While David Peace’s Munichs, published this month, centres on one of English sport’s worst tragedies — when, on 6 February 1958, a plane taking Manchester United back home from a European match crashed on take-off at Munich airport, leaving 23 passengers dead, including eight players — his setting is broader.

This is a story of Fifties England, regarded by the nostalgic as football’s golden age. It is also a story of modern England, a reflection on what we have lost.

These were the days when the game was dominated by clubs in the industrial heartlands of northern England and the Midlands. Wolverhampton Wanderers, one of the founding clubs in the Football League, won three titles that decade and beat some of Europe’s best in floodlit games televised by the BBC. TV ownership boomed in the coronation year of 1953, allowing the nation to watch two Lancashire clubs, Blackpool and Bolton Wanderers, contest that year’s FA Cup final. The sport of the industrial working class had become the national game and the country had never felt more united.

It was in the mid-Fifties, as “austerity Britain” turned into “modernity Britain”, that a young Manchester United team emerged to rival Wolves for glamour. The press began calling them “the Busby Babes”. When the Irish football broadcaster and former Manchester United player Eamon Dunphy first saw them as a youngster, he was struck by their “trim and dashing” modern V-necked red shirts. As he describes in his biography of Matt Busby, A Strange Kind of Glory, the Busby Babes were “unearthly, handsome creatures from another planet, more heroic than any movie star we’d seen or could imagine”. Football fans crowded grounds to see them play.

When news of the crash broke, millions followed the reports on their televisions. A stoical nation was broken. There was some initial cause for hope: Duncan Edwards, the 21-year-old shining star of the team, already capped by England 18 times, clung to life in hospital for 15 days. In Peace’s prose, sometimes sentimental, always heartfelt, Edwards was “a magnificent boy, always cheerful, always smiling, always ready for a laugh and a giggle; he was a lovely lad, and now he was gone”.

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As the mourning begins in this powerful and moving story, Peace sees colour being drained from the nation. On the day of Edwards’s funeral in Dudley, he writes: “That Black Wednesday in the Black Country, the world was white at first that day, with sleet, with snow, but then was turned to grey and black and into slush and mud by the thousands upon thousands.” But the generosity of this novel lies in its refusal to elevate one player above another, a democratic style and spirit that is both intrinsic to how Peace writes and in tune with the team he describes. “We don’t like picking out individuals at Old Trafford,” is how Jimmy Murphy puts it, the Manchester United coach who had the grim task of putting together a new team after the crash.

The approach can be demanding on the reader. Munichs skips none of the funerals, including those of the club officials and football reporters who died in the disaster, and we are made to feel each loss, in all its draining detail. Precise funeral routes are to Munichs what league tables and crowd figures are to The Damned Utd (2006) and Red or Dead (2013), Peace’s earlier football novels.

Matt Busby survived the disaster but did not want to go on living. He was unable to forgive himself for taking the club into Europe and for not protesting when the pilot insisted on another attempt at take-off. The book has him attending his first match after the crash, still on crutches, but he can’t see the game properly for the “young, red ghosts”.

I picked up Munichs sure that its redemptive climax would be Manchester United’s European Cup final triumph of 1968. That revival, the greatest story in English club football, came 10 years after the tragedy. It was the day when another scarred survivor, Bobby Charlton, fell onto Matt Busby’s chest in tears, the day when the ghosts of Munich were laid to rest.

For David Peace, though, the climax comes three months after the crash, that same season, when Manchester United reached the FA Cup final. The story he tells is one of overcoming and of hope. It includes the less celebrated role of Jimmy Murphy, right-hand man to Busby, who carried his own guilt for not being on the fatal flight. The new team he assembled was made up of reserve players — some who’d carried their teammates’ coffins — untried teens and the few traumatised survivors. Getting to Wembley should have been impossible.

Manchester United were carried to that final on a wave of popular emotion. It wasn’t just the city behind them, it was a nation. That feeling was still there, 10 years later, when they became the first English team to win the European Cup in 1968. If some accounts are to be believed, the moment was celebrated as enthusiastically across the country as England’s World Cup triumph two years earlier.

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The choice of title for the novel is a curious one to me. As a more partisan and aggressive fan culture took hold in the Seventies, “Munichs” became a collective term of abuse for all Manchester United fans, just as chants of “Munich 58” and “Who’s that dying on the runway?” would be directed against them. Liverpool fans were the most persistent offenders, resentful of what they saw as a media obsession with their by then inferior rivals and apparently forgetting that Matt Busby had once played for Liverpool. Astonishingly, Manchester City fans did the same.

