fn1 The identity of this man is protected by a pseudonym.
5
POLICE AND CIVIL SERVICE
Dennis Nilsen had been eleven years and eighty-four days in the army, almost half his life. He was one month from his twenty-seventh birthday when he completed his military career with the rank of corporal and a decoration, the General Service Medal (South Arabia). His conduct as per record book was listed as ‘exemplary’. To this day, he remains a life member of the Army Catering Corps Regimental Association. If asked why he decided not to sign on again, he said that at his age he thought he was still young enough to attempt a career outside, which was true but evasive. He had gradually become more disenchanted with the military mind, particularly as it expressed itself in dealing with the troubles in Ireland (about which there was much solid information as well as gossip at the Maybury), and had felt increasingly uncomfortable on the side of the ‘oppressors’. He felt, crudely, that he was hired to feed those whose job it was to kill on government orders, a role he found at first distasteful, then immoral. The one central ethic of which the army was most proud, that of obeying orders without question, was the very one which most rankled with Corporal Nilsen; how could any intelligent and sensitive man kill another merely because he had been instructed to do so by a superior officer? The final straw was the Bloody Sunday of 1972, when elements of the British army mowed down demonstrators in Londonderry. Dennis Nilsen was horrified to discover that the side of law and order could behave with the same lack of moral scruple as the terrorists, and he felt betrayed, robbed of honour. The consequent practice of ‘internment’, that is imprisonment without charge or trial, and the rumours of torture, convinced Nilsen that he did not belong in the army. He enjoyed the comradeship but was dismayed by the mentality.
Dennis spent about five weeks at home in Strichen between October and December 1972, wondering what to do next. Nagging doubts about the future assailed him. The army resettlement officer had suggested he stay in catering or join the police or prison service. His mother was rather more concerned by his apparent lack of interest in the idea of marriage. If she raised the subject, he would shrug and dismiss it. She remembered that, as a boy, if he had been required to take a girl with him to a local dance, it was invariably his sister Sylvia that he chose. There had once been an occasion when he had received forms from an agency which arranged meetings between strangers for ‘dating’, and had asked his mother how he should describe himself. ‘Good-looking,’ she had said, and he had been frankly astonished that he could be so described. The forms were sent off, and a photograph of a suitable girl received in reply, but nothing had come of it.
Relations with his elder brother Olav had never been cordial. There now occurred an incident which broke their relationship completely. Dennis went to visit Olav and his wife and another couple at home in Fraserburgh, and they all sat around watching television and drinking. The film being shown was Victim, in which Dirk Bogarde played a married man who had to declare to his wife that he was involved in a sexual liaison with another man. It was a courageous and honest film, the first ever to deal with the subject in the British cinema, but it was treated with derision that evening. Dennis was infuriated; he felt the scorn as keenly as if it had been a personal attack. At the Station Hotel later, a row ensued in which Dennis insulted his brother and was hustled outside. Someone hit him, leaving him bruised and bleeding. When he eventually got home to Strichen in the middle of the night, he remained for two hours in the garden shed, refusing to come indoors, although Adam and Betty Scott knew he was there and entreated him. He never did tell them what had happened; Betty, as usual, respected his desire to keep things to himself. Shortly afterwards, Olav told her that he suspected his brother was homosexual. Nilsen wrote: ‘I never spoke to him ever again. He represented everything that existed to put me down (especially my emotions). He was the only member of the family to guess at the scandalous aspects of bisexuality and gave me the power to hate him in his knowledge.’1
Dennis began to be troubled by nightmares prompted by memories of his Arabian experience. The nightmare was generally induced by a combination of drink and soaring classical music. His mother recalls that he would stay up late listening to music and writing poetry. He was a moody uncommunicative stranger in the house.
It was clear that Nilsen could not stay in Strichen for long; he simply did not fit. In an anxious condition, he decided that it would be a traditional and natural progression for him to exchange one uniform for another and become a prison officer or a policeman. He elected the latter, and in December 1972 joined the Metropolitan Police Training School at Hendon, North London. Having passed the sixteen-week course, he was posted to Q Division and attached to Willesden Green Police Station with the designation Police Constable Q287. There he was to remain for exactly a year.
