Somebody just called it a compound.

One of the other people.

Look on as the net draws in. As the place is sieged. Listen to a news reporter as they say the words People of Choice cult. A moment has been captured. A story has been created.

It is not easy to get hold of guns in the UK so this is not another Waco. There are no bullets or fires. There is no need for tear gas. The People of Choice do not come quietly because they do not come at all.

Wait a while for the crime-scene photos to be leaked, showing those final members lying dead around the house after taking a concoction of cyanide-laced red wine. This is what people will talk about. This is what they will tell their friends.

Stick around as a dead legal graduate is credited with organising a suicide cult that was responsible for the death of sixty-two of its members. More than Heaven’s Gate. More than Aileen Wournos.

Not as many as Jonestown. Or Shipman.

Or Artaud.

She is a fake leader of a fake cult.

Little work. Minimum effort. Maximum impact.

With a legacy she does not deserve. But a legacy all the same. Somebody.

This is the world that Dr Henri Artaud was fighting.

A simpler way to leave a legacy is to write a journal. Keep a diary. Leave word of how you lived your life and how others could follow after you have passed on.

Take Swinley Forest. Handcuff a doctor to a tree. Burn his journal. Kill his life’s work.

Now wait. Twelve months. Check the news for a small story about a lonely man in the woods, his arms stuck on a branch above his head, his shoulder pressed into the trunk of the tree, his thighs resting on the leaf-covered detritus, the key to his handcuffs just out of reach. The public, with their seven-second attention span, have moved on. The People of Choice are no longer interesting. Who cares? They have caught the mastermind behind those atrocities.

And the note found in the dead man’s pocket is inscribed with the mantra of a suicide cult. When he is examined, it will be found that he was suffering from late-stage lung cancer. He probably took his own life before the disease could consume him. That is the conclusion.

That is how it is reported.

For the few people who are still listening.

So take Dr Henri Artaud. A doctor with cancer. A smoker. That’s it. Not a career criminal. Not a genius. Not a committed man. A man of ideals. Not the most prolific serial killer of modern times. Not the person who duped 255 people into taking their own lives so that he could cleanse his little corner of the world.

A doctor. With cancer.

A smoker.

A nothing.

A real nobody.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS