On his way back through the sitting-room he stopped to pick up the album. He was curious to see photographs of Annie's 40 family and of Annie herself when she was younger. When he opened the album, however, he found that it was full of stories cut from newspapers. The first two pages told of the wedding of Annie's parents and the birth of her elder brother, Paul -- another Paul in her life - and of Annie herself. She was born on I April 1943. She must have hated being an April Fool. The next page contained a report of a fire in a house in Hakersfield, California, in 1954. Five people had died in the fire. Three of them had been the children who lived in the groundfloor apartment, downstairs from the Wilkes family (who had been out of the house at the time). The fire had started because of a cigarette in the cellar. Annie's voice echoed in Paul's mind: God, I hated those children. Paul's blood began to run cold. But she was only eleven years old. That's old enough - old enough to let a candle burn down in the cellar so that the flame could light a pool of petrol. It's an old trick but hard to beat. Maybe she just wanted to frighten them and accidentally did more than that. But she did it, Paul. You know she did it. He turned the page and found a story about the death of Annie's father. He had fallen over a pile of clothes at the top of the stairs in his house and broken his neck. The newspaper called it a 'curious accident'. On the next page a newspaper from Los Angeles, hundreds of miles from Bakersfield, used exactly the same words - a 'curious accident'. This time it was a student nurse who had fallen over a dead cat at the top of the stairs and broken her neck. The name of the person who shared the student's apartment was Annie Wilkes. The year was 1959. Paul felt pure terror rise up in him. The 'accidents' had happened in different places and at different times, and no one had made the connection. Why should they? People were always falling down stairs. 41 Why had she killed them? He seemed to hear Annie's answers in his mind. The answers were absolutely mad, and Paul knew they were right. I killed her because she played the radio late at night; I killed her because she let her boyfriend kiss her too much; I killed her because I caught her cheating; I killed her because she caught me cheating. I killed her to see whether I could. What does it matter? She was just a Miss Clever - so I killed her. The next page of the album showed that Annie had graduated as a nurse and had got a job at St Joseph's Hospital in Pennsylvania. There followed several pages containing short newspaper reports of deaths at the hospital. There was nothing suspicious about any of these deaths. Most of the people were old and had been ill for a long time. Some were young - one was even a child - but they all had serious illnesses or injuries. And what were these reports doing in Annie's album? She had killed them all. The reports were so short that several could fit on a single page of the album - and the album was thick. Again Paul asked the question: Why, Annie? Why kill these people? Again he heard Annie's voice echoing in his mind: Because they were rats in a trap. And he remembered Annie's tears falling on the rat she held in her hand, while she said: 'Poor, poor things.' Over the next few years she had moved from hospital to hospital around the country. The pattern in the album was always the same: first, the list of new hospital staff, with Annie's name among them; then pages of short reports of deaths. In 1978, nine years ago, she had arrived at a hospital in Denver, Colorado. The usual pattern began again with a report of the death of an elderly woman. Then the pattern changed. Instead of reports of deaths there was a report of Annie's marriage to a man called Ralph Dugan, a doctor. There was a photograph of the house they had bought outside Sidewinder in 1979 - this house. Several months had passed without any killings. It was unbelievable, but Annie must have been happy! 42 Then there was a report, from August 1980, of their divorce. It was clear that he had divorced her rather than the other way round. He had understood something about her. Maybe he had seen the cat at the top of the stairs - the one he was supposed to fall over. Annie had torn into this report with a pen as she wrote vicious words across it, so that Paul had difficulty reading it. Annie moved to a hospital in Boulder, Colorado. It was clear that she was very hurt and very angry, because the killings started again, and more often than before: the newspaper reports came every few days. God, how many did she kill? Why did nobody guess? At last, in 1982, Annie made a mistake. She moved to the childbirth department of the hospital. Annie had carefully kept a record of the whole story. Killing new-born babies is different from killing badly injured or seriously ill adults. Babies don't often die and people notice if they do. Parents care as well............