But then again, with hindsight, I could probably write something similar about a dozen other prisoners I knew, and none of those men has been killing and butchering.Finally, could anyone have predicted Scripps’s killings, prevented them? I cannot see how on either count. He skipped a home leave, but he was only months away from his automatic release date, and would have walked free then anyway. Certainly in those last months he was a little crazy, but then a lot of men in prison are a little crazy. The line between psychiatric hospitals and prisons is a blurred one.By the time Scripps was arrested in Singapore, I had left the prison.

But I was still in touch with a few prisoners and I mentioned Scripps to them. They didn’t want to talk about him, didn’t want to think about the fact that they had known him, had shared jokes with him, had patted him on the back, had liked him. The John Scripps we knew wasn’t a monster, but the John Scripps we knew ended up doing monstrous things. Many an explanation could be offered, but none would explain.! Jeremy Gavron’s first novel, ‘Moon’, is published by Viking at pounds 13.50.

Helen Chadwick was running late the day that she died. At some point on 15 March, perhaps between leaving her house in Hackney and picking up a fax at a nearby gallery, or in juddering across London to the Victoria & Albert Museum to meet the curator of photographs and examine 18th-century tapestries, or in rushing to the Royal College of Art before it closed to pick up transparencies from some of her students, she managed to misplace half an hour. By the time she got to the Architects’ Association, halfway back to Hackney, to plan a future collaboration and listen to a lecture and attend a private view, Chadwick was aching, even slightly woozy. In the bar afterwards, she rang her husband David to ask for a lift home Instead of fizzing round the room as usual, she sat down Someone offered her a glass of water; she said no Then she fainted Someone thought to check her pulse There wasn’t one. The abruptness of the heart attack that killed Helen Chadwick, just before nine that evening, at the age of 42, has quietened talk of her since.

The obituaries were naturally fond, and grand: “the most important artist of her generation,” said one; a campaign began to win her the first posthumous nomination for the Turner Prize. Yet the critics did not dare judge her final work when it was hung, jewel-like, from the walls of the Barbican six weeks later. No other journalists went to her inquest in a small panelled room near St Pancras station. No newspaper repeated the pathologist’s findings, tentatively given over the screech of passing trains, about her oddly undamaged organs and a possibly fatal virus. Meanwhile, Chadwick’s friends still talk about her in a shocked present tense.

Her husband David, baggy-eyed and shuffling, is trying to keep her pair of studios precisely as they were. A solemnity has settled, understandably, on a life that was actually far from solemn: “Helen would probably have quite enjoyed the coroner’s court,” said a friend before attending. “All the mystery of it …”
When Chadwick died, her career was rising – the first woman nominated for the Turner Prize in 1987, the breaker of the Serpentine Gallery’s attendance record with a glooping fountain of melted chocolate in 1994, the winner of rare transatlantic prestige at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1995 – but it had been rising, and falling, for 20 years She was no art-world James Dean. Her succulent sculptures and earthy installations and glowing photographs of flowers and flesh, both alluring and repulsive, suggested ways of artfully exploring the body during the Seventies – paths followed later by Damien Hirst, the Chapman brothers and the rest.