When his widow asked me to do a reading at Henry Doyle’s funeral, something appropriate to the occasion, I initially hesitated. I wanted to know why me. “Because he liked and respected you,” she replied. “And you knew him better than anyone else in those final months.” Being a proud Welshman I chose a Dylan Thomas poem, the one that made most sense in those unique circumstances. Nobody who I had treated with a terminal illness had ever raged against the dying of the light quite as diligently as Henry, or indeed – given the way things are turning out – quite so ineffectually.

Of course I had followed the Doyle trial like everyone else and had read several detailed newspaper accounts, never guessing that I would soon get to know the man in person. Doyle had called his victim a tyrant in the making and the killing an accident. Everyone like me on the liberal left of public opinion accepted the first of these contentions but found the second impossible to swallow. Temporarily deranged was the phrase that broadsheet opinion writers favored. After all, the murderer, hitherto a minor civil servant of good reputation and unblemished behaviour, had spent nine months learning how to shoot the hunting rifle he had purchased to perfect the job. He had become totally dedicated, leaving nothing to chance. He knew all about close shaves and missed assassination opportunities – the US news media were full of them. That such a mishap needed to be eliminated he freely admitted in his deposition to the court. He had pleaded guilty. He had shown absolutely no remorse. How did such an inconspicuous, inoffensive local government officer who gave money to charities and enjoyed amateur dramatics suddenly become such a ruthless and cold-blooded killer?

I had to put that question on hold of course. My job as the oncologist appointed to treat the prisoner necessitated professional detachment. If Doyle wanted information about the progress of his cancer, if he requested advice about painkilling options available then I could speak freely. In all other matters I had been instructed to respect his privacy. We both knew there would soon be a point when palliative care would be required. He would be moved into a hospital and allowed to die. In thirty years of NHS service I had never come across an instance of remission for this type of cancer. Indeed it was astonishing to me that the man still survived so long after the initial prognosis. The fourth estate could not agree on whether somebody in that condition should suffer the final months of his blighted life in jail. Readers of The Guardian were up in arms. On the other hand Doyle had murdered the most prominent of all British politicians, bar the prime minister, no less than Montague Franklyn, the leader of the UK Wind Of Change party. Monty, as he was known to his supporters, had been a leading Brexiteer, a Little Englander who had come to prominence by his outspoken opposition to long term governmental failures to reduce the rates of immigration and protect our border from illegal asylum seekers.

At the trial Doyle had refused to answer questions put to him by the prosecuting counsel and the judge except to confirm his identity and refer them to the written statement he had previously made. This was read out in due course by the defence barrister and copies circulated to the court officials and the jury. Doyle had no objection to the document being published and of course every newspaper editor in the country pounced on it with predatory zeal. I shall reproduce most of the text here just in case you somehow missed it.

“I never had any personal animosity for Monty Franklyn. Rather I thought of him, if at all, certainly during the early years of his rise to prominence, as one thinks of a clownish entertainer, a spivish comedian with the gift of the gab and an ability to manipulate people to believe he understood and shared their anxieties much better than anyone else. He irritated me with the nonsense he spouted, of course. And I switched off that gurning, attention seeking face when it cropped up on television. Clearly he was a xenophobe who appealed especially to the dispossessed and marginalised working class, that growing community of people who had suffered under many years of deindustrialisation and austerity and felt that none of the established political parties represented their interests. Franklyn might have emerged from the ranks of professionalism but in outlook he was unequivocally one of them. He enjoyed his pint of ale in the pub and he talked his version of straight common sense to power. For instance he stood on the platform that membership of the EU plus rampant immigration policies had drastically changed our concept of nationhood and that the British state cared more about the welfare of refugees than it did about the indigenous population.

