Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  The care workers kept overhearing the same stories about Heather and the patio from the younger West children through all the summer and autumn of 1993 after the rape and cruelty charges against their father and mother had been dropped. Eventually they became sufficiently concerned to feel they should inform the police. As a result, Detective Constable Savage was appointed to investigate Heather’s disappearance in a more systematic way. She revisited all the sources she had originally visited the previous year, and with the same result. Heather West didn’t exist in any official record. She seemed to have ceased existing.

  Before the end of 1993 DCI Terry Moore, the head of CID in Gloucester, was appointed to co-ordinate the inquiry into Heather West’s disappearance. Early in 1994, formal witness statements were taken from social workers closely connected with the West children relating to the ‘family joke’. On 23 February 1994 successful application was made to Gloucester Magistrates for a warrant giving the police permission to search 25 Cromwell Street. And at lunchtime on Thursday, 24 February, the doorbell went while Rose and Mae were in the living room watching Neighbours on television. It was what the police would log as Day 1 of the Cromwell Street inquiry. They went in expecting to find one body. Privately, some of those involved expected to find no body. The search for bodies would continue until Day 104, three and a half months later, when Ann McFall’s remains and the remains of an eight-month-old foetus were recovered from a valleyed field, Fingerpost Field, in Much Marcle. On Day 155, a Thursday at the end of July when Rose and Fred West made one of their by then routine appearances in court together to be remanded in custody, they would stop counting.

  *

  Mae had come home to Cromwell Street for lunch, which she had started to do since the removal of the children. She was watching Neighbours with her mother when the doorbell went and the dogs started barking. Rose had got two mongrels, Oscar and Benji, from an animal-rescue place while Fred was being kept away from the family in Birmingham, and they were yappers. Oscar was wiry and white; Benji was a small wire-haired terrier type and they were yappy bastards. Mae answered the door with the dogs still barking and found DCI Moore, DC Savage and three male police officers who said they had a warrant to search the premises for the body of Heather West. They passed through to the living room and served the warrant on Rose who read it and instantly went berserk. Screaming and shouting. Calling them bastards. Cunts. The dogs were barking. The television was on. It was quarter to two, five minutes into Neighbours. And then Stephen walked in. He had a day off work and had just been taking it easy, wandering around town, looking in the shops. He asked one of the officers what was going on and he told him they were looking for Heather and thrust the search warrant into his hand. Stephen read it and told them to wait until his dad came home. They were to do nothing until his dad got back. The writing on the blue form was a blur to Stephen apart from the words ‘search for the body of Heather West’. But the officer told him they didn’t have time for that. They were digging up the garden whether his dad was there or not. Stephen tried to get his father on his mobile phone. It was ringing but there was no reply. He tried again and it just rang and rang. They were all coming in with their tools and spades.

  The job Fred was working on was out of range. He was working at an address called Hatton House, in Frampton Mansell, which was in a ‘black spot’ for cellular phones. He had arrived in the morning in the long-wheel-base white Midi with ‘Carsons Contractors’ and the telephone number along the side and gone straight upstairs to start work. The roof cavities needed spraying against woodworm. And that is what he was up in the loft wearing a facemask doing when Mr Gerrard whose house it was called up to him shortly before two that he was wanted on the phone.

  When he couldn’t get his father to answer, Stephen had called Derek Thomson in his office at home. As soon as he got through Rose had come on in an excitable state saying that the police were at her house and she wanted Fred home now. She was quite excitable and was shouting and she told Derek to contact Fred and get him home straightaway. She wanted him now. Derek Thomson rang the customer and asked for Mr West who was doing work on his house. After a few minutes Fred came to the phone and Derek told him that he had better ring home because his wife was after him. He couldn’t call out direct. Apart from being in a black spot for the signal, the phone was on lock-out as far as outgoing calls were concerned. Derek Thomson’s home number, mobile number, and a couple of others were programmed in; the rest of it was locked out. Only two or three numbers were programmed into the memory, and his home number wasn’t one of them. Mr Gerrard allowed him to use the house telephone. He rang and spoke briefly to somebody at the other end. But he managed to cut himself off and couldn’t work the redial. So Mr Gerrard told him to ring again. But for a moment he couldn’t seem to remember what his home number was. It was obvious that there was a big problem at home because he appeared quite shocked. Mr Gerrard told him to sit down for a moment, then try again. He rang again. 525995. Again spoke to somebody briefly, then went to gather his things. Within quarter of an hour he was gone. It was wet. It had been raining all day. And he drove off into the rain.