Something had become twisted in the people’s game. One night in May 1985, 39 fans died in Heysel Stadium after a charge by Liverpool supporters. As the cameras ranged across the wreckage after the riot, flags with the slogan “Munich 58” were still proudly displayed on the terraces. Liverpool fans only stopped singing about Munich after the Hillsborough disaster.

In The Game of our Lives (2014), David Goldblatt suggested that the post-war image of the English as a “big national football family” was a “cosy” one. Peace’s novel is saved from a cosy nostalgia, an idealisation of an age, by portraying some of the harsher sentiments present even in those days. On a visit to Burnley, soon after the crash, Manchester United players faced abusive chants. “IT’S A PITY THEY DIDN’T ALL DIE!” Following the game, Burnley’s chairman, Bob Lord, suggested Manchester United should remember that there were other clubs in football and not just them.

Munichs will no doubt provoke thoughts about today’s game. Reading about Tommy Taylor, who came to Old Trafford from a Yorkshire pit village with his football boots wrapped in brown paper and an “earnest desire to want, to really, really bloody fucking want to play for Manchester United”, makes you want to press the novel into the hands of the some of the red-shirted multi-millionaires who have strolled the pitch in recent years, looking like they felt they should be somewhere better.

But the passing of a more dignified, self-effacing footballing age is perhaps not the principal regret of this novel. Reading Munichs, I found myself thinking back to an earlier David Peace novel, GB84 (2004), his epic story of the Miners’ Strike set a generation on from the Munich disaster. As well as being the “backbone of the nation”, the mining industry was the backbone of British football success, giving us the three greatest managers of the post-war era: Bill Shankly, Jock Stein and Matt Busby. GB84 shows how the miners were turned into the “enemies of the people”, how entire communities — those that gave us three of the Munich dead as well as Bobby Charlton, perhaps the greatest of English footballers — were criminalised and brutalised and never recovered from the traumatic blows.

In the Eighties, football looked like it would be going the same way as the industrial towns — down. Today, the game thrives even in “left-behind” places like Bolton, Burnley and Stoke. Match attendances across the country are at levels not seen since the early-Fifties. As Jonathan Wilson recently observed, football is a source of civic pride and belonging, “pretty much the only marker of identity” when “there is nothing else”.

This is a troubling thought. The rich associational culture of post-war England, with its high level of engagement in political parties, friendly societies and churches, has long disappeared, and the public realm has been hollowed out further in the years of austerity. The destruction of Spellow library in Liverpool during the recent rioting provoked outrage, but since 2010 a fifth of all public libraries have been closed by hard-pressed local authorities with little protest. In our impoverished social and cultural landscape, with populist and anti-immigrant parties filling the void, it can seem that football is the only positive thing to bring people together.

Buried within David Peace’s story of a devastated football club is this idea of a greater loss: of solidarity and collective feeling. He is not only remembering a past era, when the English working class was held in high esteem, but writing for today. We can only hope that, within the wreckage of the past and the story of the rebuilding of a football team, there might lie inspiration for the present.

That same evening, less than five hours after the ceremony, someone levered the plaque off the wall with a crowbar and stole it. West Yorkshire Police immediately classed the incident a hate crime and opened an investigation. Hilary Benn, MP for Leeds Central, spoke for many when he declared: “It is not who we are as a city.”

In recent years, attempting to do justice to the memory of David Oluwale has been central to Leeds’s hopes of presenting itself as a more inclusive and tolerant city. Just weeks before the Leeds Civic Trust blue plaque was fixed in place last month, a bridge bearing Oluwale’s name was completed, spanning the river where he was found drowned in May 1969. More than half a century later, Leeds now finds itself contending with uncomfortable memories the city thought it had overcome.

When David Oluwale arrived in Britain as a stowaway on board a cargo ship carrying groundnuts from Lagos to Hull, he hoped to find a “New Jerusalem”. Within a few years, those hopes had been firmly dashed: in 1953, he was committed to a mental asylum following a violent altercation with Leeds police officers. Oluwale didn’t surface for another eight years. The effervescent dancer known to fellow Nigerians in Leeds as “Yankee” emerged a broken man. Now homeless, he picked up the kinds of criminal convictions born of living on the streets.

