Happy Like Murderers by Gordon Burn

Author:Gordon Burn [Gordon Burn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571265060
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2011-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

Rose was five months pregnant with Stephen when Lynda Gough was murdered. She had just started on this pregnancy when the assault on Caroline Raine occurred and Fred told Caroline that ‘When Rose gets pregnant her lesbian urges get stronger and she has to have a woman and she really wanted you.’ ‘When Rose was pregnant she was always extra sexy,’ he would claim to the police many years later.

May was nearly a year old, Heather was two and a half, and Anna-Marie was nearly nine in April 1973. Lynda had done some babysitting for Fred and Rose but that had stopped when she started hitting Anna-Marie. This anyway is what Rose told Dave Evans and some of the other lodgers when she went upstairs at breakfast time one morning to explain Lynda’s sudden disappearance from the house and why she wouldn’t be coming round to the house again.

Major building work started at the beginning of the summer on the Seventh-day Adventists’ church next door. They tore down the old tin and tar-paper building and started to put up an extensive new brick building in its place. The new church was several times bigger than the old one. It came forward to meet the pavement at the front and extended to the edge of the Wests’ property all along the left-hand side. In order to construct the church’s south-facing wall, which as it happened was the wall where the altar was going to be, they had to put scaffolding in the Wests’ garden for what they said would be weeks but turned out to be several months. There was scaffolding in the back garden all summer and cement dust and brick dust. It was a hot summer and it was dirty and dusty and Fred decided to use the opportunity of the dust and confusion to do some building work himself.

Rose’s special room was on the left as you came in the front door. On the right as you came in was another room of a similar size, with a window facing the garden. In the far left-hand corner of that room was a door leading down three steps into the kitchen, which was housed in a narrow, single-storey brick building jutting out into the garden. Just outside the kitchen was an outdoor toilet. And on the other side of the toilet was a potting shed with shingle walls and a corrugated metal roof and a window which had given a view of the apple and pear trees of Mrs Green’s ‘orchard’. And with three children and a fourth on the way and the lodgers monopolizing the upstairs, Fred decided to steal some extra space for the family by dropping the shed and turning the place where it had stood into a second bathroom. He would turn the toilet into a shower, add a combination toilet-bathroom, and house them all in one twelve-foot extension the same width (or narrowness) as the kitchen. He got some of the boys from the top floor to help with the shed and, when he needed her to, Rose helped him with the building.

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