Jules eyed him with the scrutiny of a woman used to filing emotional stability assessments.

The Minister for Justice has said there’ll be an inquiry. After the trial.

That would be the time for it, he said quietly.

With her only non-buttery finger, she wheeled the tablet back towards her. Reading aloud: We must ask whether, in our rational age, we should any longer tolerate extreme and unsupported belief in some higher force. Especially when such beliefs lead to acts of incomprehensible violence. Prodding him for emotion as a child pokes a worm to confirm it’s alive.

Not all religious fundamentalists are psychotic, he said. And one can be psychotic without committing murder.

She nodded, pleased with her result. Yet it happens often enough, she said, that most psychotics are kept on strong pharmaceuticals and under close supervision.

Again, not all religious fundamentalists are psychotic.

Example?

Nanna Logan.

His father’s mother, who preached Hell’s tortures for non-believers but was only a danger to others when she insisted on cooking after the onset of Alzheimer’s.

Jules’s smile said, You lose.

I met your Nanna Logan.

Hardly psychotic, he insisted.

His wife chewed and swallowed a mouthful of toast.

That’s debatable.

The train trundles and lurches into motion. In due course, he will speak on the matter in court, in his best psychologist’s voice, wearing a suit appropriate to an Expert Witness, knowing his opinion is likely to have material consequences for the growing campaign to have religious fundamentalism contained and treated. His words will spool out from the stenographer’s fingers, into newspaper editorial columns and across the internet. They will send one young woman to a secure mental unit, or alternatively to be endlessly punched, kicked and spat upon in a regular prison. They may be transmuted into words on the statute books; they may become part of the reason why this or that person is prescribed (or not prescribed) this or that treatment. They could be the most powerful words he has ever uttered, more powerful even than It’s over, which contained enough emotional force to forge the most beautiful human being he has ever known.

Something the size and texture of an unripened plum materializes in his throat.

The problem is, he’s not sure he’s that far from crazy himself.

If religious fundamentalism is a form of mental illness, what about grief? For surely, one as much as the other will drive a person to insensible acts. In this last week alone he has entered a toilet cubicle purely for the relief of banging his head repeatedly against the door of it. He abandoned a week’s worth of shopping in its trolley and wandered into the car park in oblivious tears, because a passing shopper happened to laugh when he thought the word ‘glue’.