His call was tentative. He walked through to the back room, passing the steep staircase that divided the house. The steel wash tub stood under the window that overlooked the back yard. The door of the understairs cupboard listed open and he could see the scrubbing board still hanging from its peg. In the galley kitchen, the sink was full of the morning’s dishes, and the saucepan used to cook his porridge remained on the drainer, a thick milky mucus clinging to its sides. The bluebottle preening on its handle took flight, buzzing as it knocked against the window. Its escape thwarted, it landed on the side, restoring the room to its eerie silence.

‘Mam?’

Jack’s heart began to beat faster as he climbed the narrow staircase. It rose steeply, the wallpaper on each side grimed from years of steadying hands.

He stepped onto the landing that was not a landing at all, just a three-foot-square platform large enough to take a man. His mother’s bedroom door to his left was open. The curtains were drawn back and the evening sun was slanting across floorboards strewn with her cast-off clothes. To his right, the door to his own room – which led in turn to Jenny’s – stood half-open. He placed his hand against the wood and pushed. The hinges creaked as it swung wide.

His room was just as he had left it. The sash window before him was still open a crack and the permitted breeze lifted the flimsy curtains. His bed was roughly made and his pyjama bottoms draped over the rush-seated chair in the corner. The other furniture in the room – the small wardrobe and dilapidated tall boy – was shared, through necessity, with Jenny. Her little box room, accessed through the door tucked away in the corner of his, was barely big enough to take her slender bed. He saw that door was ajar.

He trod lightly as he crossed the room, his fingers catching the finials of his metal bedstead. His heart hammered against his chest as he raised his hand to the door.

‘Jen?’ he called softly.

It was the smell that hit him first. The harsh metallic taint of a butcher’s shop. As the door inched open, it exposed the bottom of Jenny’s bed and the sheet folded back over her upright feet.

‘Jenny?’ He pushed the door wide.

She was lying on her bed, face up, her beautiful blonde curls spread across the pillowcase, her sightless eyes staring at the mould-speckled ceiling. Her blanched skin was as white as the nightdress that covered her. But Jack did not register any of this. It was the scarlet pool that soaked the garment below her hips that trapped his gaze, a bloody flood that oozed from her to cover the bedsheet beneath and smear the exposed skin of her calves.