And then there was the tree – a scrawny, grudging specimen of which Scrooge might have approved, but a tree nonetheless, decorated with love. Penrose walked over to look more closely at the stars and angels fashioned from bits of old material, at the cotton-wool snowman that hung from the top branch, the type of toy that had been so popular when he was a boy. He knelt down to see what was underneath – six presents of varying shapes, all wrapped in newspaper – and couldn’t remember ever having seen something so pathetically out of place. What could possibly have happened in just a matter of hours to change this family’s fate so dramatically?

There were two envelopes laid neatly on what passed for a kitchen table, perhaps containing the answer to his question, but first he needed to see the tragedy for himself. He climbed the dark, narrow staircase which led directly to the smaller of two bedrooms, and located the first bodies before he had reached the top step. Not even his imagination – fed by the 5brutality of war and his job – could have anticipated the horror of what he saw. Two little girls – twins, of around seven or eight – were tucked up in bed, their fair hair entangled on the pillow as they lay close together. Penrose could almost have believed they were sleeping quietly in each other’s arms were it not for the stain of livid red on their bedclothes. His hand shook as he pulled back the blood-stiffened sheet, but he forced himself to examine the wounds on their throats; the cuts were deep, with the windpipe and jugular veins almost severed in each case. Penrose could only pray that the work had been done too swiftly for the realisation of what was happening to sink in. Anything else was unthinkable. The girls were clothed in matching nightdresses and their likeness made a mirror image of their deaths: pale faces showing the first signs of discolouration, eyes closed to the horror of what had happened. As far as he could see, there were no bruises or other marks on their skin to suggest long-term abuse, and he wondered again what had brought them to this.

Gently he replaced the sheet, noting the chalkboard above the bed on which the days of December had been struck through one by one; what had begun in a flurry of excitement at the approach of Christmas had ended in a mocking countdown to their deaths. Sickened already, he turned to the room next door. It was ridiculous to consider the privacy of a woman’s bedroom in a situation like this, but still he hesitated on the threshold, hampered by a reluctance to intrude and a selfish desire simply to turn and run. An infant boy with a shock of blond hair had been thrown across the bed, his throat also slashed through, and a woman lay dead with her head resting on her son’s body. In the corner of the room, a drawer on the floor functioned as a crib, and Penrose could 6just make out a tiny hand amid the grey blanket. The air was tainted with the smell of blood, the grief in the room just as palpable, as he stepped carefully across the floor, avoiding the blotches on the boards. The blade of a white-handled knife was still deeply embedded in the right-hand side of Mollie Naylor’s neck. Her eyes were open, glazed over now, with brownish triangles starting to appear on either side of the pupils. Penrose searched them for an explanation, but found nothing more than his own assumptions, worn-out clichés of how her life might have brought about her death. Outside, in the narrow alleyway that ran between this terrace and the next, someone oblivious to the misery was whistling ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen’, and Penrose was struck by how suddenly the normal, uplifting conventions of the day had become the aberration; there was no possibility of rest here, and he wished with all his heart that he had never come.