And his records are unlikely to be beaten for a very long time.

Go back to the Academy Awards in ninety-seven. Remember how Titanic scooped armfuls of golden trophies? What else was up for best picture? Were you pleased with the outcome of best animated short?

You remember the performances in As Good as It Gets and how Good Will Hunting could have cleaned up on any other year. But James Cameron took $200 million and turned it into $2 billion. He got cinema-goers to sit and watch a film, not for ninety minutes, but for 195 minutes. It made huge technological advances while creating two new superstars.

It is spoken about in the same terms as Ben Hur and Gone with the Wind. It doesn’t matter if it was critically acclaimed, because it created its own legend and surpassed previous records that hadn’t been broken for years.

Now take The People of Choice. As a cult, they may not have as many members as The Peoples Temple but they are followed by more and more people every day. They may not go down as the largest cult ever but that’s fine. Because they are not a cult. That’s just what the other people call it.

The biggest cult is organised religion. We could never compete with that.

So, take me. The greatest serial killer that ever lived.

Two hundred and fifty-five people.

It’s a record that’s unlikely to be beaten in a long while, though I have laid out the tools for anyone who wishes to challenge.

When people talk of killers, they will remember Bundy, of course. And the brutality of the Manson Family. Even that Zodiac fraud. But when they talk of Shipman, it will be to compare him to the man who overtook him. The one in first place. The one with a murderous heritage. Who allowed himself to be captured because he had finished his work.

You will remember his name.

126

It reads like a self-help book. A manual on how to start your own fake cult so you can kill as many people as possible.

Detective Sergeant Pace doesn’t know what to do.

This is not his case. But he’s in it now.

If there were another three officers, they could take thirty pages each and work their way through much quicker. Maybe the book is there to delay, so that the doctors can make a run for it. The door was left wide open and the evidence Pace holds in his hands is there on purpose. Not necessarily for him to find but for somebody to find, at some point.

He decides to read the first chapter and then skim read the rest.

It starts by talking about starting a cult. How you never go into something believing it to be harmful. That a group of people with similar interests and beliefs are known as a church. But it is other people, those outside this possibly peaceful regime that devalue the things they do not know or understand. That label something that needs no label. That throw around the word cult like a cursed word.