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given as reasons for his psychological warping, the one mentioned most often did not directly concern either.

    For many years, Dennis Nilsen considered the death of his grandfather to be the defining event of his early life. The incident happened when he was almost six. At the time, the family was still living in the grandparents’ flat. Nilsen remembers there being an unhappy atmosphere and continual arguments between mother and grandmother about how to look after the children. Even when things were quiet there was tension.
    Grandad, however, exuded a kind of calm, masculine serenity. It drew Dennis to him. Everyone noticed how unusually close they were. In her last television interview, Nilsen’s mother even held back a tear as she reminisced about how Dennis and Grandad would be seen walking around the town and looking at the boats in the harbour. She said at weekends they would fly kites down by the beach. Her heart was warmed by the sight of them together – it helped compensate for the lack of a real father.
    In October of 1951, Whyte, uncharacteristically, started complaining of extreme tiredness. He quit choir and missed church, but still he carried on working. One day, we hear, he went out to sea looking particularly seasick. The nextmorning, he failed to appear up on the deck. His crewmates went to his bunk to wake him; they found him dead. It was 31 October and he was 62.
    Nilsen first described this day soon after his arrest. It wasn’t just the death, he said, but also the cold, emotionless way the news was broken to him that caused his emotional scars. One day he remembered running around amid the normal bustle of everyday life and the next his mother was telling him to go and see Grandad ‘laid out’ in his coffin.
    Grandad’s body was displayed in the front room. Apparently, no explanation was given as to what had happened nor to what it meant. Grandad just lay there in a cheap, plain, wooden box. In his book, Nilsen tells us the undertaker had dressed him in white long-johns and his weather-beaten face looked like it needed a shave. When little Dennis asked why he looked so strange, the response received was that it was because Grandad had ‘gone to a better place’. Nilsen says this shocked and confused him. He felt he was being asked to accept things he couldn’t comprehend. Would he see his grandad again ‘when he was better’ he wondered? If not, then why did Grandad leave? What does it mean to be dead?
    Nilsen’s initial account led Brian Masters to conclude that seeing his dead grandfather started the boy’s personality problems. He believes that while Grandad was laid out, death and love became fused in his mind. To make matters worse, simultaneously, his inner world became totally separated from his outward personality.
    Nilsen encouraged this theory: ‘My troubles started there,’ he told Masters, ‘it blighted my personality permanently. I have spent all my emotional life searching for my grandfatherand, in my formative years, no one was there to take his place.’ But now he says he previously overstated the importance of the event. Whereas it was once the defining event, now he is more inclined to consider it to be merely part of a jigsaw – the other elements were his poor mothering, the rejection of his difference by his contemporaries, misdirected sexuality and a sense of utter worthlessness.
    There is also more to Nilsen’s re-evalution of his grandad’s passing than just readjusting its importance within a general scheme. His whole attitude towards the man has changed. Anyone familiar with the hazy memories of Grandad reproduced in
Killing for Company
would immediately notice a radical change in tone in his autobiography. His fond memories have all but disappeared. There’s no ‘being borne aloft on the tall, strong shoulders of my great hero and protector, my grandfather’, or being rescued by Grandad’s ‘Magic Sponge’.
    The reason for this change in attitude is