‘And did you see the children?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Shirl. ‘I couldn’t help but see them, standing up here. I mean, down at street level the police were doing their best to shield them from the stickybeaks. They’d put up those white sheets, like white tents really, but from up here we could see it all.’

‘How did they look?’

Shirl said, ‘The first ones, they weren’t too bad.’

Bill said, ‘They were pretty bad.’

‘It was more a shock than anything,’ Shirl continued. ‘They came out barefoot, wrapped in those silver blankets they give people at the end of a marathon. They were bald, and maybe a bit too thin.’

Bill shook his head. ‘Have you gone mad, Shirl? What are you on about? Not too bad? They looked bloody terrible! Don’t you remember I said to you, “Good God, would you look at them?” They looked like skeletons. They had crooked legs and they were blue. They looked the same as those kids they carried out of Belsen after the war.’

Shirl said, ‘No, Bill’s right, it was pretty bad. And I mean, I was absolutely bug-eyed, thinking, “How many will there be?” Because they were coming out of the house, and they just kept coming, all with that strange look about them, like they hadn’t been outside in years.’

‘And that was just the walking wounded,’ Bill added. ‘Once they were out, they started on the wheelchair kids. They were next, weren’t they, Shirl?’

Shirl nodded, saying, ‘That’s right, the wheelchair ones were next. Not wheelchairs like normal wheelchairs – I’m talking now about those padded chairs with the padding all around the headrest. And some of them had those helmets on. So these were pretty severely disabled children. They didn’t look good at all. They had their mouths hanging open and their heads were rocking around.’

Bill said, ‘Their hands were all clenched up, and their tongues were hanging out. They were making these moaning noises. How many of them would you say there were, Shirl?’

‘I’d say at least seven.’

‘Oh, there were definitely seven. Seven, minimum.’

‘And that wasn’t even the worst of it,’ Shirl said. ‘Bringing up the rear, they had the kids in the hospital beds. You know the kind of beds I mean? The hospital beds with the wheels and the IV drips overhead? They were coming out and they had children on board, and I’ve got to admit, when I first saw them, I thought, “Heaven help us, they’re dead.” Because that’s what it looked like: they were flat out on these hospital beds and they had big, round, bloated bodies, but they weren’t dead, they were very much alive. I could see that after a while. They were alive because their stomachs were going up and down, so they were breathing. The ambos had them attached to tubes. I don’t want to say the wrong thing here, but they were that pink, and that swollen, it really didn’t look right.’