Dennis Nilsen - Conversations with Britain's Most Evil Serial Killer by Russ Coffey Read Free Book Online Page A

gentleness out of her.

    Betty, Olav, Dennis and Sylvia finally moved out of Granny’s house in 1954. They travelled a mere couple of streets away to a flat above what is now a florist’s shop in 73 Mid Street. The move marked the end of a period when Nilsen claims he would spend lonely afternoons wandering the mile-and-a-half down to the beach to be alone with nature. Common sense, however, suggests that such stories were exaggerated.
    Whether or not Nilsen was really allowed to wander all around town as a young boy, life certainly changed when a local builder called Adam Scott started to court Nilsen’s mother. His presence brought increased structure to the household. Betty Scott would later say it made another depressing council house feel like home. They were married six months later. Life with three children had readjusted Betty Nilsen’s priorities for a partner. Reliability was now prioritised over glamour. Adam Scott was thick-set and of average height with receding hair. He worked as handyman for the council and if he didn’t have much money to bring in, at least he was honest and determined to treat his stepchildren as if they were his own.
    Nilsen’s book swiftly deals with his mother’s remarriage. He doesn’t want to attach much psychological significance to the upheaval it caused. Still, he does admit to being upset by the lack of affection he received, and that was a reason to resent Adam Scott. In particular, he talks about disgust at hearing his mother and Scott making love, which they did with ‘rapt abandon’ producing four babies ‘practically one after the other’. Soon, however, Nilsen says he stopped blaming Scott. He decided that if his mother didn’t show him love, then that was entirely her fault. And once he realised this, he says in
History of a Drowning Boy
, he started to pity Adam Scott in the face of his mother’s domineering character:
    My stepfather was a semi-literate, shy, County Council labourer who was completely dominated by my mother. He had a quiet personality and violence and malice were completely against his nature. She wore the pants in the house. She would often goad him into ‘doing his duty’ (as the man in the house) with oblique taunts questioning his potency in being reluctant to beat we kids for misdemeanours.
    Nilsen omits any mention of his mother’s claim that now he went from withdrawn to disobedient. And that wasn’t just at home – he also received cuffs around the ear from the local constable. Instead, Nilsen just tells us how cold his house-proud mother was. And, during this period, it seems Betty Scott did fail to show Dennis proper maternal love. She herself admitted so, saying that during 1954 she found it almost impossible to hug him. No amount of self-admonishment seemed to change this. There was just something about his difficult, unresponsive nature that prevented her from wanting to touch him.
    When things became uncomfortable at home, in his piece called ‘The Psychograph’, Nilsen says he liked to imagine himself as a ‘Saturday matinée hero’. Although having his head in the clouds was typical, the accompanying details are, again, less convincing. He says, for the ‘first and last time’ in his life, he joined a childhood gang who took part in the ‘full range of schoolboy antics and adventures’. His friends, wehear, were ‘inquisitive, daring, and mischievous’. He would have us believe that they sailed boats, built rafts and scaled rocks. But the water in which this was supposed to have happened was the very water of which even hardened fishermen were wary. Eventually, however, Nilsen says he tired of these children and their ‘dull aspirations’.
    Now, Nilsen says, he started to look increasingly to his imagination and animals for company. There were two boys he did still get on with – Farquar Mackenzie and Malcolm Rennie. Together, they would go to abandoned air-raid shelters to find fledglings. The three of them