Killing For Company
Page 4
Here in the hall of plenty there is nothing now.
Just you
Lying under my hands,
With shadowy figures approaching
With some formalities
To take you into their ‘system’,
And me.
Think over
The lonely life of you.
It is tomorrow soon enough
And they will meddle in our business.
Privacy has no boundaries
Which cannot be breached
By the law’s charges.
After this, wrote Nilsen,
I dress and prepare for a final day of freedom. I take Bleep to the back garden. I replace the cracked manhole cover having refused to complete the cover-up. I knew the form to follow that evening but would act as normally as I could. I put on his blue and white scarf, lit a Marlboro and stepped out into my last legend.16
Dennis Nilsen wrote more about his state of mind, as he understood it, after Sinclair had been killed, and this reflective confession will find its place later in this narrative.
He told the police everything they needed for a conviction, but no more; the rest, he felt, was still ‘private’ and not the business of the law to understand. Besides which, he was by no means sure that he was himself able to understand. ‘I cannot unravel the complexities of this case.’17
When the interviews were completed and Ronald Moss had sat through days of graphic and awful description of death, pinching himself to regain the comfort of normal pain against a recital of Dostoievskian horror, he asked Nilsen one question: ‘Why?’ The reply was disarming. ‘I am hoping you will tell me that,’ he said.
The accused was removed to Brixton Prison on remand, whence he wrote an elegant letter of thanks to D.C.S. Chambers commending the Hornsey team on a professional job well done, producing yet another ripple of surprise from this enigmatic man. Attention from the press was now necessarily subdued, the case being sub judice. The newspapers could afford to keep silent for the next few months, having successfully implanted in the public mind an image of unmitigated depravity. In Brixton, Nilsen wrote:
The train of words’ digestion
And answers from my head
Cannot give the answer
Or hope to raise the dead.
Everyone wants labels
Pinned neatly on my skin,
A comfortable judgment
Casting their stones at sin.
Foaming Tory ladies,
‘Rule Britannias’ sung,
‘Nilsen is a monster,
Should be bloody hung.’
Screaming mobs aplenty
Never knew Sinclair,
Wouldn’t give him gutter-room,
Here or anywhere.18
To the present author he wrote, ‘What can I ever say to turn the unproductive past away?… my best moments of public service may still lie ahead … I have judged myself more harshly than any court ever could.’19 Even before his arrest, he had resigned himself to the humiliating realisation that his many years of service, in the army, the police force, and the Manpower Services Commission, would be judged much less valuable than his necessary immolation as a result of his crimes. At last the world was taking notice of him, listening to every word, watching every move. The sad paradox of his unremarkable life was to discover that he was, after all, remarkable.
Nilsen warned me that I should find a full inquiry into his life and deeds distressing; he admonished me with a quote from Georges Dandin – ‘Vous l’avez voulu, vous l’avez voulu.’ Certainly, there is always the possibility that if one seeks to understand how such events as are related in this book occurred, and even more if one seeks to feel from within the motive forces of the man who caused them, one might oneself become infected or contaminated by deeply-hidden streams in the human psyche which are, in the normal course of events, severely inhibited. Nilsen himself thought that public interest in his case (which genuinely took him aback) was suspect:
I am always surprised and truly amazed that anyone can be attracted by the macabre. The population at large is neither ‘ordinary’ or ‘normal’. They seem to be bound together by a collective ignorance of themselves and what they are. They have, every one of them, got their deep dark thoughts with many a skeleton rattling in their secret cupboards. Their fascination with ‘types’ (rare types) like myself plagues them with the mystery of why and how a living person can actually do things which may be only those dark images and acts secretly within them. I believe they can identify with these ‘dark images and acts’ and loathe anything which reminds them of this dark side of themselves. The usual reaction is a flood of popular self-righteous condemnation but a willingness to, with friends and acquaintances, talk over and over again the appropriate bits of the case.20
A just and subtle reflection, one might think, and not at all uncommon in people accused of vile murders who regard themselves as a cathartic release from the accumulated wickedness of mankind, and deeply resent the additional burden. Sympathy with murder is unthinkable. It is even safer not to understand.
And yet not to attempt an understanding is to abnegate a crucial responsibility. The murderer takes his place in the jumbled kaleidoscope of the human condition. So, too, does his audience. For them to enjoy the display of crime, detection, retribution, while refusing to be drawn into a steady contemplation of themselves as audience, and of the subterranean echoes which the case disturbs, would be fruitless and arid. To understand the steps which brought Dennis Nilsen and his victims to a lingering four-year catastrophe, one must go back to a fishing village on the coast of Aberdeenshire, Scotland, and beyond, and come forward to the war years in Fraserburgh, to school in Strichen, through bereavement, the sea, and on to a life of corrosive loneliness.
