The sorry case of Rachel Bowdler reminds us that our acts do not take place in a vacuum, particularly if they are acts at the extreme ends of the scales of good and evil. The man who killed Rachel’s mother in Egypt, when he broke into the family home to burgle it, provoked a chain of events that led to Rachel’s death a decade later. Left without a mother to keep her safe, carrying the nightmarish burden of finding her mother dead in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor, with a father who spent large amounts of time away from home, and scapegoated by his second wife, she was emotionally exposed and very vulnerable.

I am sure that when the mothers of young children are about to die or be killed, it is not their life that flashes before their eyes, but panic at the thought that their children will be left unprotected – even if those children have a father. Yes, there are many exceptions – mothers who abandon or ill-treat their children; fathers who are unusually sensitive to situations and know what to do about them – but on the whole, children without mothers are in a far worse position than children without fathers.

John Bowdler was not a bad or neglectful father. He just thinks like a man, and this is clear from his testimony in court: that if you sort out the logistical problems, then the emotional problems will fall into place or sort themselves out. Many men do not even acknowledge emotional difficulties, but only logistical ones. This is one of the primary complaints made by women, that when they try to explain to the man in their life that they are unhappy or sad, the response is usually one of two: “What do you want me to do about it?” or “There’s nothing I can do about it.” Men with the money to do so throw money at problems by giving their unhappy wives large sums of money to spend on themselves, or by buying their children things, things and more things. The woman who tries to explain that there is nothing specific she wants done about it, but just love, sympathy and understanding, is in dire waters.

That part of the male psyche, which contributes to a difficult relationship with women, is the very same one that leaves a man unable to protect his children fully without the support of their mother. The same factors that render men unable to understand women or to be “sensitive to their needs”, as women like to put it, also make them unable to understand their children or to be sensitive to their needs. To a father, the most important aspects of looking after children are the provision of money (the breadwinner role), education, clothing, food and shelter. All else is silliness. Yet a child who is very well provided for materially can end up desperately unhappy and even suicidal, and when that happens, the father’s reaction will be: “I gave him everything!” It strikes me that this is precisely the same thing they say of the women who leave them, despite being “given everything” – everything, that is, except the most important things.

John Bowdler is not to blame for anything. You can’t blame men for the fact that they are from Mars rather than Venus, and feel constrained to approach every problem pragmatically, even if the required solution is emotional. But you can certainly get angry at them for doing it.

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If the death of a good mother leaves a child exposed, then the presence of a bad one ruins him. Bad mothers are not only those who abuse their children or neglect them. There are bad mothers who parade around in the guise of good ones, convincing even themselves of this. They are what I call “enablers” – women who collude and conspire with their sons (they do it with daughters too sometimes, but less often) justifying everything these sons do, encouraging them to be dependent, preventing them from becoming men, sheltering them from the consequences of their actions. The end result is a ragel bla sinsla – no moral backbone and plenty of general spinelessness. A lot of Maltese men are like this, because a lot of Maltese mothers of sons are not good mothers at all, but enablers – bad mothers in disguise, wolves in sheep’s clothing. Their aim is not to make a man of their son, but to “protect him” and make him theirs.

When Cettina Decelis stood up in court and, under oath, said that she has nothing on her conscience, because she did for Rachel Bowdler what she would have done for her own son, I thought: “Oh, would you have sat by your unconscious son for 12 hours without calling an ambulance, and would you have dumped his body in a field at dawn when he died?”

I suppose these are the Christian values we are trying to shelter from the invasion of the black African Muslim savages. It is tempting to think that the Decelis family are an aberration, but they are not. There is a curiously amoral streak in Maltese society, which allows many of us to square up with our conscience all kinds of behaviour that the most objective assessment would class as wrong, bad or even downright evil. I believe Cettina Decelis when she says that she has nothing on her conscience. She has almost certainly gone through this process of rationalising the wrong she did and turning it into something acceptable, perhaps even something good (“I did for her what I would have done for my own son.”). It’s very common – it allows people to live with themselves and the thought of what they have done. It is a survival mechanism that kicks in to stop them going mad with guilt. If Lady Macbeth had been Cettina Decelis, she would simply have washed her hands, gone up to her bedchamber to dress for dinner, and got on with the rest of her life, instead of obsessing with a spot of blood and spiralling into insanity. And William Shakespeare would have had no play.