The choice of a career in the police can only have been faute de mieux for a man who was more and more disgruntled with the exercise of authoritarian power. His left-wing propensities were more emphatic than ever, and were quickly confirmed by what he perceived as the dangerous aggression exhibited by some police officers who were all too eager to subdue a suspect while resisting arrest, especially if it offered an excuse for violence. As for himself, he claimed that ‘in my year in the police I never once drew my truncheon, or assaulted any officer, prisoner or member of the public.’2 It has to be said that he never had much excuse to do so, since his duties as a junior constable were not exacting, though he made a number of arrests and grew accustomed to appearing in court. On the other hand, he was well aware that policemen had so often to deal with messes created by incompetent or innocent politicians and were sometimes blamed for being the instruments of an ill-conceived law. It was little wonder that many an honest copper sank rapidly into miserable dejection, exhausted by all-consuming work.
Nilsen’s colleague at Hendon Training School, Ian Johnson, was posted to Willesden Green at the same time, and the two of them were taken in April 1973 to look at the mortuary behind Brent Town Hall with their ‘parent’ copper, Peter Wellstead, responsible for supervising their initiation into the working force:
We enter a shabby little room which displayed all the disarray of an army butchers’ shop behind the scenes. A couple of metal trolleys were lying around with opened bodies upon them. Mostly old men with a wooden block supporting the head with a variety of grotesque facial expressions. Each one cut from neck to navel with the breast/rib bones sawn out so that the examiner could get at the heart and lungs. The back of the head was open to give access to the brain … on one of the trolleys containing an old man’s uncut corpse was the contrasting body of a young girl with a label attached to her left wrist. Ian felt a bit pale. I felt a bit fascinated … We walked out into the fresh air. Our faces were pale and serious and Ian wasn’t feeling too well. Pete knew we were affected and laughed it off. ‘You’ll see a lot more of this in the police,’ he said. He was right.3
Peter Wellstead liked the new recruit and enjoyed talking to him, but he noticed that an indeterminate sense of dissatisfaction clung to him like an extra skin. Nilsen admitted that he was disappointed not to find the same kind of comradeship in the police force as he had been used to in the army, a consequence of anonymous London life; soldiers had perforce to spend all their leisure hours more or less together, policemen went off in different directions to their homes and wives. Dennis Nilsen was left to his own resources, which were few. The big cosmopolitan city did not line up friends for you to choose from; you had to ferret them out. Nilsen knew no one in London and began to feel the awkwardness of isolation in a crowd, a sensation which would deepen as the years progressed. His solution was the common escape of many young men in London; he frequented the pubs, and discovered the huge subterranean homosexual fraternity which eddies around certain public houses in the metropolitan area. To call it a ‘fraternity’ is in reality a cruel misnomer, for the majority of men who congregate in these pubs are not interested in each ot
her except as potential sexual encounters, which they strive hard to keep separate from their normal social lives. They go to look and to display themselves, to parade with a glance that promises orgasm and positively warns that expectations of anything further are to be discounted. The most famous of these pubs is the crowded Coleherne in Earl’s Court, the first that Dennis Nilsen discovered and the crucible of his initiation into an arid homosexual sub-culture. He met a man there at the beginning of 1973 and smuggled him into the Hendon Training School. It was an unsatisfactory and belittling experience.
