solid clay. So it was dug out in spits. Blocks. Then he put it back in with his hands. The level of the garden had been raised by about two feet after Mrs Green’s orchard trees had been uprooted and her hen house levelled. Lorry-loads of soil had been brought in so it was easy to throw on any new dirt and soil – the solid clay that he had broken up with his hands – and incorporate it into the garden.

  The shaft in which the jumbled parts of Carol Cooper’s body had been buried was towards the middle of the room in a direct line with the coal-hole stairs. Down the coal-hole stairs and straight ahead. He was using the rear cellar room as a place to store his tools at that time and the walls were piled with pickaxes and mallets and shovels and sacks of cement and other building materials. And so he made a hole away from the walls towards the centre.

  Between the rear room, which he was using as a tool room, and the front room, which he had begun work on converting into a playroom for the children, was a narrow middle room, the same width as the staircase that went up through the centre of the house. There was a cupboard under the flight of wooden stairs that came down from the hall into the cellar and it was in there that Frank Stephens would store his chainsaws, garden implements and other ‘hot’ and stolen items. The nursery alcove where Lucy Partington was buried was also in this narrow middle room, and Thérèse Siegenthaler was buried on the left side of the children’s playroom just beyond it. The playroom was also the burial place of Shirley Hubbard, whose grave would be marked by the false fireplace wall covered in shiny foil images of Marilyn Monroe. The expression ‘the Marilyn Monroe wall’ would become a shorthand used to identify the site of the most horrifying of the many bleak Cromwell Street discoveries.

  The packing-tape masks, which would survive in the graves of all the people who were murdered, were partial masks – lengths of tape wound around the face and hair and occasionally around the top of the head and under the chin and therefore only partially obliterating; cruel and brutal but not wholly dehumanizing. But the mask that was wrapped around Shirley Hubbard’s face while she was still alive obliterated her whole face and mummified her. It covered her hair and mouth and nose and eyes and she was kept breathing and alive with the aid of two plastic tubes which were forced through holes in the brown plastic mask and up into her nostrils. Repellent white semi-opaque plastic tubes that Fred West said had been used as part of a piece of home-brewing equipment but of the kind used by him all his life for stealing and siphoning off petrol. There was all manner of things in the basement.

  Shirley Hubbard had been born Shirley Lloyd in 1959, which made her fifteen. She was from a broken home and from when she was two until she was six she lived with one parent or another and in children’s homes. In 1965 she was fostered by a council worker called Jim Hubbard and his wife, Linda, in Droitwich in the Midlands and had established the kind of settled relationship with the Hubbards where she wanted to use their name. But in October 1974 she ran away from home and was found a few days later with a soldier camping in a field about five miles outside Worcester. She had tattooed herself on the left forearm with ‘SHIRL’ in one-inch-high capital letters. Not long after this she met an eighteen-year-old called Dan Davies at a fair at the Worcester Racecourse grounds and he became her regular boyfriend. Danny’s brother Alan, who worked on the fair, had once gone out with Carol Cooper, but it seems that is just one of the several coincidences that now link Shirley Hubbard and Carol Cooper who almost certainly never knew each other. In the middle of her final term at Droitwich High School in November 1974, Shirley got a work-experience job on the make-up counter at Debenhams in Worcester. Danny Davies worked at a branch of John Collier the tailor’s in Worcester and they spent the afternoon of 14 November together around the town, eating chips on the banks of the Severn, and later at the Davies’s house with Danny’s brother and sisters. Shortly before eight thirty in the evening, they wandered back into the centre and he put Shirley – he thought – on the bus to Droitwich. What he didn’t know was that she had packed a few things and taken them into work with her that morning. She never returned to Droitwich and Linda Hubbard and her husband never heard of or from Shirley again. Somehow Shirley Hubbard made her way, or was taken, to Cromwell Street, where she was kept in secret, murdered, and buried in secret until her remains were excavated from underneath the cellar at ten to three on the afternoon of Saturday, 5 March 1994, the fifth set of remains to be discovered. A number of toes and fingers had been amputated and taken away. She had been decapitated and her thighs had been twisted out of their sockets. The bones showed many cut marks in the region of the neck of the hip bone. Her skull was still encased in the frightening hood mask. One of the plastic tubes that had been used to keep her alive had come loose and was adrift in the hole. The other was still poking into the mask at nostril-level and curved upwards over the dome of her skull, discoloured brown after twenty years in the ground. The slurry around it was cleared and it was lifted out carefully and photographed and logged as having been found close to the Marilyn Monroe wall.

