Mike Walsh - Nicholas Van Hoogstraten. Blood and Retribution

I n the mid-1950s the husband of a teacher at a Roman Catholic school in Shoreham-by-Sea developed a fatal cancer. Somehow one of the pupils learned about the illness and took to going to the dying mans house to read to him every night. The pupil was Nicholas van Hoogstraten. It is one of the few favourable anecdotes about Van Hoogstraten, man or boy, that people tell. Van Hoogstraten, or Mr H as his henchmen call him, has spent a lifetime embroidering the evil that hes done. If there is a good side to him he has gone out of his way to bury it.

His reward is a reputation for arrogance, ruthlessness and brutal violence. It is a reputation that for decades intimidated almost everyone who got in his way and helped make him one of the richest men in Britain. That same reputation was almost Nicolas van Hoogstratens downfall. It was a crucial factor in persuading a jury to convict him of the killing of a business rival. Newspaper headline writers applauded when, in the autumn of 2002, van Hoogstraten was sentenced to ten years in jail and his career seemed to be over.

On a scale of evil of one to ten, he scores at least eleven, pronounced the Daily Mail. The Evening Standard said that his life had been, dedicated to violence, fear, intimidation and hatred.

Yet there are women who have loved Van Hoogstraten and still do. And there are one or two men who say they, too, love him.

What explains this man who made a vast fortune and in the process went persistently out of his way to make himself hated?

Part of it is that Nicholas van Hoogstraten is an actor and a fantasist. He has been making up things about himself good and bad all his life: his family was rich and built the Indian railways; his father was a shipping agent; he made his first fortune from a land deal in the Bahamas; he is a friend of pop stars and prime ministers; he is so dangerous that if you cross him you might find your balls chopped off.

Some of it appears to be utter fabrication, but, like all the best lies, some of it is true.

On 27 February 1945 the Second World War was coming to an end. That morning American tanks smashed across the River Ruhr to come within sight of the ancient Rhineland city of Cologne. That afternoon US Marines recaptured Manila from the Japanese. That night Berlin was blitzed by six hundred RAF Mosquito bombers. And, in the Sussex town of Shoreham- by-Sea , Nicholas van Hoogstraten was born.

The weather in Shoreham was calm and surprisingly warm for the time of year. Temperatures rose above fifty degrees Fahrenheit that day.

At the local Odeon they were showing I Love a Soldier, starring Charlie Chaplins wife, Paulette Goddard. The Dome was showing I Walked with a Zombie. The Plaza had Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back, with Ronald Colman.

On the BBC Home Service it was announced that HRH Princess Elizabeth had mumps.

The local paper, the Worthing Gazette, reported a High Court ruling that the omission of Mr before a gentlemans name in a newspaper report is not defamatory.

Babys Nicholass birth was registered on 13 March. He was christened Nicholas Marcel Hoogstraten. He would add the van twenty-two years later. The Hoogstraten family were from old Flemish stock and were wanderers. His grandfather settled in India, where his father Charles Marcel Joseph Hoogstraten was born. As a young man Charles made his home in Paris, working in the wine trade. He arrived in England on the outbreak of the Second World War and found a job in a munitions factory in Bognor. There he met a local girl, Edna Brookes, and married her. Then he joined the British army.

It is unlikely that Charles was there to see Edna give birth to little Nick. At the time he was a trooper with the Royal Armoured Corps, then battling its way through Holland for the final assault on Germany. In the midst of war a private soldier only qualified for compassionate leave to see someone at home being buried, not to see a baby being born.

When he came back from the war, Private Hoogstraten settled the family in Rustington, on the eastern edge of Littlehampton. A mile and a half from the sea, Rustington was described in post-war guidebooks as a pretty little village that maintained a happy balance of old and new. Today it is another featureless suburb characterised by ugly concrete shops and street after street of semi-detached houses with narrow, forty-foot- long back gardens.

In the late 1930s the place had expanded rapidly to take families from Wales and the north of England. They had come south looking for jobs in nearby Southampton and Portsmouth. But with the outbreak of war this stretch of the Sussex coast was thought to be the place where the Germans might invade, and Rustington began to empty. The nightly Luftwaffe blitzing of the two nearby ports hastened the retreat. When the Hoogstratens came looking for a home in Rustington there were plenty to choose from.

The house that Charles and Edna picked was at the end of a cul-de-sac of tiny, pebble-dashed semis called Conbar Avenue. Today, through a collapsed back fence, you can see the window of young Nicks cramped bedroom at the rear of the house.

The bits and bobs about his childhood which Van Hoogstraten has let slip over the years suggest a violent, dominating father absent from home for long periods, a downtrodden, distant mother and an increasingly resentful child.

His father landed a job after the war as a senior wine steward for the Royal Mail shipping line. His ship was the SS Andes, the Queen of the South Seas according to the brochures. She plied the Southampton Buenos Aires route, which accounts for the long stretches Charles spent away from home. Thanks to the war, he cant have seen much of his son in the first six months of Nicks life, and his job on the Andes meant that he didnt see much more of him later either. The next-door neighbour, Louis Yaxley, believes that Charless prolonged absences were disastrous for Nick, who eventually began to run out of control.

Nick disliked his father. In a 1998 interview, he said: I didnt get on with my father. He always saw me as a rival

He liked his mother Edna even less. My mother was not nice to me. I never had any affection. He viewed her as an object that I had inherited, someone to do the work. My father treated her like that and Im the same. Almost up to her death he would refer to his mother as a whining cow.