“I saw my supposed step-grandfather looking at me out of the mirror. The resemblance grew stronger as I got older. I had his eyes, the same shaped ears, his sallow complexion, his long neck. He was a bigger man than I was, a more masculine-looking man, and I think part of his great dislike of me came from the fact that he hated to see his own features in a weak and girlish form. He despised vulnerability…”
“Yeah, of course Dennis was his,” Agnes told me. “He [Awdry] started on me when I was thirteen. I was never allowed out, never had a boyfriend. When my mother realized I was expecting, Awdry told her I’d been sneaking out to meet someone. What else was he going to say? And Mum believed him. Or she pretended to.”
Agnes fled her stepfather’s overcrowded house shortly before Dennis’s second birthday, when she was sixteen-and-a-half.
“I wanted to take Dennis with me, but I left in the middle of the night and I couldn’t afford to make noise. I had nowhere to go, no job, no money. Just a boyfriend who said he’d look after me. So I went.”
She was to see her firstborn only twice more. When she found out William Awdry was serving nine months in jail for assault, she returned to her mother’s house in hopes of snatching Dennis away.
“I was going to tell Bert [her first husband] he was my nephew, because Bert didn’t know anything about that whole mess. But Dennis didn’t remember me, I don’t think. He wouldn’t let go of my mum, wouldn’t talk to me, and my mum told me it was too late now and I shouldn’t have left him if I wanted him so bad. So I went away without him.”
The last time Agnes saw her son in the flesh was when she made a trip to his primary school and called him over to the fence to speak to her. Though he was barely five, Creed claimed in our second interview to remember this final meeting.
“She was a thin, plain little woman, dressed like a tart,” he told me. “She didn’t look like the other boys’ mothers. You could tell she wasn’t a respectable person. I didn’t want the other children to see me talking to her. She said she was my mother and I told her it wasn’t true, but I knew it was, really. I ran away from her.”
“He didn’t want nothing to do with me,” said Agnes. “I gave up after that. I wasn’t going to go to the house if Awdry was there. Dennis was in school, at least. He looked clean…
“I used to wonder about him, how he was and that,” Agnes said. “Obviously, you do. Kids come out of you. Men don’t understand what that is. Yeah, I used to wonder, but I moved north with Bert when he got the job with the GPO and I never went back to London, not even when my mum died, because Awdry had put it about that if I turned up he’d kick off.”
When I told Agnes I’d met Dennis a mere week before visiting her in Romford, she had only one point of curiosity.
“They say he’s very clever, is he?”
I told her that he was, undoubtedly, very clever. It was the one point on which all his psychiatrists agreed. Warders told me he read extensively, especially books of psychology.
“I don’t know where he got that from. Not me…
“I read it all in the papers. I saw him on the news, heard everything he did. Terrible, just terrible. What would make a person do that?
“After the trial was over, I thought back to him, all naked and bloody on the lino where I’d had him, with my stepfather standing over us, threatening to drown him, and I swear to you now,” said Agnes Waite, “I wish I’d let it happen.”
Strike stubbed out his cigarette and reached for the can of Tennent’s sitting beside the ashtray. A light rain pattered against his windows as he flicked a little further on in the book, pausing midway through chapter two.
… grandmother, Ena, was unwilling or unable to protect the youngest member of the household from her husband’s increasingly sadistic punishments.
Awdry took a particular satisfaction in humiliating Dennis for his persistent bedwetting. His step-grandfather would pour a bucket of water over his bed, then force the boy to sleep in it. Creed recalled several occasions on which he was forced to walk to the corner shop without trousers, but still wearing sodden pajama bottoms, to buy Awdry cigarettes.
“One took refuge in fantasy,” Creed wrote to me later. “Inside my head I was entirely free and happy. But there were, even then, props in the material world that I enjoyed incorporating into my secret life. Items that attained a totemic power in my fantasies.”
By the age of twelve, Dennis had discovered the pleasures of voyeurism.
“It excited me,” he wrote, after our third interview, “to watch a woman who didn’t know she was being observed. I’d do it to my sisters, but I’d creep up to lit windows as well. If I got lucky, I’d see women or girls undressing, adjusting themselves or even a glimpse of nudity. I was aroused not only by the obviously sensual aspects, but by the sense of power. I felt I stole something of their essence from them, taking that which they thought private and hidden.”
He soon progressed to stealing women’s underwear from neighbors’ washing lines and even from his grandmother, Ena. These he enjoying wearing in secret, and masturbating in…
Yawning, Strike flicked on, coming to rest on a passage in chapter four.
… a quiet member of the mailroom staff at Fleetwood Electric, who astonished his colleagues when, on a works night out, he donned the coat of a female co-worker to imitate singer Kay Starr.
“There was little Dennis, belting out ‘Wheel of Fortune’ in Jenny’s coat,” an anonymous workmate told