In the late Sixties, the climate across Britain was becoming more hostile for black people. Nowhere was this more pronounced than in Leeds. In April 1968, the same month Enoch Powell delivered his notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech, Inspector Geoffrey Ellerker was assigned to Millgarth police station in Leeds city centre, teaming up with Sergeant Kenneth Kitching in a pairing that would make Oluwale’s grim life even more hellish. The two officers made it their mission to clear vagrants off their patch, but Oluwale came in for special attention. Calling him their “playmate”, they urinated on him while he slept, forced him to bang his head on the pavement as “penance”, and drove him to the city limits where they would dump him in the dead of night. When Oluwale was arrested for disorderly conduct, the police entered “WOG” as his nationality on his charge sheet.

On 4 May 1969, a group of boys found his body when they were out walking by the River Aire close to Knostrop sewerage works, a few miles downstream from the city centre. The only mourners at his pauper’s funeral were the undertakers. But 18 months later, after a police cadet reported rumours he’d heard about Ellerker and Kitching, Oluwale’s body was exhumed. A Scotland Yard investigation concluded that the officers had pushed or caused Oluwale to fall in the river in the early hours of 18 April 1969, and the two were eventually tried for manslaughter and several assaults.

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Yet the trial at Leeds Town Hall brought further attacks on Oluwale. “What right have we to call him a citizen?” Basil Wigoder QC, representing Ellerker, asked the jury in his opening speech. “His only claim to being a citizen was that every now and then he was lodged in the local prison.” Even the judge failed to hide his distaste, describing Oluwale as “a dirty, filthy, violent vagrant”. Though Ellerker and Kitching received prison sentences for a number of assaults, they were ultimately found not guilty of manslaughter on the direction of this judge: the witnesses who’d seen two uniformed men chasing someone by the river could not identify Ellerker or Kitching and could not even be sure of the colour of the man being pursued. Despite the two officers’ violent hounding of Oluwale over several months, the judge concluded that there was no evidence they had caused him to drown.

That didn’t stop football fans taunting the police from the terraces: They’re the boys from Millgarth and they don’t care, they threw Oluwale in the River Aire. But the unsettling story of Oluwale slipped slowly from the broader public mind.

In the Seventies and Eighties, no northern multicultural city was without its racial antagonism, and none could boast of healthy relations between its police forces and black communities. As the socio-economic climate worsened, those strains intensified. And Leeds entered a particularly dark period. During a riot in the Chapeltown area on Bonfire Night 1975, several West Yorkshire Police officers received serious injuries.

Days before the Bonfire Night riot, Wilma McCann — a woman from Chapeltown — became Peter Sutcliffe’s first known victim. The Yorkshire Ripper was known as the “Leeds Ripper” in the early days, as his first three murders were in the city. This was the Leeds that David Peace excavated in his blistering Red-Riding quartet: a grey concrete hell “abandoned to the crows and the Ripper”. All the ills of the Seventies — the misogyny, the civic corruption and police violence — were rampant in Peace’s city.

It was in this same period that Leeds became synonymous with racism, mostly down to the reputation of the followers of its football club. National Front publications such as Bulldog were sold outside Elland Road containing proud league tables of the “most racist fans”: Leeds United were usually near the top. Black visiting players were regularly pelted with bananas.

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Tony Harrison’s 1985 state-of-the-nation poem V. didn’t help Leeds’s reputation. It achieved notoriety with a film adaptation aired on Channel 4 in 1987, becoming the first time the word “cunt” was uttered on British television. V. was inspired by a visit to Holbeck cemetery during the Miners’ Strike, when Harrison saw tombstones, including that of his parents, desecrated with swastikas and NF slogans and the ground littered with Harp lager cans.

“What is it that this aggro act implies?” the poet asks in his clash with the vandal, an alienated skinhead who’d “been on t’dole all my life in fucking Leeds!”  The poet wants to suggest that the hooligans’ “mindless desecration” is something more than lager-fuelled frustration at Leeds United letting them down every week. He portrays it as springing from feelings of loss: of real jobs, a sense of place, dignity and security. Harrison’s V. was a moving cry for a more united country, a revival of post-war decencies and solidarity.

I was teaching in Leeds in 2004 when I came across the then-obscured story of David Oluwale. In those days, I was immersed in the novels of David Peace, though the contemporary city was confident and buoyant.

