He picked Wendy up, and carried her sleeping into the bathroom. Her arms lolled beside her as if she were already dead. He felt as if he were mad, or drugged, or even as if he were someone else altogether. Supposing there wasn’t really a famine at all? Supposing his radio had been telling him lies? But he looked around him at the white enamel bathtub with its green-coloured stain; at the can of lavender talcum powder with the rusted rim; at the fingerprinted mirror where Elizabeth had plucked her eyebrows and he had always shaved. And even if the radio was lying, what the hell was the use of a life like this, for any of them?

He took a safety-razor blade between finger and thumb, and then sat on the toilet seat with the sleepy Wendy on his lap. She mumbled, ‘Daddy… what are we doing?’ but he shushed her soothingly as he stroked her forehead, and then gently but firmly gripped her hair and slit her throat, as deeply as he could, from one side to the other. She didn’t even protest; didn’t even seem to realise what was happening. But then there was a sudden explosive gargle of blood and air, and the whole bathroom was arrayed in red. He dropped Wendy off his lap, in horror and utter fear, and she lay kicking her left foot against the side of the bath, kick, kick, kick, as she died. It was like watching a run-over dog die, only a thousand times worse, and he reeled with the dreadfulness of it.

‘I didn’t lose my resolve, though,’ he told the police. ‘I knew the rest of them had to go, too.’

He went upstairs to the small attic room where Jenna slept in her pink-painted crib. He had spent hours on that crib himself, sanding it and decorating it. Just above Jenna’s slumbering curls there was a transfer of a grinning burro, wearing a straw hat.

John Frederick Walters was glad that Jenna had gone to sleep again. He doubted if he would have been able to kill her if she was crying. He leaned over her crib, kissed her, and then pressed a pillow against her face for what seemed like a half-hour. It was probably only five or ten minutes, but it was enough. Jenna May Walters died of asphyxiation, aged 179 days.

Alice was the last. Alice, too, was asleep, and all she said when he softly opened the collar of her nightdress and held the razor-blade against the side of her throat was, ‘What time is it?’ Then the sheets were stained with ever-widening darkness.