Detective Sergeant Pace does not speak. Now he is the one who listens.

‘I am a person of choice. Now and always with courage. And I choose not to fear. This is the only solution. It is the end. There is but one certainty. I am the last.’

And he says it again.

‘I am the last.’

134

If you ever saw the police footage of Harold Shipman being interviewed, it’s odd. He’s awkward. Doesn’t say too much. Doesn’t give anything away. You know he’s psychotic, he’s disgusting, what he did over that time to all those people is unthinkable. But he comes across, at times, as timid. Then he’ll flip it and seem arrogant.

Dr Henri Artaud displays no such dichotomy in character.

He wants Pace to know what he did and how many people’s deaths can be attributed to his name.

Artaud is strapped into the back of Pace’s car, his hands still cuffed, uncomfortably, behind his back. Pace slams the door shut, not listening to his doctor.

He should have called it in. He should have waited on that bridge as the first police officer to arrive on the scene. He left the place in chaos. But he left with the man responsible. That’s what matters to Detective Sergeant Pace.

They’re travelling for a minute or so, back in the direction that Pace came from, and nobody speaks.

‘You know it’s only two hundred and fifty-four because of you?’ Artaud eventually chimes in.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You, Detective. You’re supposed to be dead. You’re supposed to be lying on the concrete of Tower Bridge with your skull smashed in. You would have taken me to two hundred and fifty-five kills. Now it’s only two hundred and fifty-four.’

‘Oh. Is that all?’ His tone is sarcastic and you can tell he is rolling his eyes without even seeing his face.

‘You cheated Death, Mr Pace. It was your time to go. You may need to keep a look over your shoulder. The shadows will be closing in.’ Artaud is trying to rattle his captor. Just for fun. Just to torment him on the way back to the police station. He was his psychiatrist. He made a note of Pace’s chronic paranoia the very first time they met. And Pace said hardly anything in that initial session.

‘Bad luck for you, eh, Doc?’

‘Don’t be silly. I was there waiting for you. Not you, personally, but one of your kind. I’m done. The People of Choice will end with me.’

‘Thank God for that. I’m so bored of you.’ Pace gives as good as he gets.

Artaud smiles.

‘There’s nothing you want to know? You’re waiting until you can record me before you interrogate, is that it? What about the whole anything you say can be taken down in evidence thing?’

‘I haven’t said that to you,’ Pace confirms. And he hasn’t. Dr Artaud has only been cuffed, he has not been formally arrested yet. ‘But it seems like you are itching to tell me something. So, go ahead. I’ll make a note.’