  As soon as he was within range Stephen got through to him in the van. Said the police were there and they were going to start digging the garden up looking for Heather. That was just after two. He was about twelve miles from Gloucester. He should have been home by half past two but he didn’t get there until more than three hours later. Nobody has been able to discover what he did in those missing three and a half hours. Nobody was able to contact him. Nobody knows where he went. He had been in a black spot. It was as if he temporarily disappeared off the face of the earth.

  The police left Cromwell Street at five thirty. They had lifted many of the slabs off the garden in preparation for the digging to start the following day. A mini-digger had been brought in to plough up the garden. It was raining heavily and the exposed surface soil was quickly turning to mud. When Fred walked in there was only Rose and Mae and Stephen, and the yapping mongrels, Oscar and Benji. The dogs were barking and frantic. There had been constant comings and goings through the house. A lot of strange people. They weren’t used to people. Rose had been crying. Fred seemed very calm. Transcendentally calm. Rose and Fred talked quietly to each other over by the sink in the kitchen and after a while went upstairs for a bit so that they could talk on their own. Then, at about quarter to eight, Fred left the house to go to Gloucester Central police station not very far away in Longsmith Street. A few minutes later DS Terry Onions and WPC Debbie Willats arrived at Cromwell Street and tape-recorded an interview with Rose in the first-floor Black Magic bar. She was belligerent and aggressive and made out she couldn’t remember much about the circumstances surrounding Heather’s disappearance: ‘What do you think I am, a bloody computer … I was upset at the time. I cannot fucking remember … If you had any brains at all you could find her. It can’t be that bloody difficult.’ She repeated almost all the things she had said in 1992. Except that, whereas then she had said that Heather refused to speak to Fred, now she was saying the opposite: ‘I know he had several phone calls off her but she didn’t want to speak to me … She was all her father, not me.’ Now she said that she had neither seen Heather, nor heard from her, nor made any efforts to find her. Reporting Heather as missing to the police would have been ‘snitching’ on her daughter, she said.

  At Gloucester police station Fred announced himself at the counter and was taken for interview by DC Hazel Savage and DC Robert Vestey. He seemed very calm. Almost affable for somebody at the centre of a murder investigation. Almost breezy. He knew Hazel. It wasn’t as if Gloucester police station was new to him. He’d been there before. So why all the fuss? Heather was alive as far as he was concerned, he said almost as soon as he’d sat down. He’d seen her recently in Birmingham. ‘She was more of a lady … Her hair was expensively done.’ Like Rose, who was busy telling the interviewing officers that Heather had always been all her father, he confirmed
that Heather was all him. ‘Heather had summat against Rose, for some unknown reason … Every time Rose spoke to ’er, she bloody insulted her, and walked away. But me and Heather was very close, which all of them will tell you. I mean, me an’ Heather built half our home together.’ Also like Rose, he said they had never reported Heather missing because they didn’t want to snitch on her to the police. ‘You don’t go inside just because you’re a missing person,’ Hazel Savage told him. ‘Ah!’ he said with a throaty chuckle. ‘What Heather’s up to is a different story …You name it, Heather’s up to it … I think Heather was supplying Cromwell Street, somehow … Lots of girls who disappear’, he added, ‘take different names and go into prostitution.’ From speaking to her on the phone he knew that Heather had ‘umpteen names’.

