You might think that planting a seed in the mind of a professional headshrinker would be more difficult than a broken boxer or a scared au pair or a sleep-deprived, drug-addled broker. Because you have to allow it to fester and create doubt. You have to massage the idea to the point where you can control that person with either fear or confidence.

You’d think someone with a degree in psychology would be wise to that. Here’s the thing: if they are, Dr Erickson would listen to what they have to say and advise. No seed would be planted. They would simply be treated. Not every patient has to jump off a bridge or chew the barrel of a gun. But if they’re beaten down enough by life, if the job has got to them so badly that they can’t perform to the best of their ability, it’s easier to take advantage. They can be recruited to a suicide cult where they never inquired about membership.

The job continued to erode the motivation of the Shrink and the seed took root. And each day that passed, he felt worse and more useless than before. The branches of doubt spread within him until the only reaction he could have to seeing the words Nothing Important Happened Today was to flush the note down the toilet, float through several sessions, including a couple who were both depending on alcohol to make it through the day and a morbidly obese man who was lying to himself about what he consumed, lock his filing cabinet and jump off Tower Bridge, smashing his midsection against the railing before flipping over into the Thames and drowning because he had no feeling in his body after the impact.

Easy.

Shipman never had this kind of finesse.

116

242 – DETECTIVE

He leaves the front door open when he sets off. That’s it. That tiny detail leads all the way to the top of The People of Choice. Yes, you can ensure that everybody that is chosen dies. You know that you send them a letter and it will trigger a reaction to get them to a certain place at a certain time and that action will result in their death.

And you can add it to your tally.

You can catch up with Shipman and overtake him and reach your goal and be lauded as the greatest and most prolific killer in history. But you deal with human beings. And then you forget that they are so different. That they are so complicated. That they are nuanced.