About two years ago several things happened almost simultaneously that made me radically harden my attitude against the man. One of these was a diagnosis of cancer I received. The consultant confessed that it was unlikely that I would survive beyond eighteen months. This left me feeling shocked and depressed. Not because I was frightened of dying but because a prolonged review of my life informed me that I had achieved absolutely nothing of worth in my career. I was destined to dissolve into the great morass of history as a cipher. A life without purpose and legacy. The second thing was a visit to a play at The Gatehouse Theatre in North London. It was a fanciful piece about the rise of Adolph Hitler. Apparently as a little boy Hitler was constantly beaten and abused by his father. Consequently he wet the bed well into his teenage years. The writers ask us to consider if Mrs Hitler had sought treatment for her traumatised son from Sigmund Freud, who worked as a psychiatrist in Vienna, would he still have grown up to become the twentieth century’s greatest monster? The answer delivered is a resounding no. Freud imparts on his patient some wonderfully insightful advice but the only result is that Adolph becomes increasingly confirmed in his psychopathy. Adolescent Hitler is haunted by low self-esteem and a morbid sense of paternal rejection. While Hitler senior expected his only son to become a civil servant, Adolph dreamt only of a life as an artist and writer of Wagnerian scale operas. His failure to gain entry to an art college intensified his already burgeoning antisemitism as he believed all of them were presided over by swanky Jews, just like the financial institution of Austria. Thus his resentment grew. Germany, the country he fought for in the first world war, lost and its people were humiliated by the imposition of huge reparations. Unconsciously he sought for a scapegoat on which to project all his frustration and rage. If the world as it existed could not accommodate his creative talent, if the Aryan peoples chose to grovel beneath their enemies and the Jewish fifth columnists then he would reinvent the world in his own demonic image by sheer force of will.

As the play progressed I could not help but notice a parallel text in the basement of the dialogue. Yes, it was about Hitler but it also seemed to reference all the other populist political chancers who have emerged in the early decades of our century. You know who they are. You need only to glance around the Americas, both south and north, as well as our very own continent of Europe. At one point Adolph, having been told by Freud that he will never be evacuated of his resentment until he has killed himself, barks back, ‘The masses need a leader of such immense charisma that they can subsume their own identities in him!’ On the tube I became subsumed in my own thoughts. The playwrights were warning us about Franklyn loud and clear, it occurred to me. Of course we knew very little about Monty’s childhood or family relationships, his thwarted desires and secret dilemmas or whatever else had metamorphosed in his psyche into a neurotic loathing of Johnnie Foreigner, but we did know that having gained an eight percent poll rating above any other UK party he was now a present and urgent danger to democracy. He had begun openly talking about sending long settled, working immigrants back to their countries of origin. Indeed my own daughter’s partner was just such an immigrant who had relocated here when we were still members of the EU. What other fascist policies did he have up his sleeve? Indeed what delusions of heroic self-importance were incubating inside him?

So within a couple of days I had made the decision. My days might be severely limited but now they had a purpose. Somebody needed to rid our nation of the tyrant and the responsibility had fallen to me virtually by accident. I felt as if Destiny had singled me out. The planning I embarked upon was swift, calculating and meticulous. It did not allow for errors. I joined Franklyn’s Wind Of Change party. I applied for a gun licence in lieu of joining a shooting club where I was determined to learn how to use an appropriate weapon. It would all require patience, secrecy and moral resilience. My idea was to attend whatever events Franklyn would be present at – rallies, dinners, fund-raising events. I wanted to become known as an active supporter so that when the opportunity arose to kill him there would be no access problems. The weeks passed into months. I had obtained a collapsible rifle that exactly suited my needs. It could be packed into a fairly small leather bag, the type a photographer might use on location. As Franklyn’s entourage got to know me it was firstly as a generous donator to party funds and secondly as an amateur cameraman. I took many shots of our leader, some of which he chose to use in his publicity materials. I sat at his luncheon table more than once. In comparison to learning how to use that rifle, becoming a footsoldier in Franklyn’s anti-establishment army was a piece of cake. But I stuck to the task doggedly, taking whatever target and deer stalking opportunities became available to me.

Eventually I felt confident and ready. The details of the hit will now be well known to you. Franklyn had booked a West End theatre for a rally and well before the event I appraised the four tiered auditorium. Not once but several times while a show was being performed. I reckoned that I would have to be situated in the highest gallery to effect the killing. It was the only place where I had a chance of setting up the rifle unseen. The gods constituted a restricted space merely four rows deep. If I was lucky the rally would not be fully attended and that space would be left empty. On the other hand I realised the theatre could be packed to the rafters and I would have to shoot from the cramped aisle behind the last row. Even so, if security men were sent up there, I’d be properly scuppered and have to abandon my mission to another time. So mentally I prepared for all eventualities. On the day, however, as luck would have it, a bomb alert in central London caused a major disruption of the transport system. When the rally began the venue could not have been much more than sixty percent full. Not only did I have the gods all to myself but the entire upper circle as well.”

