You think I’m wrong? You have counter-examples? That’s so sweet and naïve – which is tactful-speak for ‘fucking stupid’. Whenever people say about someone who’s committed an evil act, ‘But he had a happy, loving childhood,’ feel free to say to them confidently, ‘No, he didn’t.’ Not all wounds or causes of hurt are visible to those on the outside.

‘Halliday had an abusive stepfather from a really young age – seven or eight, I think – and a mother who colluded,’ I said.

‘Simon calls her the Hate Preacher,’ said Charlie.

‘I feel sorry for her. She so desperately wants to believe women aren’t as venal and vicious as men. Maybe she never went to school with other girls between the ages of twelve and eighteen. Why did Billy Dead Mates send her a Toni Morrison novel?’

‘We don’t know. He also sent her Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. Books are everywhere in this investigation. Billy’s little white ones with lines from poems in them …’ Charlie gave me a pointed look.

‘And now my copy of Delirium of the Brave.’

‘Yes.’

‘Books don’t commit murders,’ I said. ‘Even the very worst of them. That’s why books are so much better than people.’

Lifeworld online, 14 January 2015

BILLY DEAD WOMEN STRIKES AGAIN

by Sondra Halliday

Yesterday, Culver Valley Police revealed that the killer they’re failing to catch, while affectionately dubbing him Billy Dead Mates, has struck for a fifth time. Guess what? Once again, the victim was a woman: 82-year-old Marion Hopwood from Silsford. Unlike Billy’s other victims, Marion wasn’t shot. That would have attracted too much attention, given she was in hospital at the time of her death. Instead, she was injected with something very similar to battery acid.

How do the police know Marion was killed by Billy and not by one of the many other lethal male death machines freely roaming our streets? Well, a little white book containing one line of poetry was found in her hospital bed shortly before she died, and, as we all know by now, Billy serves a little white book to each of his targets before killing her, like a sinister murder-subpoena.