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he moans, witheringly, that the only character trait they ever shared was a ‘fondness for cock’.
    Whether or not Betty Nilsen had a particularly flirtatious nature when Dennis was growing up, there is no doubt in her early twenties she turned many of the heads of theservicemen looking for relief from the war. As Fraserburgh became increasingly important as an RAF base, many local halls were commandeered as makeshift places of rest and recreation. On Fridays and Saturdays, romance happened quickly. Betty Whyte was petite with a delicate, pale face framed by brown hair, and would use all her youthful guile to sneak past her parents to get to social events. If it proved too hard to make it to the evening dos, she would try in the cafés during the afternoons.
    This was how Betty Whyte met Sgt Olav Nilsen of the Norwegian Resistance. Olav was 6ft-2in tall, fair and rugged. He came over and rescued her from the unwanted attention of some RAF boys who had invited themselves to the table where she and her friend were sitting. Betty was won over by his gallant act and, afterwards, they walked off down the street together, hand in hand. It was March 1942 and she was 21.
    They got married a couple of months later on 2 May. Things almost immediately started to go wrong. Olav soon left in search of more excitement and, no doubt, other women. And whatever military value he might have had – no one seems to know – quickly expired. He ended up in a tobacco factory. This was entered as his profession on Dennis’s birth certificate. He was also known for drinking heavily in the town’s pubs. Betty stayed in her grandparents’ flat. But despite the unconventional marriage, Olav still managed to father three children by Betty. The oldest was Olav junior; the youngest was Sylvia. In the middle was Dennis, born on 23 November 1945.
    Olav senior took some interest in the eldest child but, otherwise, he didn’t take any of his responsibilities seriously.Later, Dennis would discover ‘Nilsen’ wasn’t even his real name. It was a pseudonym Olav had adopted for his Scottish adventure. Nilsen says this contributed to his poor sense of identity as a child.

    During his first decade in prison, Nilsen would look back over these early years like a detective in search of clues. In letters, he told me how he suspected his mother had been hiding things from him. Eventually, he became convinced that Olav wasn’t even his real dad. He thought that explained why he and his sister were treated differently, and how it was that, when Sylvia was born in 1948, Olav petitioned for divorce on the grounds of adultery. He believed that they had had a different father.
    As Nilsen stewed over his origins, his bitterness about his relationship with his mother festered. Increasingly, he felt that all his life she had been hiding important information from him. ‘Why will she not face me on any visit?’ he demanded rhetorically in one letter to me. In another fit of pique, he wrote, ‘Mrs Betty Scott is protecting herself from any hard and embarrassing questions in the future.’ Later in the letter, Nilsen remembers his mother losing her cool and shouting, ‘You wouldn’t know your father if you met him in the street.’ Why not, he wondered? There were plenty of photographs of him, after all.
    The more Nilsen reflected on his relationship with his mother, the more theories he developed. One was that his very existence reminded her of an affair, or worse … maybe a rape. That, he thought, would, at least, explain his mother’s reluctance to touch him and why she was so keen to dumphim on the ‘cold practicality’ of Granny. Such thoughts helped Nilsen believe that his family really was partly to blame for his later problems. In a letter, he complained to me there was ‘only one villain’ in Brian Masters’
Killing for Company.
His mother, he felt, should have been a close second, with his father not far behind. But of all the traumas Nilsen has