That was the text except for a few exculpations on behalf of his family and friends. No blame should be directed at anybody in Doyle’s circle, this asserted. Nobody had an inkling what he was up to. Nobody asked questions about his sudden interest in gun clubs. Nobody outside The Wind Of Change Party knew he had become an acolyte of theirs. It seemed somehow improbable this universal lack of curiosity but Doyle insisted that he was a loner and his clandestine ‘other life’ had never come under suspicion even from his wife who had to endure the brunt of his numerous absences from the home.

Our weekly meetings at the prison rarely lasted very long. I would ask a few perfunctory questions and he would make even more perfunctory replies. Then I would take bodily fluid samples and measure his blood pressure. Our meetings were gentlemanly if archly formal. “Is there anything else you wish to ask me?” became my standard exit question – to which he stoically always shook his head. That’s why around two months in I experienced surprise when he replied, “Actually there is.” He must have noticed the muscles in my face betray a twitch because he instantly apologised for detaining me further.

“I’ve been sleeping badly,” he said. “Perhaps you can give me a pill or a sedative to help?”

I sat down and studied his face. It looked paler than usual and bags had begun to form under his eyes. He existed in a cell on his own, a privilege that had been granted to him out of compassion – so to some extent Doyle was protected from the night time snoring and anxiety mutterings of the institution. “What do you think is causing it?” I asked. He didn’t immediately answer. “Are your neighbours giving you a hard time?” He shook his head. “Is there much nocturnal screaming in the place?”

“There’s some,” he admitted. “But I wear ear plugs at night and in any case my hearing isn’t the best. It’s something else keeping me awake.”

Even this level of personal disclosure was unprecedented. Normally if not quite monosyllabic in his responses to my questions, Doyle had perfected the art of polite reticence. I waited for more but his larynx needed to be prompted. “Well, what is it, Mr Doyle, may I ask?” I said.

“Bad dreams,” he replied. “They wake me up and after that I can’t get back to sleep.” So I tried to get him to explain the content of these nightmares and again he prevaricated. “Does it matter?” he said aggressively. Now I deigned to shake my head. I told him I would get the senior warder to bring him a bottle of Nightnurse.

“Take two or three tablespoons,” I advised him. “If it doesn’t work, we will try something else next week. Okay?”

In the event Nightnurse didn’t work. At least that was what Doyle said when I returned. The grey and haggard pallor of his face surprised even me who was used to sudden deterioration in a patient’s demeanor. “Forgive me for being so abrupt last week,” he said. “I’d like to tell you about my dreams, if you’re prepared to listen?”

I removed the blood pressure sleeve from his arm and assented. The reading was higher than the previous week but not alarmingly so. “You know I had told myself that Franklyn was a sewer rat whose only talents lay in breeding even bigger disease carrying rats than himself,” he muttered before lapsing into a pensive silence, eventually broken by the words, “Somebody has to exterminate vermin. Why shouldn’t it be me?” Was this a rhetorical question or did it require a response? “Unlike MacBeth, I harboured no personal ambition,” he eventually continued with a wry smirk. “But now it seems my hidden purpose has also murdered sleep.”

This sounded to me like the self-pitying musings of a guilt-ridden man yet it seemed unnecessarily callous to point it out. Did he receive newspapers in his cell? I wondered. Was he aware that his assassination of Monty had made not one iota of difference to The Wind Of Change Party’s poll ratings? Surely he must have known. Indeed under the leadership of the party’s deputy, Sebastian Glover, its dominance had actually improved by a couple of percentage points. I struggled with my ambivalent feelings, wanting to say that the elimination of populist fascism was no simplistic matter. Those two bullets, one to the right cheek, the other to the temple merely served to inflame the indignation of Franklyn’s supporters. That could have been me! they howled in unison and those not yet fully committed on the margins of the movement took up the howl with them. To publicly describe Monty’s army as racists is not enough, I wanted to instruct my patient. The majority experience themselves as demeaned, as overlooked, as voiceless – not as racists – whether they are or not. And this horrific slaughter just confirms their sense of injustice. “You were about to tell me about your dreams, Mr Doyle,” I reminded him instead.

“The worst of them take place in that theatre,” he said. “I have the bastard in my sights and pull the trigger but nothing happens. He just laughs or cracks a joke. It’s as if he is protected by an invisible shield. He’s shotproof.”

“You mean the bullets haven’t been fired?” I asked.

“No, I have felt the force of the recoil on my shoulder,” he replied. “The bullets just don’t reach him. And the worst of it is he knows!”

