The boy pitched forward, arms flailing, and Hilary couldn’t help but notice how the child kept his fingers beautifully extended. ‘Good boy,’ she wanted to say, but never had the chance.

Almost directly below Hilary Clarke, Amelia had held her ground and refused to join the dense crowd forming at the back of the auditorium despite several attempts to encourage her to leave. She wouldn’t move, but she had put on her coat in readiness. As she pressed her cheek to the stiff wool of her mum’s jacket, something made her look up. It felt as if someone had dropped a tiny stone on her head.

Amelia’s seat was a few rows in front of the overhanging circle, giving her an uninterrupted view of the theatre’s high ceiling. There was a pair of long-limbed figures moulded into the ornate plasterwork, and they appeared to have come to life. Beautiful alabaster faces offered trembling smiles. ‘Wow,’ Amelia whispered, moments before the world turned black.

Scorched beams and lethal chunks of masonry smashed into one section of the circle and rained down onto the stalls with a bone-shattering crash. The lights went out, and a wave of panic hit the previously ambivalent audience like a tsunami.

Lois felt rather than saw the ceiling collapse. She and Joe had just made it through the exit at the back of the stalls and were in the centre of a narrow conduit that led left and right. The long corridor had a set of double doors at each end that opened onto the foyer, but the light from these exit points was beyond Lois’s reach. For every person who escaped through those doors, she could feel the pressure of ten more behind her. People flowed left and right, but Lois was part of a small group that was forced into a smaller and smaller space at the epicentre of what had quickly become a crush.

Lois’s arms were trapped by her side and her fingers began to tingle. She had made the mistake of screaming as the crowd surged, and there was no room left to re-inflate her lungs. She fought with all her strength to escape, but her efforts were countered by others with equal force. There were parents determined to save their children, adult children determined to save their elderly parents, friends and strangers trying to save themselves.

The emergency lighting illuminated arrows to the exits, but these faded to a dull glow as a cloud of dust filled the void. Lois ought to be relieved it wasn’t smoke, but her eyes remained wide with terror as she searched out Joe’s face in the gloom. They had become separated and she couldn’t get to him, nor he to her.

‘I can’t breathe,’ she mouthed.

Joe was taller, his chest inching above the critical mass of bodies. ‘It’s OK. We can make it.’