  He was quite happy to reminisce with Hazel about Frankie Stephens and the druggy lodgers and the life at Cromwell Street that Hazel had known. She wanted to know about Heather. ‘Where is Heather, Fred?’ ‘You find her,’ he said. ‘An’ I’ll be happy. That’s all I can say.’ And then he was off on another anecdotal ramble. ‘What can we do to find Heather and find Heather quickly?’ Hazel Savage asked him some time after nine o’clock. ‘I’m going out from here in a few minutes,’ he told her, ‘an’ see what I can do.’

  ‘If you want me I’ll be at home all day tomorrow. I ain’t goin’ to work tomorrow,’ he said before walking out of the police station at nine thirty to begin what he must have known was going to be his last night in the house with Rose. Back at the house he asked Mae to make him a cup of tea and then set about undoing the fiddle with the electric meter that he had been running for years. One policeman had been left behind reading a book under a plastic shelter at the bottom of the garden. And he wanted to change the cable over on the meter without the policeman noticing that the house had suddenly gone dark. A team of fifteen men was due to start digging in his garden in the morning, searching for the body of his daughter. But rerouteing the electricity supply back to the legitimate meter was the thing that seemed to possess him. He became calm again once he had done it and took the dogs for a walk in the park with Rose, something neither Stephen nor Mae had ever known him do before. When he came in he had a shower and sat on the sofa in his underpants watching the news. They were already getting some idea that there was going to be some publicity of what was happening in their back garden and that it was going to come out on the news. When it was over he went upstairs to sleep with Rose in the bed made out of dark Dean oak timber that he had cut and put together with his own hands.

  The next morning he asked Stephen to clear all the tools out of his van which was parked outside. As the day progressed Derek Thomson would ring and ask Stephen to move the van because the press who were starting to gather in Cromwell Street had seen the number on the side and had started calling him at home.

  There was no press when Hazel Savage accompanied by a young detective constable, Darren Law, returned to the house at eleven fifteen. Rose was watching the television in the living room when they went to her and asked her to tell them where her mother lived. They wanted an address for her mother. Which really upset her. She didn’t want them to speak to her mother. Her mother was ill and she didn’t want her involved. To quiet her, Fred took Rose into the tool-room passage off the living room and closed the door. Hustled her in there and told her he’d go and persuade Hazel not to go up and see her mam. ‘I’ll kill that bitch if she ever speaks to my mum!’ He was well worried what was going on. But once he’d got Rose settled and upstairs out of the way, he said to Hazel Savage, ‘Can we go to the police station?’ He collected what he always referred to as his ‘prison lighter’ and his cigarette papers and tobacco. And as soon as he was in the car with Hazel he said to her, ‘I killed her.’ The ignition hadn’t been turned on. They were sitting in the car in front of the Sabbath Church in Cromwell Street. He admitted that Heather was in the garden but said they were looking in the wrong place. It was twenty past eleven. Detective Constable Savage arrested Fred West for the murder of his daughter. He was then taken to Gloucester police station and detained. An hour later Rose West was arrested on suspicion of the murder of Heather West by Detective Sergeant Onions and taken to Cheltenham police station. She arrived at quarter to one.

  Mae and Stephen couldn’t take seriously what was going on. They weren’t allowed in the garden but they watched from the windows, sitting on stools eating crisps and drinking cups of tea and taking the rip out of the police. They found a chicken bone that Stephen could see was obviously a chicken bone and he started making loud chicken noises and jumping about and fooling around, taking care that he was seen by the searchers in the rain and the mud. It was only around tea-time that they got a call asking them to come to Gloucester police station. And when they arrived their father’s solicitor, Howard Ogden, told them that Fred had confessed to killing Heather. In fact he was back at Cromwell Street as they spoke, pointing out where Heather was buried in the ground. He was handcuffed to DC Law and sliding around under the tarpaulin roof that had been erected. He seemed dazed and unsteady and kept falling off the duckboards that had been laid across the garden like somebody disoriented by drugs or drink or by the familiar suddenly turned strange. His legs had already given way under him at the police station earlier in the day. He had had to be helped on to a seat soon after he arrived and brought a glass of water. He had walked around the station’s exercise yard for more than an hour holding his head and looking blank. ‘My head hurts,’ he had said when he was asked if he was all right, ‘and I keep seeing stars.’ He kept falling off the duckboards that had been laid across the garden. Sliding in the mud. It didn’t look like his house.