I can’t read the minds of the members of the jury, but I suspect that what really helped them reach their verdict was the very same thing that made me form my own opinion: the fact that these people dumped the girl’s body in a field. Leaving 18-year-old Rachel – her age only makes her death more piteous, and what these people did more hideous – unconscious and gurgling in the flat for 12 hours without calling an ambulance, because you are afraid that your son will be arrested, tried and jailed for having given her the drugs, is one thing, though it is bad enough. Picking up her poor, dead body and throwing it into a field, with her jeans shoved on the wrong way round (she had taken them off to have sex with their son), betrays a kind of callousness that shocks decent people to the core. It establishes beyond doubt that these are not decent people, but people who think and behave like criminals. The fact that the Decelis family treated Rachel Bowdler’s body – the body of a girl, we should remember, with whom their son had had sex only a few hours previously – like the corpse of a dog, is what did for them in the end. One of the reasons that, if there is an afterlife, it must be one in which the dead cannot see what happens in the lives of those they leave behind is because of this kind of thing. For Rachel’s mother to see her daughter’s suffering, and her horrible end surrounded by callous strangers who saw her only as a problem to be dealt with, would be to condemn her to hell.

* * *

I part company with the members of the jury in their request to the judge to be merciful to Cettina Decelis, “because she is a mother who wished to protect her son”. That request in itself is symptomatic of the ugly mindset which Mrs Decelis appears to have, and which I have just described. The end does not justify the means, particularly not when the end in itself is wrong. Mothers are not protecting their sons when they collude with them to break the law or to harm others. Good mothers make men of their sons – men who are able to face the consequences of their actions. Bad mothers create monsters of spinelessness, ineptitude and moral turpitude who, in their late 20s, call up mummy to solve the problem of a dying girl, to whom they have probably given hard drugs, and with whom they have had sex – on mummy’s sofa, in mummy’s flat. Jason Decelis was not a teenager like the girl he helped kill. He was a grown man, long past the age when he should have been asking his mother to solve his problems.

There is no proof that Jason Decelis gave Rachel Bowdler the drugs that killed her. That is why he wasn’t charged with this, and also why, in all probability, he chose not to speak in court. Asked under oath whether he gave her the drugs, he might have been constrained to say “Yes” – though quite why somebody with no compunction about disposing of a dead girl’s body in a field, after leaving her to die, should worry about lying under oath is beyond me. His mother must have suspected that he did give her the drugs, though, and he might even have told her he did. That is why she would have tried to protect him from the law. Yet that is a perverse interpretation, by the jury, of the mother’s natural desire to protect her son. A woman who truly wanted to protect her son would have called an ambulance immediately, hoped against hope that the girl wouldn’t die, for the girl’s sake and so that her son wouldn’t have to live with a death on his conscience or be charged with murder or manslaughter, got him a good lawyer, and then told him: “Now face the music, but I will help you face it.”

Perhaps, apart from basic human decency, Mrs Decelis lacks the intelligence to see that a trial and a prison sentence of a few years would have been infinitely better for her son’s mental health than the life sentence of living with the knowledge of what he did, in collusion with his mother, and having to keep it secret. A skeleton of this magnitude in the family cupboard can be a spur to madness. As things turned out, he has got his prison sentence in any case, and she with him – and over and above that, he has to come to terms with the knowledge that, instead of having a mother he can respect, he has one who will dump the body of his recent sexual partner – a mere 18-year-old girl – in a field and say that she has nothing on her conscience. I almost feel sorry for the man. He is as much a victim of his mother’s behaviour as Rachel was. Let’s not forget that she brought him up.