Can’t you just imagine the discussions they’ve been having, all these DC No-Solves who have failed to put an end to the killing spree? ‘These murders must be about friendship. Perhaps he resents best friends because he never had a bestie himself,’ they say to one another.

By calling him Billy Dead Mates, they’re inviting us to sympathise with a murderer. ‘Poor, lonely Billy,’ is the subliminal message. ‘If only someone had extended the hand of friendship and provided a shoulder for him to cry on, perhaps he wouldn’t have grown desperate enough to kill.’

And just who might these hypothetical people be that failed to invite poor Billy to their sleepovers and summer houses? Could they be girls and women, by any chance? We’re usually the ones expected to open our hearts and our legs, to provide emotional sustenance to needy men incapable of taking responsibility for their own actions. Make no mistake: although no male detective has said so explicitly, if Billy has been lonely all his life, then the underlying assumption is that somewhere, somehow, a woman is to blame. Perhaps his mother didn’t let him play out with the other children on their street, or an ex-girlfriend humiliated him by mocking the size of his todger. Does he maybe have a shrewish wife who never lets him go to the pub with the lads after work?

I’m beyond certain that if I were to put all this to DI Giles Proust or DC Simon Waterhouse, they would vehemently deny they’re thinking along these lines. They’d insist that they blame Billy and no one but Billy for the four murders he’s committed so far. They would claim that the name Billy Dead Mates, with its implicit reference to Billy No Mates, was in no way intended to elicit sympathy for a killer. To which I would say, ‘Oh, really? Then why aren’t you calling him Billy Dead Women?’

That’s right, folks. He might have killed two pairs of best friends, but it’s telling that the police are pushing that angle so hard, isn’t it? We know that nearly all of the violence in our patriarchal woman-hating society is male. This isn’t a controversial feminist assertion; it’s a simple fact. Toxic masculinity is responsible for more than 90 per cent of fatal assaults in the UK. The overwhelming majority of murders of women are committed by men. Yet, again and again, the police and the media conspire to conceal what’s going on, which is nearly always the same thing: lethal male violence against women and girls.