She looked like the child she was at that moment. Thwarted. She stood, barely four feet tall in her Winnie the Pooh slippers, her hands balled into fists. She screamed, suddenly, running to him and pounding at his belly. ‘Stop it, Hannah,’ he said, holding her at arm’s length, his face red. ‘Stop it right now. I want you to tell me why you’ve done this. Why did you want to hurt Toby? Hurt us? We’re your mummy and daddy and we love you.’

‘Well I don’t love you. I hate you! I’m going to tell everyone what you did! I know what you did and I’m going to tell on you! I’m going to tell the police!’

Doug flinched at her words and I saw the triumph that flashed across Hannah’s face. I stepped towards her. ‘Good,’ I said, as calmly as I could. She stopped and stared at me in astonishment. ‘You do that. You tell the police what you know, and your father and I will be put in prison – and you will go into care. Do you know what that means?’

She hesitated, watching me intently, the look in her eyes so familiar; so eerily old beyond her years: assessing, calculating.

‘It’s where children go when they don’t have a mummy or daddy to look after them any more,’ I continued. ‘You will be sent to a children’s home, with lots of other children, where you’ll have to do what you’re told. You won’t have any of your things, none of the nice food you like to eat. It’ll be like school, all day every day, with grown-ups making sure you follow all their rules. Do you want that, Hannah? Really?’

‘I don’t care,’ she said, but I could hear the uncertainty in her voice. ‘I hate you. I hate you and Daddy and Toby. I don’t want to live here anyway!’

‘If that’s what you want, then go ahead,’ I said quietly. ‘Go ahead, Hannah, tell whoever you want.’

There was complete silence for a moment, my eyes met Doug’s across the room. And then, all at once, I saw the fight go out of her. She sat down at the table and sullenly filled her bowl with Shreddies. We had called her bluff, and, for now, at least, it seemed to have worked.

And so began an uneasy truce; a watchful, distrustful co-existence, during which we stuck to our promise, never leaving Hannah alone with her brother for a moment, using a constant, exhausting cycle of punishment and reward to get her to go to school and keep her behaviour under control. And there was peace for a time. For five years, in fact, until she was thirteen.