He sounded at his angriest and, in one slurred word, fear overwhelmed her.

There was a silence as her father listened to the person on the other end.

‘If you must know, the little bastard’s a boy!’

Bastard?

It was a word she didn’t know the meaning of, a word her father used frequently but one she had learned never to repeat again after the slap in the face he’d given her the one and only time she’d said it.

Downstairs, he slammed the receiver in its cradle and she scurried back to her bed, burying herself under the blankets and pretending to be fast asleep.

At some point, and she didn’t know when, she drifted into a dreamless sleep.

In the morning, nothing unusual happened.

As usual, at a quarter to eight, her father left the house to run his businesses, leaving her alone with Mrs Doyle, the cleaning lady, who’d been given a few pounds to stay with her but who she’d overheard being given strict instructions not to talk to her and, especially, not to answer any questions about the little shit.

Shit?

Same as bastard, she guessed, as she watched the scene in the hall between her father and Mrs Doyle unfold through the struts on the staircase, the memory of his open-handed slap when she’d used the ‘b’ word causing her cheek to sting at the thought of it.

She confined herself to her bedroom and, as the morning rolled on, she wondered if there was something wrong with her baby brother.

At lunchtime, when the antique grandfather clock chimed twelve in the hall downstairs, the phone rang and Mrs Doyle answered it.

‘Hello?’ Mrs Doyle sounded as plain scared as she felt.

She listened and heard her father’s voice leaking from the telephone receiver. Not talking then, shouting.

‘Half past the hour it is then, sir?’

Sir. The name Mrs Doyle had been commanded to call her father.

She stood at the bedroom window but couldn’t see the whole of the garden and drive at the front of the house. On her knees, she pushed her toy box to the window and, when she managed to get it there, she climbed up and had a perfect view of what lay below.

She waited and heard the quarter hour chime and guessed that something important was going to happen when the clock sounded the half hour.

In the top left-hand corner of her bedroom window, she saw a fly struggling against the stickiness of a spider’s web and watched as the arachnid drifted towards its prey. It wrapped a tight thread around the fly and, before long, the captured bug looked like it was entombed in a mini blanket.

The throb of the engine of her father’s Bentley as it slowed to turn into the drive at the front of the house brought her back into the moment.