Not wicked, he thought: that’s not the word, that’s sentimentality. These are just runts…They don’t sin in the sight of heaven and feel despair: they only throw away lighted cigarettes on Exmoor, and go on holiday leaving the cat to starve, and drive on after accidents without stopping. A wicked man nowadays can set millions of them in motion, and when he’s gone howling mad from looking at his own face, they’ll be marching still with their mouth’s open and their hands hanging by their knees, on and on and on…”

They have no instinctive sense of sympathy. Their moral compass only points inward. They’re sociopaths, but not the violent predatory kind. Just indifferent. Utterly, shockingly, indifferent. These are the ones who, in another time, in another place, said “We heard the rumors but we didn’t believe them…”