  *

  Thérèse Siegenthaler was murdered in April 1974. Shirley Hubbard was murdered in November 1974. It was in the summer of 1974 at the midpoint between these two murders that Fred West started working as a driller/borer on the big Asquith drill at the wagon works. And he quickly made it clear to the men he was working with at the wagon works, as he had made it clear to the men he worked with at Permali’s and other places, that he was in charge of a household where an open attitude to sex was not only welcomed but expected, and where his wife in particular was anybody’s. She was going out a lot, putting out with other men and was particularly interested in black men and other women, but she was anybody’s, ‘So if you want sortin’ out.’ He had a load of audio tapes of himself and Rose and others having sex and he would bring these to work with him in a carrier bag and lend them out. He had home cine movies as well and he would bring these in in a carrier bag. Home porn. He had both types in fact: he had your run-of-the-mill under-the-counter jobs – American- and Scandinavian-made black-and-white stag films; and he had 8 mm. home movies of his wife performing alone and with others although the others never included Fred. They were open about it in this way. They were quite open about it. It was an open lifestyle.

  In the televisionless days twenty years earlier when the door to his grandmother’s house – to virtually all the houses in Cromwell Street – had always been open and you’d walk up the alleyway and straight in, Brian Fry had put on film shows in the back living room on Sunday evenings and the whole family had come. There were a lot of sons and daughters, cousins, aunts and uncles and, for the Greens as a family, number 25 was the main meeting point. And on Sundays after tea as many of them as had come would squeeze into the tiny back living room to watch the newsreels that Brian’s perk from his job as a rewind boy at the Ritz in Barton Street had allowed him to slip home. For a screen he used a bit of cardboard painted up with a professional-looking black border. But the equipment he showed it on was professional standard – he had a Pathé H camera and a Pathé Son sound projector – and through the miracle of advanced technology they would be able to watch Derek Ibbotson recapturing the mile record in 1957, the swearing-in of President Kennedy in 1961 and other world happenings only a week or so after they had taken place. The lights would go off and the projector would start up and the voice of Bob Danvers-Walker would come on explaining what they were seeing and the world would be brought into their living room, which Brian’s grandmother was old enough to still find thrilling. There were two film buffs in the family: Brian was the rewind boy at the Ritz in Barton Street and his uncle Raymond was the projectionist at the little fleapit cinema in Lydney in the Forest of Dean. It was Ray who had bought Brian his first camera and it had be
come more than a hobby; it had become a passion. Brian was a railway buff: he followed the steam. But he picked up an interest in photography and cameras at an early age and it got into his system. He lived it. He lived and died films. Photography and cameras. There is a word for it – scopophilia: ‘love of looking’.

  Polaroid cameras were the perfect kind of camera for the kind of pictures Fred West liked taking. They were fast – virtually instant; and, more important, the film didn’t need to be taken for processing by somebody else. He stole an early Polaroid camera and started taking close-up photographs of vaginas when he was in his early twenties; there would be an album of these pictures still in Cromwell Street as late as 1992. Throughout their twenty-five years together he took numerous pictures of Rose on her own and with other men. There was the album of close-up pictures of men’s erect penises kept locked in a briefcase in Rose’s special room and the still photographs and home-movie footage and eventually videotapes of Rose holding herself open and being explored clinically and forensically by him; being gazed into in a fixated, insatiable, obsessive way.