  Mae and Stephen had reacted to the news that Heather had been murdered by their father in different ways. Stephen had slipped down the wall in the police station on to the floor and started crying. Mae didn’t cry. She didn’t believe it. She was sure her father had cracked under the pressure and was making it up. Although they didn’t know it, their mother as well as their father was present in Gloucester police station at that point. It was around six. She had also had the news broken to her that Fred had confessed to killing Heather. She had been told by DC Onions in an interview room in Cheltenham just before five o’clock. ‘So she’s dead? Is that right?’ ‘I’m telling you,’ DC Onions repeated. ‘Fred has confessed to murdering Heather.’ ‘What!’ ‘He’s told us where she is. Where do you think she is?’ ‘She’s dead?’ She was crying. ‘That automatically implicates you.’ She stopped crying. ‘Why does it implicate me? … It’s a lie.’

  If Rose had been genuinely upset by the news that her daughter, who had been missing for seven years, had been murdered by her husband and had been lying buried in their garden all that time – ‘You are the wife of the person who’s confessed to killing her. You live in the house on whose land the body is allegedly lying at this very moment,’ as DC Onions reminded her – she had rallied by the time she was interviewed for a second time at Gloucester police station a couple of hours later. ‘Do you feel that perhaps you’ve been a bit naïve over this [seven-year] period?’ she was asked. ‘Looks like it,’ she said, ‘don’t it?’ Adding a few minutes later, ‘I feel a bit of a cunt, to be blunt with it.’ ‘What’s your feelings towards Fred now,’ Onions asked, ‘now that you know he’s slain your eldest daughter?’ ‘Put it this way,’ she said. ‘He’s a dead man if I ever get my hands on him.’

  The next day, Saturday, 26 February, he took it all back. In an interview that started just after two in the afternoon he said that everything he had told them the day before about how he had killed Heather – strangled her while she was lounging against the washing machine ‘coming the big lady’, and dismembered her and hid her remains pushed into a dustbin behind the Wendy house; his soliloquy on the ice knife – that had all been a lie. ‘Heather is not in the garden. Heather’s alive and well. She’s possibly at this moment in Bahrain. She works for a drugs cartel. She’s got no identification –
that’s why you can’t find ’er … They’re looked after like queens. I have no idea what her name is, because I will not let her tell me. She contacts me whenever she’s in this country. Now whether you believe it or not is entirely up to you. As far as I’m concerned I’d like to see them all still over there digging in my garden … They can dig there for evermore. Nobody or nothing’s under my patio.’

  Asked why he had confessed the day before, he said he was getting back at the police for what they had done to his house between 1992 and then. He also said he was taking his revenge for the way they had upset Rose by saying they were going to see her mother. ‘When you come in yesterday and upset Rosie, when she begged you not to have nothin’ to do with her mother ’cause her mother was an old lady … Rose was so upset over her mother, an’ mind I love Rose, an’ no messin’. We’re devoted. An’ when I see anybody hurt that woman then I want to get them back an’ make sure they pay ’ard for touching her. She’s an angel … If Rose was all right, then I was quite prepared to go on with it. Let ’em go on digging out there … I feel a lot better for it.’

  A few minutes after four o’clock one of the search team digging in the garden at Cromwell Street found a human bone. He had been digging in a different part of the garden from where Fred West had indicated they would find Heather. The bone was taken to Gloucester police station where it was examined by the Home Office pathologist, Professor Bernard Knight. Professor Knight confirmed that the bone was a human thigh bone. He then went to Cromwell Street and excavated the remains which would eventually be shown to be those of Heather West, which had been discovered simultaneously in roughly the place where Fred West had told them they should be digging. When the remains were excavated both thigh bones were found to be present. They had three thigh bones. It became obvious that there might be a second set of remains buried in the garden. It was a possibility that nobody had considered until that moment.