One of the policemen appeared from the side of the house that faced the coast, where the big bay window was, and his expression turned my spine to ice as he began yelling and gesticulating, which set off what seemed like an explosion of movement.

And I knew that things had gone from being bad to true horror.

A short, red battering ram was produced and pounded into the beautiful old door, with its distinctive lion-shaped knocker I had seen a million times.

I was out of the car now.

I heard a uniformed officer – I don’t even know if it was a man or a woman – call my name from where they were standing at the front of the house, but I ignored them and ran past the broken, open door and into the cool, tiled hallway. I was carrying Livi, which is something that still haunts me. I don’t remember if I squeezed too hard, or even if she woke up. I just remember the warm density of her in my arms. That she was there, where she should never have been.

In my memory of it, there are no crackling radios, none of the shouting and urgent activity that must have been taking place.It’s as though it happened in a dream state.

All I can hear is my own fearful, rasping breath. I see the heads of the police officers slowly turning towards me and mouthing urgently words I can’t hear from angry, frightened faces.

I saw Julia first.

She was lying on their long red sofa, her head back against a cushion as though she had dropped off into a pleasant nap. Her glasses had fallen onto her chest. The top of her head was now a mashed, pulpy mess of pink and white. The shotgun was on her chest.

Patrick was next to her but slumped sideways so I hadn’t seen him at first. I wasn’t able to see the damage to his head and learned of it only later.

Hands were reaching out for me. I think I screamed; I must have screamed. Then I pushed past the PC standing with an ashen face in the doorway and climbed the stairs two at a time, past another policeman who was just standing there doing nothing and into Anya’s childhood bedroom.

Lilac wallpaper, flowered curtains. Bookshelves that still held all the books she had loved as a child: the Jacqueline Wilsons, the Harry Potters, the horsey books. A big arty picture of the three of them, black and white, tumbling about and laughing.

I seemed to see each part of her in stages. First, my wife’s feet in her scuffed red Converse, up to her legs in the only jeans she could get into since Livi’s birth, then the flowery nursing top that crossed over at the front.

Finally, her face. What was left of it.