The crimes I did orchestrate, if known about, would ensure that I was remembered for decades, perhaps even centuries – if the human race manages to hold on for that long. Dr Crippen, Fred West, Ted Bundy, Lizzie Borden and me, Grace Bernard. Actually that displeases me somewhat. I’m not an amateur or an imbecile. I’m someone who, if you saw me in the street, you’d gaze at admiringly. Perhaps that’s why Kelly clings to me instead of punching the living daylights out of me as I expected.

Even in here, I retain a certain elegance, and a froideur that those weaker than I desperately wish to break through. Despite my crimes, I’m told I’ve received letters by the sackful, professing love, admiration, asking me where I bought the dress I wore on the first day of my trial (Roksanda, if you’re interested. That terrible Prime Minister’s wife wore something very similar just a month later, unfortunately). Often hate mail. Sometimes mad shit, where the writer thinks I’ve been sending them messages through the air. People seem to really wish to know me, to impress me, to emulate me, if not in my actions then at least in my sartorial choices. It matters not, since I don’t ever read any of it. My lawyer scoops it all up and takes it away. I’ve no interest really in what I represent to strangers sad enough to put pen to paper and write to me.

Perhaps I’m being too kind to the general public, ascribing to them a more complex set of emotions than they deserve. Maybe the reason for such sustained and frenzied interest in my case is best ascribed to Occam’s Razor – the theory that the simplest answer is usually the correct one. In which case, my name will live on long after I am dead for the most prosaic reason of all – merely because the idea of a love triangle seems so dramatic and grubby. But when I think about what I actually did, I feel somewhat

sad that nobody will ever know about the complex operation that I undertook. Getting away with it is highly preferable, of course, but perhaps when I’m long gone, someone will open an old safe and find this confession.

The public would reel. After all, almost nobody else in the world can possibly understand how someone, by the tender age of 28, can have calmly killed six members of her family. And then happily carried on with the rest of her life, never to regret a thing.

HOW TO KILL YOUR FAMILY by Bella Mackie is published in hardback on 22 July by Borough Press (£14.99) Order an exclusive signed copy from Waterstones

Images: courtesy of Harper Collins

How To Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie: read an exclusive extract from the novel