4 ideas
He goes to Whitewater, the country house of the family friend who bought them, and tries to steal a 17th-century Dutch 'Portrait of a Woman with Gloves'. When the maid, Josie Bell, catches him, he forces her into a car and beats her to death with a hammer, then drifts around Dublin until he is arrested and writes his account while awaiting trial.
Freddie concludes that he could kill Josie Bell because he never imagined her as fully real, as a person with an inner life equal to his own. He could invent a whole existence for the painted woman in the portrait but not for the living woman in front of him. He therefore frames his real guilt as a lack of imaginative attention, and his task in prison as bringing her to life in his mind.
Read a confession's polish as part of the evidence rather than a neutral window onto it. Freddie's ornate, witty, self-aware prose seduces the reader into sharing his aesthetic view of events. His apparent candor about his own monstrousness turns admission into display, so style launders guilt even as it seems to confess it.
Freddie narrates his life as a series of things that simply happened to him: the debts, the theft, and the killing all appear as events he was carried along by rather than choices he made. This habitual passivity lets a person commit an extreme act without ever feeling that he decided to do it. The murder comes out of accumulated indifference, not a deliberate plan.