In August of that year he met another man, a few years younger than himself and the son of an ex-colonel, in the King William IV pub at Hampstead. They went together to Nilsen’s room at the Police Section House and anal sex took place for the first time in Nilsen’s life (and then only once). More importantly, he felt a renewal of the romantic attachment which had bound him to Terry Finch in the last months of his army career. He was ready to commit himself totally and thought he saw the chance of a permanent relationship. But again, his choice had fallen upon the wrong person. Derek Collinsfn1 showed no interest in Dennis Nilsen and had no intention of trying to reciprocate his affection. On the contrary, he was quite happy to ‘sleep around’ with different partners, and although he saw Nilsen on several occasions later, theirs was never anything like an exclusive friendship. ‘He wanted everyone and nobody,’ says Nilsen, who soon realised that his hopes were still-born. In fairness, Collins did not encourage him to think otherwise; the impetus for his emotional surrender was entirely self-generated. Nilsen resigned himself to the inevitable and sought refuge in a growing number of casual encounters:
I was left with an endless search through the soul-destroying pub scene and its resulting one-night stands … passing faces and bodies the unfulfilled tokens of an empty life. A house is not a home and sex is not a relationship. We would only lend each other our bodies in a vain search for inner peace.4
The Derek Collins episode and consequent promiscuity convinced Nilsen that he could not remain in the police force, with any semblance of propriety. He resigned in December 1973 to the amazement of his colleagues, who could not understand why he should want to leave. P.C. Wellstead said he had performed his duties well and appeared to enjoy the work; certainly he never shirked it. He left with a moderate report and with no complaints having been lodged against him. Nobody knew that he had once shone his torch into a car parked in Exeter Road and found two men ‘behaving indecently’. He could not bring himself to arrest them.
For the first four months of 1974 Nilsen was at a loose end and measurably poor. He was also without a home, a novel condition for a man who had thus far been provided with accommodation. He took a room at 9 Manstone Road, London NW8, and sold his General Service Medal for £8 to help pay for it. His employment in these months of limbo was as a security guard at various Crown properties, including the Ministry of Defence Building in Whitehall, the Parliamentary Offices in Bridge Street, and the Old Admiralty Building.
I could gather my thoughts in the quiet evenings and unwind from the hectic life of a policeman. I could even take time to browse through some exhibits at the Tate Gallery depository at Gorst Road, NW10 (I remember it was full of stuffed animals and huge tortoises from the Galapagos Islands).5
There was nothing but a paralysing boredom in the work of a security guard, especially after a career which had been highly active, eventful, even creative. In May 1974 he resigned from P.S.A. Security and after a week summoned the courage to sign on for unemployment benefit. It was an embarrassing and humiliating moment when he presented himself at the Department of Employment Office in Harlesden High Road, NW10; the descent into uselessness had been rapid and total.
Nilsen was interviewed by an executive officer who submitted him for a job in the civil service. On 20 May, he went for interview before a panel at the Regional Office in Hanway House, Red Lion Square, to determine whether he should be offered a post as clerical officer in the Department of Employment itself. His application was successful, and in view of his experience in the Army Catering Corps, it was thought that he would serve best at the Jobcentre in Denmark Street, in the heart of London’s West End, just off Charing Cross Road. Jobcentres, run by the Manpower Services Commission, advertise vacancies in the metropolitan area, mostly low-paid and unskilled, and help to alleviate the chronic unemployment problem in the city. People may walk in off the street, see what is available, and be sent by a clerical officer for interview. Jobcentres are scattered all over London, and the large Denmark Street branch specialises in supplying labour for the hotel and catering trade, a task for which its central position makes it suitable. Many of the staff it places are foreign.
Dennis Nilsen turned up at the hotel and catering employment office in Denmark Street with a letter for Mrs Hawkins, and thought he would ‘give it a try’. He stayed for the next eight years, and was still at the Department of Employment when he was arrested on 9 February 1983.
I warmed to the creative and positive community service aspects of placing an unemployed person in a job vacancy. The number of these ‘placings’ each week gave a genuine feeling of achievement and job satisfaction.6
From the very beginning there was a certain amount of friction in the office, as Nilsen was impatient of bureaucracy and yearned to see results, while many of those he was working with were markedly less aggressive in their approach; his direct manner (the Buchan bluntness surging up) did not fit well with their soft acceptance of the rules. Nevertheless, he threw himself into learning the profession in all its aspects and soon developed his own technique of front-line interviewing, which, to his frustration, he was not called upon often to put to use, being relegated to the telephone most of the time.
