George could smell her perfume. It was lily of the valley. The scent brought back his childhood. The terraced house in Bow, the war, his father’s death, his mother’s endless stream of men friends. His ‘uncles’ as he had had to call them. George could not remember his father and knew that there was something not right about his death.

After the war his mother had packed up what was left of their home and moved them all to East Ham where she had made a niche for herself.

Nancy Markham had been a formidable person all her life. She ruled her children. When she said do something, you did it or took the consequences. Like Edith’s baby. She had wanted to keep the child. It had broken her heart when she had had to give him up. But, as always, Mother knew best.

Nancy was still talking, her voice low and caressing as she enumerated every failure in his life.

George knew that his mother did not like him, though she swore that she loved him. As he watched her ruby red lips opening and shutting he had a vision of himself getting up from the settee, going out to the hall and getting his Swiss army knife from beneath the floorboards in the hall cupboard. He could see the fear in his mother’s face as she realised that he was going to plunge it into her fat body. Over and over again. Slashing and ripping at her fat breasts and overhanging stomach . . .

‘George boy, you’re sweating! Are you feeling all right?’

He smiled at her. His secret smile. ‘Yes, Mother, I’m fine. Absolutely fine. Never felt better, in fact.’

For the first time ever, Nancy Markham felt as if her son had the upper hand. And like Elaine before her, she didn’t like it one bit.

Patrick Kelly sat at his daughter’s bedside in Grantley Hospital. The bruising on her face was beginning to fade, but still she lay in a deep coma. The doctors had opened a little window in her skull because her brain had swollen so much they had to relieve the pressure on it.

He held on to her hand. Christmas had no meaning for him now. The big dinner he had planned, and the present giving, were all far from his mind.

Earlier in the day he had attended Mass in the hospital chapel. It was the first time in over twenty years. He’d prayed to God to save his daughter. Make her be as she was before she was attacked. Even as he prayed he knew he was a hypocrite.

While he sat in the chapel, paid muscle was looking for the perpetrator of the horrific deed. He gritted his teeth.