I often tell friends they should read up on the Lucy Letby case because it is not going away. People will be talking about it for decades, possibly centuries. Even if she confesses, some people won’t believe her. A working understanding of the events at the Countess of Chester hospital in the mid-2010s will soon be as essential to social discourse as a rudimentary knowledge of the Premier League table, so you might as well do the prep now.

The lies. The disturbing comments. The gaslighting. The falsification of medical records. The bizarre scribbling

The case is so vast that it can swallow you up. The first trial took ten months and then there was another trial, two attempts at an appeal, and the Thirlwall Inquiry. The Inquiry itself produced more documents than anyone could reasonably be expected to read. No matter how much you learn, it is never enough. The knowledge is dispersed over court reports, witness statements, podcasts, tweets, blogs, books and documentaries. Unhelpfully, some of it isn’t true. The court transcripts are the Holy Grail but they’ve never been available online. Some people have got hold of excerpts. There is a chap on YouTube who reads them out. You can listen to the prosecution’s summing up if you want – and of course I have – but it takes over ten hours.

Scraps of new information and misinformation appear regularly and show no sign of slowing down. So far, the Letby case has been the subject of three episodes of Panorama, two Channel 5 documentaries, one ITV documentary, a feature film shown on Channel 4 and now a Netflix documentary. The latter was released this week, and was pre-empted by a fresh burst of Letby-related publicity featuring Esther Rantzen, Nadine Dorries, her ubiquitous lawyer Mark McDonald and the detective who caught Beverley Allitt. Her PR company – yes, she has a PR company working for her – boasted on X........

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