In these early stages, Nilsen steered clear of union activities, not wishing to draw attention to himself while ‘on probation’ as it were, but he watched and learned from the enthusiasm of the two activists, Andy Power and Ian Watson, who between them bore most of the union work for their branch on their shoulders. The rest of his colleagues tended to be indifferent. His social life virtually non-existent, he attended meetings held by various left-wing groups and was pressed to join the International Socialists, a move he resisted because he was not attracted to dogma. He says he remained politically independent throughout his civil service career, and it is true that he never joined a party. On the other hand, he did not attend any conservative or right-wing meetings. There was never any doubt where his sympathies lay.
What little social life he had was restricted to inconsequential encounters with a flow of ‘pick-ups’ found in various pubs. All were anonymous and never seen again. Sometimes Nilsen would accompany the man to his house or flat, sometimes he would bring him home to his own tiny room. When the landlady at Manstone Road objected to these mysterious nightly visitors and asked Nilsen to leave, he took a slightly larger room at 80 Teignmouth Road, where the landlady was more accommodating. The years 1974 and 1975 were promiscuous and depressing. Having reached the age of twenty-eight with almost no sexual experience, Nilsen made up for the loss in wilful abandon. All his encounters were made in pubs, especially the William IV in Hampstead and the Salisbury in St Martin’s Lane; of the others, many were known to be exclusively homosexual, while some took on that character on certain days or at specific hours. They included the Black Cap in Camden Town; the Golden Lion in Dean Street, Soho; the Champion in Bayswater Road, and of course the Coleherne in Earl’s Court. In addition, the Pig and Whistle (now closed) in Belgravia was particularly pleasant at Sunday lunchtime, and there Dennis Nilsen met quite a number of people well known to the public.
The danger of entertaining strangers has always been the possibility of assault or blackmail, and when one is finally aware of the risk it is always too late. Blackmail was not threatened against Nilsen, who after all did not represent the promise of attractive bounty, but he did have his share of nasty moments. And he was himself the author of an unpleasant incide
nt which should have been a portent of things to come.
A young man called David Painter called at the Jobcentre where Nilsen worked, looking for casual employment. He was seventeen, and, unknown to Nilsen, had been reported missing by his worried parents. There were no suitable jobs, so Painter left. Quite by chance, Nilsen bumped into him in the street some hours later, and they struck up a conversation, which led to the boy going home with Nilsen to 80 Teignmouth Road. They drank a little and watched a western film on Nilsen’s projector. Later, David Painter went to bed, and Nilsen followed. Nilsen made sexual advances, which Painter discouraged then fell asleep. When he woke to find his host pointing a camera at his face, he panicked, tore his clothes, threw them about the room, screamed and yelled, until at last, when he smashed his arm against a glass partition, Nilsen surrendered his efforts to control the boy and called the police and an ambulance. At Willesden Green Police Station, where he had himself served eighteen months before, Nilsen was closely interrogated, and it was not until the hospital confirmed that the boy had not been seriously molested that the police released him. Painter’s parents were reluctant to press charges for fear of the ordeal of a court appearance, so the incident was filed away and forgotten. Nilsen’s own recollection of the incident was that Painter went berserk for no clear reason, but there can be no doubt that he had been frightened by something in Nilsen’s conduct.
It was less the dangers inherent in a life of casual encounters which were depressing, than the mortifying ephemerality of it all. Nilsen was fast coming to believe that he would forever remain alone. Colleagues at work found him talkative and articulate, but occasionally boring, and he lacked the sense to recognise when he had said enough (even when other people held newspapers in front of their faces) and went on talking as if the most profound interest had been shown. He might have alleviated his isolation by forging friendships with his colleagues after hours, but apart from sharing a drink with a few people in the early evening, after which he would always wander off alone, he kept himself essentially private. So the endless search for companionship continued, with people who did not know him and did not want to. ‘The trouble with “the scene” was that everything was transitory and everyone kept walking away.’
Killing For Company Page 10