But there was another Leeds that stood outside this new prosperity. The British National Party’s anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim message resonated in poorer parts of the city, particularly after the suicide bombings in London on 7 July 2005. Three of the bombers had been raised in the Beeston area of Leeds, coming from the close-knit terraced streets near to the cemetery that had inspired Harrison’s poem. A leaked membership list revealed that Morley, a few miles down the road from Beeston, had more BNP members than any other constituency in the country. Though the BNP had been picking up council seats in the region, it still came as a profound shock when, in June 2009, a BNP candidate was elected to the European Parliament for the Yorkshire and Humber area. The declaration of what was the party’s first major breakthrough into the political mainstream was made at Leeds Town Hall, the setting for Oluwale’s trial.

Lifting Oluwale’s story from the shadows of Leeds’s memory into the centre of its public history, and onto a plaque, had been a long, slow process. My own 2007 book was part of that effort. When it was adapted for the stage by Oladipo Agboluaje two years later, a large image of Oluwale’s face — a mugshot after one of his brutal arrests — was plastered onto the theatre wall, facing accusingly towards Millgarth police station.

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Back then, however, there was little appetite for a permanent memorial to Oluwale. Leeds Civic Trust acknowledged that his was a tragic case, but I was told this was not sufficient to merit a plaque. Such honour was bestowed on celebrated scientists and writers, the great brewers and tailors of Leeds, sporting heroes or social reformers. Marking a terrible event so that later generations might learn its lessons was not deemed good enough. It took the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in the United States to change hearts and minds in Leeds.

Fast forward to last month, and the desecration of Oluwale’s memorial serves as a bracing reminder that Leeds is still doing battle with its historical demons. This was no random act of hooliganism; the perpetrator was no “HARPaholic yob”, as Harrison calls his Holbeck cemetery vandal. In an echo of the original offences against Oluwale, someone had set out to deny his citizenship and humanity.

The perpetrator might well turn out to be a solitary, embittered individual, but it comes in the context of a white English backlash against multiculturalism and against those calling, with growing confidence and assertiveness, for a different vision of Britishness. The recent Black Lives Matter assaults on monuments to white power and dominance seem to have provoked a kneejerk response: you tear down our history; I’ll tear down yours.

But the desecration of Oluwale’s memorial has also proved to be a spectacular own goal. The removal of the plaque was bigger news than its unveiling. Many more people, in Leeds and beyond, are now aware of the story of Oluwale. His name cannot be erased: a replacement plaque has already been crowdfunded and an image of the original one has been projected onto screens and billboards across the city. For all that Leeds is wrestling with its past, Tony Harrison’s dream of a more united society might not be a vain hope after all.

Carrying a holdall and a plastic Tesco bag, Thomas Mair hovered on the market square with a baseball cap pulled low over his face. Jo Cox, the Labour MP for Batley and Spen, wasn’t due for her constituency surgery at the local library for another half an hour. As he waited, Mair stood and ate a Flake.

Five months later, he watched as CCTV footage of that day was replayed in Court 8 of the Old Bailey, occasionally taking notes in block capitals. From the press seats, I watched as Mair looked straight ahead, emotionless, as the devastating injuries he’d inflicted on Jo Cox were described: multiple stab wounds, two gunshots to the head and one to her body. As Mair attacked the 41-year-old MP, witnesses variously heard him shout “This is for Britain” or “Make Britain Independent”.

Within hours of Jo Cox’s death, commentators were blaming the toxic, highly-charged atmosphere fostered by the EU referendum. On the Leave side, any suggestion of shared sympathies with a racist killer, however remote, was greeted with contempt and indignation, and the perpetrator was cast as a mentally-ill loner.

Against this backdrop, the eight-day trial pieced together a forensic narrative of the murder, right down to the chocolate wrapper discarded in a bin in the market square. Mair’s guilt and motivation was never in question. In his sentencing remarks, the judge said: “There is no doubt that this murder was done for the purpose of advancing a political, racial and ideological cause namely that of violent white supremacism and exclusive nationalism most associated with Nazism and its modern forms.”

Mair had remained silent throughout the trial, and the judge refused his request to address the court after the guilty verdict. Prior to that, he had spoken just once during the entire criminal justice process, at the magistrates’ hearing a few days after the murder. Asked his name, he replied: “Death to traitors, freedom for Britain”.