  Around the time he started at the wagon works he acquired an 8 mm. movie camera. And he would go round the factory on a Friday or Saturday and ask the other drillers and welders and brake-press and grindstone operators if they wanted to come round to his house on Sunday and watch some pornographic movies which he had on super-eight film. This was before the days of video recorders and he would show the films from midday to early evening in the cellar, getting as many people in there as possible. He had a makeshift bar down there and would charge for the drinks he supplied as well as a small entrance fee. He would occasionally say he’d been over to France and got a couple of new ones in. It was mostly the single men who were interested and the most regular white attender was a man called Robert Jackson whose nickname was ‘the Honey Monster’. He worked in the time clerk’s office at the wagon works and was regarded as a bit weird because he used to talk a lot about witchcraft and covens and sacrificing lambs. Jackson, who was also known as ‘Peardrop’ because of his size and his shape, was always a good source of pornographic magazines, which he said he had got from abroad. He claimed he had contacts in the modelling world and could get photographs done. And he persuaded at least one girl to pose topless for him at a friend’s house. He carried the Polaroids of her around in his pocket.

  They were a close-knit gang of men at Wingate’s, as the wagon works was sometimes called. Fred would get to work at seven in the morning and was starting to do his work by quarter past although the official clocking-on time was seven thirty. He would take any overtime that was going and got on well with his chargehand, Ronnie Cooper. Ronnie was Gloucester man and boy and, although he had grown up in Coney Hill, a rough part of the city, he had lived for many years in Apperley, a village on the river Severn near Tewkesbury, and now was more country than Fred. His house was on a hill at the bottom of the village, near the river, and there hadn’t been a month of the year that he hadn’t seen the road to his house flooded. When that happened he would get in a boat and row over hedges and five-bar gates to the high point where he had parked his car the night before. Then he’d tie the boat to a tree and at night-time make the same journey in reverse with the help of the house lights and a torch. It was an operation that involved waterproofs and waders and God knows what else and Fred loved that. Hearing the stories of how Ron had had to bloody swim to work. It was the kind of thing Fred liked. Fred was having a running battle with the underground water that was constantly threatening to flood his house – constantly carrying out running repairs to stop this water coming up; to stem the rise of thick murky water. What you got round Cromwell Street used to be the moat round Gloucester. Gloucester used to have a moat round it. The moat was filled in, so you’ve got a very high water table. A small lesson in local history from Fred. Ronnie learned to take a lot of what Fred told him with shovelfuls of salt and Fred and Ronnie got on great. Fred was up to Ronnie’s house in Gabb Lane at Apperley all the time. And when Ronnie had to go into hospital for a week Fred insisted on staying out at Apperley every night to make sure that Ronnie’s wife was all right. He’d drive out every night in the caravanette he was driving at the time. A bloody blue thing. A bloody old thing. An old Trojan caravanette. And he’d park up in the orchard below the patio and spend the night. ‘I’ll look after your wife, look. I’ll keep an eye on the wife.’ The nearest neighbour was half a mile away down there. Being mates, Ronnie thought it was bloody good of him, like. In the mornings Fred used to drive to work in the ’van.

  Fred was always there at Gabb Lane. And Ronnie got into the habit of going to Cromwell Street on a dinnertime nearly every day with Fred. How it happened was one day when it was hot and they were sitting outside in Bristol Road, Fred just said, ‘C’mon.’ Ten minutes’ walk across the park and into Fred’s house. They’d sit in the back room. There was a spy-hole in the side door. You couldn’t get in there. And there were Polaroids in the bathroom of Fred’s wife. Kinky pictures stuck to the wall of a woman who was obviously Rose who would always be in the scullery off the living room making tea for them when they arrived. Didn’t talk really a lot. But if the two of them were talking, laughing and joking, she wouldn’t half stare at Fred sometimes. Glare. Give him that glare. Half an hour a day, four or five days a week for five or six years and Ronnie never suspected a thing. He took his sandwiches with him and supped his tea and he never suspected nothing. Fred told him she was a model and offered him home movies of his missus. Took him and showed him where the cameras were. Ronnie never told his wife about any of this or about the kinky pictures or the spy-hole in the door. It’s how men talk. And at over fifty years of age he believed he was way too old for that kind of thing himself. He was bloody fifty-odd then. What interest did he have in that? That was the end of the conversation as far as Ron was concerned. Oh, bloody yeah.

