That says it all. Now I understand something about you that I missed before, and it explains why you’re trying at every turn to sabotage my project and to misrepresent me.

At first I thought you genuinely believed me to be a misogynist. I thought you were so blinkered by your own dogmatism that you were incapable of seeing past it, but now I wonder if you and you alone have known from the start why I’m doing what I’m doing. I’ve no idea how you could know – I have confided in nobody, and if the police are still clueless in spite of having put all their investigative muscle into it then I can’t see how you could have beaten them to the correct conclusion – but perhaps I’m being naïve. Journalists sometimes set out to investigate, don’t they? Especially when they’re obsessed.

You can’t deny you’re obsessed with me, Sondra (if I may?). Nor can you deny that, in all the thousands of words you’ve written and published about me, you’ve been silent on one much-publicised aspect of Billy’s modus operandi: the white books containing fragments of poetry that he leaves for his victims to find before he kills them. I know you know about the books; it’s inconceivable that you would not know.

Finally I put together two of your omissions and worked out what they jointly mean: your failure to mention the Billy books and your failure to read the two novels I’ve sent you.

Because you’ve read the three Stories of Enlightenment, haven’t you? Even though they had no authors’ names attached to them – certainly not famous names like Toni Morrison and Thomas Hardy. You will no doubt claim this is because the stories were much shorter, but we both know that’s an excuse, a glossing-over of what’s really going on here.

Which is quite simply this: you, Sondra Halliday, are a bibliophobe.

Yes you are.

I’ve seen you (on Twitter, countless times) accused of transphobia and whorephobia, and I’ve seen you protest bitterly as I imagine you are now, reading this, but I am in no doubt: you suffer from bibliophobia. You hate and fear books. It’s a rare condition, but it’s real. Look it up online if you don’t believe me.

Books – the actual physical objects with paper pages and covers and printed words – disgust you. I bet you don’t have a single one in your house, do you? The smell, even at a distance, wafted from another room or floor, is enough to make you gag.