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What I found particularly unsettling was how, until the killing, this 53-year-old man had lived an anonymous life, with no known history of violence and no criminal record. That his first offence was the murder of an MP seemed extraordinary.

And so, soon after the trial, I wrote to Mair at Frankland prison, explaining that I was a crime writer interested to know what he would have told the court had the judge allowed his request. To my surprise, I received a short note in response. In block capitals, Mair told me he had written a three-page reply but that it had been confiscated by the prison’s censors. He did say he was open to a “dialogue”, but as far as I know my response to that never reached him. Instead, the prison informed me that any further communication was banned, and that Mair’s pages of thoughts had been “placed in stored property not to be issued until release”, even though his whole life sentence makes that an impossibility.

That dead-end left me to piece together the clues to Mair’s mind from the literature — presented by the prosecution — that he kept in his meticulously tidy bedroom and the scant traces he’d left on the far-Right scene.

In the late 1980s, Mair, then an unemployed man in his mid-20s living with his grandmother, was a supporter of the National Front, a party whose main policy was the repatriation of all non-white immigrants. The reclusive Mair does not appear to have been an active member. He also subscribed to the pro-apartheid magazine, S-A Patriot, sold through NF publications, sending in a letter in 1988 to complain that the British media only ever showed white South Africans in the “worst possible light”. A decade after the end of apartheid, Mair was still raging at the demise of the racist regime, blaming “white liberals and traitors”.

Delving deeper into the contents of his personal library, detailed at the trial, the idea that such an extreme individual could have been pushed to breaking point by pre-Brexit tabloid scare stories about migrants seemed to me implausible. Mair’s hero was not Nigel Farage: the contents of his bookshelves suggests it was Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler’s cruellest henchman. Holocaust denial and racial separation were his obsessions.  

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By the late-1990s Mair was immersed in the ideology of the US neo-Nazi National Alliance which, according to a pamphlet he owned, dreamed of a “New White World” which would come into being after “a final cleansing”. A sort of bible for those on this most violent fringe of the far-Right was William Pierce’s novel The Turner Diaries, which depicted a future race war where feminised white men would “regain their manhood” and take revenge on “race traitors”. A passage from the novel was extracted in one of the books on Mair’s shelves, James Ridgeway’s Blood in the Face, imagining “thousands of hanging female corpses… They are the White women who were married to or living with Blacks, with Jews, or with other non-white males.”

That Mair was drawn to such views was particularly chilling in the light of his own family history. Born in Kilmarnock in 1963, Mair moved to West Yorkshire with his mother after his parents separated when he was 7. There she met Reginald St Louis, a Grenadian who had worked in the woollen mills of Huddersfield since arriving in the UK. The couple lived in Batley, while Mair was raised by his grandparents a couple of miles away in Birstall.

“Sometimes you look for the ‘wound’ and there is none, but in Mair’s case there was,” University of Kent criminologist and expert in terrorism Dr Simon Cottee tells me. Cottee believes that Mair could have felt abandoned, betrayed and resentful at his mother’s second marriage.

During the trial, Mair screwed up his face when the judge mentioned his internet search on “matricide”, made as he was researching Jo Cox, a mother of two. He reacted with the same contempt when her husband Brendan described the couple’s holidays in the Balkans volunteering with children orphaned by the war. As Mair was otherwise emotionless throughout, this response to mentions of mothers and motherhood stood out.

I was at the press conference after the trial when the senior investigating officer hinted that Mair, who had reloaded his gun after the attack on Cox, may have been planning to go on and harm his mother. Cottee, though, suggests the MP’s murder could have been a case of “displaced rage”: Jo Cox’s multicultural liberalism made her a “stand-in” or an “effigy” for the mother who betrayed Mair, but who he was unable to harm.

Mair had certainly harboured violent fantasies for many years. In his letter to S-A Patriot, he expressed a belief that “the White Race will prevail” though only after a “very long and very bloody struggle”. A decade later, in the aftermath of the London nail bombings, he ordered material from the USA on how to construct bombs and weapons. But he did not act on these thoughts until the summer of 2016.