  Fred’s total obsession with decorating was the only thing Ronnie thought was slightly strange. The house was like a building site. It was never not like that. Decorating, building, DIY. As a result he was always black and never clean. Black hands. Black face. It was a noisy shop and it was dirty work. It was heavy, dirty work. And he would go home off one shift and come back for the next shift on the next day and it was obvious he hadn’t washed. Forget a bath. He hadn’t washed. Some of the men who worked with him moaned that every time they went near him he always smelled. Black face. Black hands. Boilersuit stiff and the jeans and shirt under it stiff with grease and dirt. Turning up day after day in the same flared jeans and dirty shirt. Working at home and working at work and presumably thinking that once something’s dirty you can’t dirty it any more. Good worker, mind. Brilliant worker. No complaints there. Always a cobble on. And always black. Few and far you saw Fred dolled up.

  For a boaster, for the bastard liar that many of the men at the wagon works thought he was, he could sometimes seem oddly shy. He struck some of them as a very quiet chap. He wouldn’t mix with anybody. He wouldn’t go to a pub at all. He always said he was too busy if you asked him out for a drink. Said he had too much to do. Colin Price had helped Fred guillotine and bend metal for his house sign and for other bits and pieces for around the house. They traded ornamental fish. Fish, some tools, a few plants. Occasionally Fred would drive over to Colin’s at Longlevens but he was itchy and would never want to stay. It was out to the greenhouse, sort a few plants out, and gone. Away.

  When the men in his shop stood in a group together for a picture to mark the retirement of one of them, a man called Reg Williams, who the joke was had been born in the shop, Fred didn’t want to join in. His workmates all grouped together in their boilersuits and grimy faces and steel-toe-capped boots to provide a memento for Reg Williams who had worked the press on the other side of Fred’s drill for many years, but he didn’t want to know. Ronnie Cooper and Fred would sit and have their morning break on two wooden stools on the other side from Reg. ‘C’mon now, Fred. We’re going to have a picture took.
’ ‘Ah, I won’t bother, Ron.’ He was eventually persuaded to come in on the edge, peeping bashfully over the shoulder of a taller man, his face sooty, a smudge of dirt over his mouth, standing shoulder to shoulder with a smiling West Indian man, a piece of work slung up behind them.

  The evening shift at the wagon works was two till ten. And on one occasion that would remain in Ron Cooper’s memory Fred knocked off at ten and was back at seven the next morning looking black and dirty and seeming tired. His explanation was that he’d had a rush job on and that he had been up all night concreting and plastering up. Fred was very proud of his house and on Ronnie’s lunchtime visits he was always keen to show Ronnie what he’d done. At the beginning the cellar used to be more than seven feet deep. But he kept putting down layer on layer of concrete to beat the damp, and by the end Ronnie, who is not a big man, had to stoop to get in. He used to call it the kids’ playroom and he told Ronnie to come and see how he’d decorated it out. The house was like a building site. It was never not like that. Decorating, building, DIY. ‘Come and see what I’ve done, Ron.’

  *

  Juanita Mott disappeared and was buried under the cellar at Cromwell Street in April 1975. She was aged eighteen and unlike the others buried alongside her in the cellar – Carol Cooper, Lucy Partington, Thérèse Siegenthaler and Shirley Hubbard – she had a known connection with the people who lived at Cromwell Street and with the house.