“Is this a free-form poem, Waterhouse? Is the end in sight?”

Simon felt his face heat up. He resolved to stick to simple language. “Just one thing to add,” he said. “Maybe he—”

“One thing to add to reason number two?” Proust cut in again. “If only we had a printed order of service.”

“No, this is a fourth possible reason, one I’ve just thought of: he liked the idea of newspaper headlines saying, ‘Bryn Gilligan Not Guilty of Any Murders, Despite Confessions.’ If we look into it and find he didn’t do any of the four, he gets to be found innocent four times. Might make a nice change after being found guilty for the drugs thing, having first insisted he was innocent. Kind of like a reversal. The general public gets a vague sense of ‘Oh, that guy wasn’t guilty after all.’”

“And the cruelly overlooked third reason?” Proust asked wearily. “He wanted to practice his cursive handwriting, and it takes longer to write four names than one?”

“Third reason: he knows what it’s like to do something stupid and be vilified for it. He knows exactly how shit that feels. By trying to take the blame for these four murders, thinking he might succeed in getting them attributed to him, he’s protecting the four real murderers from similar vilification. He’s going to kill himself anyway, so he’s got nothing to lose and plenty to gain. He’s noble—the patron saint of sinners.”

“See my earlier point,” Gibbs said. “A twat.”

“No, you don’t get it. He doesn’t want to help them to escape justice so that they can kill more people. He wants to help them so they’ll think, ‘I’ve got a real chance here—to live a better life, stay out of trouble.’”

“Got that, everybody?” Proust was looking only at Simon. “Bryn Gilligan has more motivations than Starbucks has branches on UK high streets. Also like Starbucks branches, some of them appear to be miles apart.”

“Have you never met anyone with several contradictory impulses at once?” said Simon. “I’m not saying his thoughts were consistent, or that he was full of great ideas. He’d decided the way forward was suicide, remember?”

“Instead of creating morbid fantasies on behalf of a dead cheat, let’s examine the facts,” said Proust. “On the one hand, we have a letter in which Gilligan, who had both motive and opportunity, plainly confesses to murdering Damon Blundy as well as a few other people, and on the other hand, we have Waterhouse telling us that he didn’t because of atonement, sacrifice, saintliness and noble pyres. I know which I find more persuasive.”