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It was only after the trial that the police revealed that the sawn-off .22 rifle Mair used to kill Jo Cox had come into his hands at some point between the summer of 2015, when it was stolen, and early June 2016, when Mair began to make Google searches on the MP at Batley library, typing sinister questions on how best to kill. If true, it would suggest that Jo Cox, MP for just over a year, was not a long-standing obsession, but had only drifted into his line of sight during the referendum campaign. The gun, it seems, came first. (The police still don’t know how he acquired the weapon, though they are sure he was not the person who stole it.)

Cottee described the rifle as a “rudimentary weapon”, not difficult to acquire with the right contacts. But the police characterised Mair as an “anti-social loner” of the most extreme kind; a man who sent just two or three text messages in as many years. He was not a pub-goer, had no criminal record and, as far as the police have been able to establish, no active membership or connection to any existing far-right organisations.

In the years since the trial, my requests for more information on this key issue have been met with terse responses from West Yorkshire Police. Recently, they announced that the active investigation into the gun’s origins had been closed, all avenues having been exhausted.

Cottee, however, is more intrigued by Mair’s use of a dagger, arguing that it revealed a desire to be close and intimate “in the killing moment”. Mair’s violence, fifteen controlled and precise stabs, was “too personal” and went “way beyond what was necessary”, he suggests. In what was Britain’s deadliest far-Right act of terror prior to Mair’s attack, David Copeland dreamed of sparking a race war with the nail bombs he set off around London. But Cottee thinks that for Mair, killing Jo Cox was an end in itself. When he was arrested in a cul-de-sac a mile from the crime scene, he was calm and passive.

“It was a moment of agency,” Dr Gwen Adshead tells me. The former forensic psychiatrist at Broadmoor, who I first met in the weeks after the trial, sees Mair’s crime as his attempt to make a mark in a world where he was “constantly on the receiving end of things”. She also sees a crime rooted in deep envy.

“Jo Cox had vitality and popularity and integrity and a partner and a family,” Adshead points out. The MP was the local success story: the Heckmondwike grammar schoolgirl who had gone on to Cambridge, lived an international life and later returned to serve the constituency where she’d been raised. “I am Batley and Spen born and bred, and I could not be prouder of that,” she’d said in her maiden speech.

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By contrast, Mair, lonely and disconnected from society, had lived an empty life in his childhood home with his grandmother’s floral decor and his Nazi literature. “It may have made him feel that he was not alone,” Adshead suggested, when I asked about Mair’s fixation on figures such as Heydrich. “He thought he belonged to this group of people who felt the same way; that it was alright to have horrible, hateful feelings.”

Following the trial, the police disclosed that Mair had received treatment for OCD and mild agoraphobia. Mair’s mother, in her few words to the media, said that he had been treated for depression some twenty years earlier, which would have been around the time of his grandmother’s death.

Yet his life had contained shards of hope. He volunteered as a gardener at the grounds of Oakwell Hall, close to Fieldhead, an experience he described in 2010 to a local reporter as having done him more good “than all the psychotherapy and medication in the world”. I also met former colleagues of Mair at a scheme known as the Electronic Village which taught IT skills to disabled people. They talked of how Mair had arrived there to learn low in confidence and self-esteem, progressing to become a valued voluntary assistant.

But a few hours a week of human interaction and empathy could not unmake the long, slow shaping of a fascist life.

Adshead believes the “political fever” surrounding Brexit could well have provoked Mair’s rage. “But it is only one [factor] and often the final factors are very much to do with the individual perpetrator,” she clarifies, adding that Mair’s hatred had been trying to find a political cause.

“I would definitely think of the political environment as being a kind of “bicycle lock factor”, she explains, referring to a theory that a violent criminal needs multiple factors to align like the cogs in a combination lock in order to act. The final “number” that causes the lock to “spring open” can be something as seemingly insignificant as a look or a smile or a familiar phrase from the victim.

Adshead, whose new book describes her experiences of working with Britain’s most dangerous offenders, says the only chance of finding this final, usually deeply personal, “link” is by speaking to Mair himself, over many hours. Even then the answers may prove elusive.

But the only glimmer of access had been shut down. When I last tried to contact Mair in prison, I was told that any correspondence could be a “hindrance or distraction” to his “rehabilitation process”. It was an odd explanation for someone deemed beyond redemption by the court.

“We’re trying to put something rational around something fundamentally irrational and we can wear ourselves out trying to think about that,” Gwen Adshead said when I told her of my frustrations. “If we can understand why he did it then maybe we could control it next time. But ultimately it may make no sense.”