They might have escaped. They might have carried on running. Rose could have driven them to a Channel port, and gone to France. She might have dyed her hair, worn a long trench coat and dark glasses. Aaron could have worn a wig.

Imagine them on the deck of a ferry, Rose’s hair whipping around her face. Aaron grinning in delight. He looks looser, happier. The kinks have been ironed out. He holds himself more like a real boy and less like a broken puppet. Rose smiles too. She has rescued him, from the wolves and the witches and the fairy godmother.

But they didn’t go to France. They had no passports. They had never needed them. London was the farthest Rose had ever been.

They didn’t even leave the house. After they had thrown the plates, and smashed the glasses, and opened every tin and box they could, and hurled the eggs at the window, and drunk the milk until it poured from the corners of their mouths, they curled up together on the jam-stained sofa and went to sleep.

Titch was the first to wake up. She found herself, bloodied, on her kitchen floor. At the hearing you could still see the mark of the door on her, a long straight scar surrounded by fading yellow bruises at her temple. She called the police, and when they came, Rose and Aaron were still asleep. They shook them, pulled them up, but they clung to sleep with a fierce tenacity. Eventually, the police waited beside them while the ambulance crew took Titch, and the officers began to catalogue the scene.

Still they slept.

In all the din of the crime scene, the radios, the flash photography, they lay on the sofa. Finally, the officers carefully prised them apart, and held them upright until their eyes blinked open.

Only when they took Aaron away did Rose react. It took three officers to hold her.

In court her face was still bloodied and swollen. One officer’s elbow had caught her on the bridge of her nose, and her eyes glinted fiercely behind broad black bruises. She had blood crusted across her lip. She smiled throughout, a gleeful smile, free and feral, like she’d never been so happy.

After the hearing those who had watched and testified stand around in the lobby of the courtroom. Graeme approaches Titch. Her wet eyes are dimmed with fear and a kind of shame.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

She makes a gesture, faint.

Paula is at her head-teacherly best, tailored into narrow precision. ‘Hi, Graeme,’ she says.