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It follows that psychopaths, people who fail to empathise with others, are more at risk of crossing this threshold and getting into an evil state of mind. Hindley was psychopathic when she remained unmoved by a tortured child pleading for her life. So too was the mass murderer Dennis Nilsen when he wondered why there was such a fuss about the way he dismembered his victims. One of Adshead’s Broadmoor patients, a murderer, told her that he knew he was doing wrong but said: “I was deaf to my own restraints.”

But it does not have to be so. The residents of Jedwabne, in occupied Poland, who herded their Jewish neighbours into a barn and burned them alive, were not acting under Nazi orders and could not possibly all be psychopaths. Yet they chose to do it.

Ian Rankin, the best-selling crime author, has spent the past nine months exploring the meaning of evil for a Channel 4 documentary series. He has not reached a firm conclusion.

“What we mean by evil is very complex,” he says. “It is a protective device. We prefer to demonise certain people, put evil in a world of monsters because it prevents us confronting the fact that these people are just like us, the people next door. It lets us off the hook.”

The image of the Devil as a monstrosity with cloven hooves and horns is rooted in early pictures of pagan gods. In order to make evil something alien to humankind we made it ugly, non-Christian and not of this world. When the World Trade Centre was hit, some people claimed to be able to see the face of Satan in the billowing smoke, perhaps deriving comfort from the belief that a metaphysical force and not a human being was ultimately responsible for such a dreadful act.

Not only is evil a powerful word but we seem to believe that it can pollute us. Rankin admits that he turned down the chance of meeting Brady during the making of the programme. “Brady is as close as I get to my idea of evil. Once you meet him you cannot unmeet him and I didn’t want him inside my head.”

But psychologists argue that evil behaviour is an inherent possibility in everybody, a theme that underpins the American psychiatrist Dr Robert I Simon’s book, Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream. Rankin adds: “I believe there is such a thing as an evil act, but not an evil person. We are all capable of wicked things. Most of us have very bad thoughts, road rage for example, when you find yourself putting your fingers into the shape of a gun. Some people happen to take it a step further.”

Opinion differs wildly over what constitutes evil, or even if it exists at all. Clergymen argue that it is a void, a total absence of good, and that we can choose the path of righteousnes instead. Yet Professor Benjamin Libet, who conducted neurological tests in 1958, questioned the entire notion of personal responsibility. His work concluded that our brain controls us, not vice versa, suggesting that the sense of free will may be illusory. Darwinists, meanwhile, will argue that, by the laws of natural selection, humans must have an innate ruthless streak to have triumphed as the superior species.

Certainly humans seem more capable of cruelty if the victim does not “belong” to their tribe or race. To illustrate this, researchers at Lancaster University hired an actor to wear a Liverpool FC shirt and writhe in agony on the ground as Manchester United fans filed past. Almost all failed to go to his aid. When he switched to a United shirt, 80 per cent ran to help him.

Jedwabne shows us how, when people act in groups rather than as individuals, evil actions come more easily because the sense of responsibility is diluted. At Auschwitz, guards who were friends in the outside world were deliberately made to work together to “normalise” what they were doing. The coupling of Brady and Hindley, Rose and Fred West, produced an alchemy, a catalyst for evil deeds.

Hindley’s supporters argue that had she never met Brady she would have got married, had children and enjoyed a normal life. But Adshead questions this. Given her capacity for psychopathy, she may well have one day battered her own children. Adshead says: “I get very worried about that type of argument. How do we know that if Brady had not met Hindley, but a different woman who was appalled at the idea of killing and who said: ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’, he wouldn’t have stopped? What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. I see enough women who get into evil states of mind on their own.”

She asserts that by looking to places such as Broadmoor, whose inhabitants are statistically a rarity, we learn less than at standard prisons where people have committed terrible crimes but are neither mentally ill nor particularly repentant. “There are a lot of cruel states of mind out there and if you only look at the places like Broadmoor you miss all the ‘normal’ stuff.”