Jess cannot seek refuge in her friends for fear they will ask questions she is unable to answer.

She slides the key into the front door, thinking about the Oreos and mug of hot chocolate she will get from the kitchen before settling down in front of Grange Hill. Closing the door behind her, she feels a shiver tiptoe down her spine and fears momentarily the reprisals when her mum discovers her transgression. Having only recently celebrated her eleventh birthday, she is not supposed to be in the house alone.

It is only when she turns and sees what is at the top of the stairs that the cold trail along her spine spreads toward her ribs, her neck, her head, until her whole body is ice cold from her scalp to her toes.

Jess stares, unblinking, knowing what she is seeing yet unable to comprehend it.

It is her dad, but also not her dad. He is not standing on the landing, waving and smiling, calling her petal and asking about her day at school. Her dad is swinging from a beam on the ceiling, the cord of her mum’s navy blue dressing gown around his neck, his head slumped forward, his legs dangling beneath him.

Jess stares, cannot take her eyes off him, even as she feels the nausea swirl in her stomach. She stares at his suit and tie, his freshly polished shoes, waiting for him to raise his head, smile at her, tell her it’s all some terrible joke. But he does not move.

She does not move her eyes from him, yet somehow she absorbs the rest of the scene: the broken dining chair lying at the bottom of the stairs; the fat double knot under his chin; the deafening silence that seems to be pressing down on her until she fears it will crush her on the hallway floor.

Jess does not move, her body remote, distinct, as though it no longer belongs to her.

And then, all of a sudden, a sound is ringing in her ears and vibrating across her skin, but it is only when she hears a key in the front door, only when Mrs. Sheppard, their neighbor, bursts into the hall and gasps, that Jess realizes the sound she can hear is screaming and that the screams are her own.

She is aware of Mrs. Sheppard’s arm around her shoulders, of being led into the sitting room and lowered onto the sofa, of Mrs. Sheppard speaking but the words feel gluey in Jess’s ears. She sits on the sofa, her whole body trembling, and she knows there is nothing she can do to stop it. She hears Mrs. Sheppard whispering in the hallway, and for a split second she thinks she has got it all wrong, that Mrs. Sheppard is chatting to her dad, that it has all been some terrible misunderstanding. But above the noise of the blood pounding in her ears she hears the words police, dead, and body and they sound strange, unreal, as though they have drifted accidentally into her house from some other time and place.