No, I’m not, I protested silently. I know so much more than my brother does about death. I’m the one who can be objective about it. Drew was thinking of his own loss while Marion was dying. I didn’t feel I stood to lose in the same way, so I thought about her deprivation, and how everything she had – her breath, her thoughts, her memories – was about to be wiped out forever.

If I could have saved her life, I’d have done it in a heartbeat. I viewed her death as the most horrifying tragedy: not because it was Marion, but because it was death. Drew was too busy crying over his grandmother to notice the encroaching epidemic that was – is – coming for all of us. That’s why he could stay in the room and I had to get the hell out.

What I didn’t realise was that Death had a human representative on Ward 10 that day: you, Billy.

I don’t hate you any more, not now that I understand why you did what you did. The five murders you committed were horrifying and unjustifiable, but once I knew your reason – the bizarre, meticulous logic of it – the personal antipathy I felt fell away. Yours was a mindset that only intense suffering could have produced. That’s why I can’t condemn you as evil through and through. I think you honestly believed you could redeem your own suffering by creating its equal and opposite. And while you planned and carried out your crimes, you were temporarily anaesthetised: focusing on creating pain for others prevented you from experiencing your own agony.

I understand all that because I, too, go to great lengths to avoid feeling the pain that’s lying in wait for me.

Would I ever commit murder? I doubt it. But I understand why you did. In order to make sense of your thought process and how you must have felt, I’ve had to build a model of your mind inside my own. I’ve forced myself to inhabit that model and, when I do, everything you’ve done makes perfect sense.

I’m writing this book because I want it to make sense to other people, too; not only to you, me and Simon Waterhouse. Also because it seemed the obvious thing to do. There has to be a book about you, Billy. How can there not be?

Chapter 11

11

13/1/2015