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convinced psychiatrists at his trial indicate that Nilsen’s words probably do reflect genuine feelings. The worst aspect of Aberdeenshire life, for him, was the sense of hardness and brutality. He observes it was a necessary character of the fishing trade which, when Nilsen grew up, generally thrived. The life of the fishermen was, he says, ‘a harsh, uncompromising life constantly tacking close to the cold lips of sudden death’. But that didn’t make it any easier for him to warm to them or they to him. As his own brother said of Dennis, ‘Fraserburgh isn’t a very good place for a poofter.’
    After Nilsen’s arrest, most locals – both from Fraserburgh and his second home town of Strichen – concluded that Dennis had been born with something ‘wrong’ in his brain. That belief persists today. Even apart from what he had done, it was not hard to believe that there might have beensomething wrong with him. And it was also the case that mental instability was not unknown within Nilsen’s own family – a great-aunt of his had spent most of her life in a mental asylum. It’s also true that generations of intermarrying meant that mental problems were, in fact, not uncommon in the area.
    Dennis Nilsen, however, wasn’t a simple product of the local gene pool. His father Olav Nilsen, was a Norwegian resistance soldier who had come over during the Second World War. He had done so as a part of the British-organised ‘Shetland Bus’. The Nazis had occupied Norway since 1940, and in 1941 the British Secret Service set up an operation to bring key personnel over to the Shetland Islands or northern Scotland using Scottish fishing vessels. Olav Nilsen was one of those who made their way to northern Aberdeenshire. Fraserburgh, with its RAF bases, was a centre of military activity at the time. In fact, it was even nicknamed ‘Little London’ because of all the air-raids it had received. Other than how he arrived in Scotland, very little is known about Olav Nilsen.
    Nilsen’s maternal line came from the Whyte family. His grandparents were Andrew and Lily. They were born in the 1890s into what he calls ‘poverty, hard work and danger’. They married young and they first set up home at Inverallochy, a small port near Fraserburgh. Later, they moved to Broadsea, a little way inland. Finally, they settled in Academy Road in Fraserburgh, where Dennis Nilsen was born and where he, his mother and siblings would live until 1954.
    Academy Road, like much of Fraserburgh, was comprisedof geometrically square, granite council houses terraced into four reasonably-sized flats. In ‘Feelings’, Nilsen describes them as ‘blockhouse-prim, solid and grim with a black smoke of hell spouting from the red clay chimney pots standing in neat rows over the grey slate roofs.’ Number 47 was at the end of one small terrace. The Whytes occupied the top flat.
    It was an uninspiring place to live but the couple never aspired to more. Besides, they never had any money. Despite working all his life as a fisherman, Andrew Whyte failed to own his own boat. This meant he was dependent on other fisherman for his livelihood and, when times were lean in the town, he would be unemployed. He found claiming welfare shameful. When his wife had to supplement their social security money with cleaning work, that humiliated him even more.
    Andrew would try to compensate by telling elaborate stories. Down at the harbour, he had quite a reputation. Back at home, though, he was careful not to let his story-telling get in the way of the family’s spiritual life. God and the Bible were woven into their daily routine and it came as a great comfort to them when their daughter Betty, as a teenager, also became interested in the ‘Faith Mission’. In her later years, Betty Scott would talk a lot about her faith. Dennis, however, remembers his mother’s evangelicalism with scepticism. He thought, at heart, she was sensual rather than religious. In one letter to me,