The evil that resides somewhere near home

I sit hushed, paused on the brink of each news bulletin, silenced by the horror of what has happened near my home. There is a relentless misery about the fate of Marsha McDonnell and Amelia Delagrange. The national TV news shows the police carrying out detailed searches and house to house inquiries. Images of the young women revealing pale skinned innocence betrayed by a world more evil than anyone can fully comprehend.

If the crime has been random it would, oddly, appear more explicable. But we must now consider the possibility that they were killed by people they knew, during the night in a quiet suburb in the west of London.

There will be reasons, but no explanations for this crime. We might learn it was a sexual thing, or a some other form of power lust perverted into atrocity, but whatever terms are used we'll never really understand why. How some brains can consider and calculate such acts is simply beyond our comprehension.

This is why we prefer to think there was no premeditation or thought. We'd rather events were spontaneous and conducted in some fog of lust. It's why so many of our myths concern evil strangers and mysterious forces - we like to think that evil lives on the fringes, or in the depths of the forest, and not among us.

This is because we hope we would recognise evil. This is a very strong instinct, the assumption that if we live with people we will understand them. It is, and always has been, wrong.

The chances of being murdered by a stranger are remote. People close to the victim commit most violent crime.