“Knows what?” I asked.

“My intentions. He looks up at me, waggling a finger,” Doyle explained. “It’s both ironic and admonitory. And when he speaks again it is in the voice of my father.”

“Can you remember what he says?”

Doyle nodded his head grimly. “It changes from dream to dream,” he said then suddenly gasped and gripped his stomach in what appeared a spasm of acute pain. I hastened to his aid but he shrugged me away. “Here’s my finger, here’s my thumb. Here’s my fist and here it comes! That was one of dad’s favourites. Delivered with an almighty thump usually in the belly. If I anticipated it quick enough and turned away his fist landed in the kidneys. The sadist!”

If I had taken my patient’s blood pressure right then it would have been much higher. His muscle had tensed in the grip of some awful memories and he had begun to pant as if hyperventilating. I gave him a glass of water and encouraged him to lie on the bed to recover. But just when it felt as if the storm had passed Doyle said, “Dad was a bully and I was the runt of the litter.”

“Are you sure you want to talk about this?” I asked, fearing further negative reaction.

“Yes,” he grimaced back. “It’s been constricting me too long. Unrecognised. Unspoken. I need to get it out of my system.”

Of course I wasn’t a psychotherapist. I felt out of my depth but it would have been cruel not to have allowed the confession to continue. So bit by bit the story emerged in jagged staccato sentences. And I report the substance here although not in the disorderly way it was conveyed. Doyle’s mother and father were like chalk and cheese. An acutely sensitive woman, Mrs Doyle felt things deeply and was demure in all aspects of her behaviour. Her husband was boisterous, over-confident and macho, a man’s man who got angry quickly and had an inscrutably narrow range of emotions. The eldest of three children Henry became doted upon by his mother and tormented as a namby-pamby mummy’s boy by his father. He took refuge in one while trying his best to avoid the other. Henry was fifteen when the marriage eventually fell apart. His siblings went with the patriarch and he remained with mum. Peace finally reigned. Those fallow years of anguish and tribulation became quickly displaced, buried like the core of the Earth beneath layers of sediment – an impervious rock-like substance called maternal love. The father was never again even a topic of conversation between mother and son. Together they breathed the heady air of liberation. Yet the damage had been done. Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man. What then if he reaches fifteen? I reflected as Doyle eventually ran out of verbal steam.

“What has all this got to do with Monty Franklyn, do you think?” I asked him pointedly.

The answer came out more coherently than I expected. “Franklyn had the same mannerisms,” he replied. “Very similar facial tics. The puckering lips. The rolling eyes. The mocking smirks and innuendoes. That air of cocksure certainty. The grand panjandrum setting the corrupt world to rights.”

“And you never noticed this until the last few weeks in prison when you started having these dreams?” I asked. He shook his head. “But how could you not do if the resemblance was so striking?”

Doyle considered this for a few seconds. “Buried far too deep,” he finally surmised.

“Was he a racist, your dad?” I wanted to know next.

“I have no idea what he was,” Doyle answered. “He came from the planet Zog. Twenty-five years ago he pegged out. A heart attack. I got the news third hand. Funny, isn’t it?”

“What is?” I asked.

“All that wasted effort I put in,” he said. “The man who died twice.”

The nightmares ceased after that. It was as if Doyle’s blighted soul had become purged of the poison that mined it. Had his cancer been incubated by the malignant presence of Doyle senior in his psyche? I don’t discount the possibility. I have colleagues who will swear they have experienced patients whose carcinomas metabolised directly as a result of thwarted desires or subsumed resentment. The relationship between mind and body remains far more inscrutable than medical science likes to believe. After that momentous disclosure Henry Doyle faded away very rapidly. We had him installed in hospital within a fortnight and five days later the now globally notorious killer, who divided public opinion as cleanly as a knife though soft butter, reached the end of his journey. I was about to go off afternoon duty when it happened. We’d situated him in a private room and as I passed through the ward to get there the early evening news was being broadcast. Who should be on the screen but Sebastian Glover, his political star very much in the ascendancy thanks to my hapless patient. “How do you feel about holding a fifteen percentage point lead over the party of government this close to a General Election?” the newsreader was asking him. Glover was trying hard to appear humble as he cleared his throat.

“Firstly I wish to impress upon the public that we take absolutely nothing for granted,” he began but I didn’t stop to hear the rest of the answer.