‘No one wants to believe ever that I am just an ordinary man come to an extraordinary and overwhelming conclusion.’21
fn1 See Appendix.
2
ORIGINS
Dennis Nilsen was born of a Scottish mother and Norwegian father in the town of Fraserburgh, on the north-easterly tip of Aberdeenshire, blown, buffeted, drenched and occasionally invaded by the fierce North Sea. His Norwegian inheritance is incidental, a postscript to a long legacy of Scottish ancestry which is fundamental to an assessment of his character. All the salient traits of his personality, including those which were apparent soon after his arrest, and many that lay hidden, are traceable to his strong Buchan roots. Sturdy independence, blunt honesty which despises compromise and forbids diplomacy, iconoclastic radicalism and contempt for privilege, garrulity, love of argument, distrust of the Church and faith in humanist logic, above all a deeply-ingrained and awesome respect for the irresistible forces of nature, especially the omnipotent and omnipresent sea, these are the characteristics of the rugged folk of the Buchan district from whom Dennis Nilsen sprang. A number of them, too, are readily prone to mental disorder of one kind or another, common enough in a community which has for centuries been turned in upon itself.
There is a clear difference between these Scots on the east coast and those on the west coast, a difference determined ultimately by climate. The west coast, misty and gentle, produces mild, soft, trusting people; the east coast, with which we have to deal, is beset by constantly harsh and dangerous weather, which rears dogmatic character, unbudgeable opinions, and a fatalistic outlook on life. These are people who habitually keep their front doors closed, are suspicious of strangers, consider themselves outside the common run, and, in the fishing villages especially, are deeply and permanently aware of the dark side of their natures. Good and evil are realities for them, not thin religious concepts, and it is sometimes said, not fancifully, that the fisherfolk have markedly different personalities at night.
The district of Buchan, stretching southwards and westwards from Fraserburgh, is good farming land, crossed by stone walls and dotted with low stonebuilt farmhouses. The horizon is wide and low, and the trees have little chance to grow lush bef
ore they are punched by the wind and subdued. To the north and east there swells the sea, sometimes rising mountainously, always menacing and powerful. Yet it is the sea rather than the land which has historically given the Buchan people their livelihood, a fact which does not make it a friend, but rather a foe who has to be coaxed. Tamed it can never be, and to think of facing its mighty wrath and beating it would be absurdly presumptuous.
Fraserburgh, known throughout the area as ‘The Broch’, was built in 1592 on the site of a small village called Faithlie. It is the commercial and trading centre of the district, but it is a novice town compared to the string of fishing villages which stretch along the coasts west and south of it, and which have been inhabited, in one way or another, since the Ice Age. Names like Broadsea (or ‘Bretsie’), St Combs, Cairnbulg, Inverallochy, have bred a people whose lineage ascends beyond time, and who have long since learnt that, when the men go to sea, they must not always be expected to come back. Thousands have not.
The boom in herring fishing, which reached its apogee in the nineteenth century, made the area prosperous, but the sea has always abounded in an endless variety of stock – cod, skate, turbot, mackerel, haddock, whiting, lobster and many more. The difficulty was not, for the most part, depletion of supply, but the constant risk involved in sailing, an exercise which has always been fraught with danger in these rough and unpredictable seas. To navigate a small boat by sextant and the stars required experience passed down through the genes, together with something more than courage. Every fishwife knew that half her family would be swallowed by the sea in time. There are cases on record which show a fishwife losing five of her menfolk, husband and sons, in five separate incidents spread over two years. The harshness of such a life does not breed optimism.
During the season, the fisherman’s day would start at 3 a.m. and sometimes go on till midnight. The men were carried out to the boats on the backs of their wives to keep them dry, and a pretty sight it made, the women hoisting their colourful check skirts above the knee and wading out to sea. You could tell which village the fishwives came from by the distinctive colour of their skirt, or ‘plaid’; it was a primitive kind of badge they wore. (Inverallochy’s was red and black.) While the men were out tossing on the turbulent waves, the women would spend the day gutting and curing the fish, scores of them along the beach and over the rocks, covering every available inch with salt fish, and fighting off with stones the marauding seagulls who, screeching and swooping, could decimate a catch in minutes. On the roofs of the tiny cottages, hardly bigger than dolls’ houses which one had to bend down to enter, the infants of the family would take a chair and cover all the tiles with gutted and split fish to dry in the sun. When the tiles showed moisture, it was time to turn the fish over. The colour, the noise, the smell, all combined to create a picturesque tableau which would entice any painter. What he would not see, or smell, or hear, was the utter exhaustion of the wife and her children at the end of the day, and their empty despair in the knowledge that, however many hours they worked, they would always be poor.
On certain days, the ‘wifie’ and her ‘loons and quinies’ (boys and girls) would travel to the ‘near country’ around Strichen, about seven miles inland, to exchange their fish for butter, eggs, cheese and milk from the farms. (The ‘far country’ was the Grampian mountains.) Also in Strichen and the Broch there were ‘feeing markets’, where the smaller children sometimes hired themselves out to a family which might need an extra pair of hands and be ready to pay for them. More often than not, however, the people of the village would organise themselves to maximum efficiency by adopting, for a few years, a neighbour’s child if too many of their own had been lost and there was room in the bed.
The bed was a wooden box at one end of the cottage, or two wooden frames one on top of the other, into which everyone but the parents piled. At the other end was the open fireplace and the wooden table and benches for eating. All such cottages were known as ‘butt and bens’, and there are many of them surviving today; Dennis Nilsen’s grandmother was born in one, and married from it twenty years later. Even the language spoken was unique to the Buchan people; it is not a dialect of the Scots tongue but a minority language known as ‘Buchan Doric’, completely incomprehensible to an Englishman, and only vaguely recognisable to a west coast Scot. This, too, helps to buttress the Buchan feeling of isolation, independence, and aloof superiority. They are not given to politesse, as they consider it a squandering of their precious energies to make time for the soft and the protected.
It is scarcely to be wondered, then, that the people of the Broch, of Broadsea, of Inverallochy, are distinguished by such sturdy pride in their race and their ancestry. They cannot bear to be patronised, and grow loudly indignant if anyone in authority should address them by surname only, which they consider profoundly insulting. (‘In all my years as a public servant,’ wrote Dennis Nilsen, ‘I never regarded anyone, not even a road traffic victim, as only another face, name and number.’)1 Nor do they willingly grant obeisance to an aristocrat. Christian Watt, a fishwife from Broadsea whose papers were recently edited, wrote that her mother had told her never to depend on a living from landed proprietors, for it took away one’s independence. It was preferable to be a poor fisher, she said, than a well-fed ladies’ maid. ‘Though a Lord or a servant, money will never make you if you are not right yourself.’ Aristocrats who expected fishwives to bow to them were quickly disabused. ‘Nowhere in north east Scotland have I seen this,’ wrote Christian, referring back to the mid-nineteenth century, ‘it is totally against the Buchan character to do such a thing. The Earl of Erroll tried to get folk at Cruden Bay to bow to him, he was feeble-minded. One wifie took his walking-stick and gave him a hiding.’2
There is in the fishing villages of Buchan a long tradition of radicalism brought down through the generations by verbal report and allied to an abiding sense of natural justice. Unlike radicalism of recent growth and political origins, theirs has its roots deep in Scottish history, in nationalist, Jacobite and anti-clerical bias. They were, for instance, angry at the famous Highland clearances, when the Duke of Sutherland’s factor forcibly evicted hundreds of crofters to make way for a better use of the land. The clearances could be justified on economic grounds, but the fisherfolk (to whose villages some of the displaced and homeless crofters retreated) saw only greed and cruelty inflicted upon an ancient humble culture. Young Christian Watt with her acid tongue encountered Lord Macdonald (another intent on clearances) on the pier at Kyleakin on the west coast, and in front of an astonished audience shouted at him, ‘You are lower than the outscourings of any pigsty, causing all that human suffering to innocent people.’3 Had he lived on the east coast, she added, his castle would have been burnt to the ground.
Allied to this iconoclasm is a deep contempt for the divisions of class. It was widely thought that a public school education set the mind in treacle which only a hammering could break, and the strongest disapproval was reserved for those working people who crossed the threshold into a better world, then set up even higher barriers to keep their former fellows out.
Burnt castles were, and still are, a conspicuous feature around Fraserburgh. The castles of Inverallochy, Cairnbulg, Pitsligo, once solid defences against raiders from the sea, had been destroyed by government forces as punishment for Jacobite support in the Buchan district and left open to the sky, like ghastly skulls on the landscape. Children, Dennis Nilsen included, have for generations played amongst the ruins of their people’s past. They are never far from reminders of their history.
Radicalism has displayed itself also in a strong resistance to the established Church. The Presbyterian Church has never held the influence in the north-east of Scotland that it enjoys in the south and west. It has been estimated that four-fifths of the Buchan people were Episcopalian at heart, no doubt out of a desire, once more, to show their independence, the Episcopalian Church being allied to the Jacobite cause. Presbyterianism had eventually to be enforced, a
gainst much riotous rebellion (Presbyterian ministers were dragged from the pulpit), and those who clung to their chosen belief developed a nice sense of persecution which accorded well with their character. The Catholic religion held no attraction for them, and one would not expect it to. ‘It struck me as a religion that may lend itself to a warm Mediterranean climate, where it began,’ wrote Christian Watt, ‘but not to cold northern climes. Cold and hunger sharpen one’s desire for explanations.’4