‘Hurry up! For God’s sake… get a move on.’ He fed the small, trembling bodies through the back parlour door and into the scullery. Here Tilly was desperately fumbling with the bolt on the back door. ‘I can’t budge it,’ she told him, ‘it’s stuck fast and my hands are that sweaty.’ It was dark, too. Almost pitch black. Yet it was more than they dared do to light a candle. The only glimmer of light was the moon’s soft glow as it played in through the small window panes.

Without a word Joe came forward, gently pushing Tilly to one side. When the bolt shot back, a sigh of relief filled the air. But then came the worst: it all happened so quickly that no one in that scullery could have prevented it. As the door swung open, they were pounced on! Dark, fleeting figures in the moonlight, surging forward, intent on creating mayhem. In the furore that followed, both Tilly and her son fought to protect the children, who cowered together in a corner of the scullery, their sobbing pitiful to hear. Only Sal came forward, throwing herself again and again into the uproar, to be sent reeling backwards by flaying fists.

In a matter of minutes, Tilly and her son were overpowered. ‘Bastards!’ Tilly spat the word out, employing the last dregs of her strength when, in one last determined effort she rammed her two fists into the chest of her attacker. His answer was to strike out a vicious hammer blow to her head. As she fell sideways, Tilly’s temple cracked against the corner of the slopstone. With a strange, muffled cry, Tilly slumped to the ground. The brave fight was over, and Joe feared that, because of him, his own mother, had paid with her life. Openly sobbing, he fell to his knees, collecting Tilly into his arms and begging her forgiveness.

‘Fools!’ The voice was cunning, dripping with satisfaction. ‘Fools, the lot of you!’ Justice Crowther stepped into the scullery where, with a quick, sure movement, he lit the candle which stood on the window ledge. In the flickering light his face became an eerie sight, the eyes narrowed to thin dark slits, his lower features embedded in a mass of thick, greying hair. As his gaze fell on them, the children clung to each other more fearfully, each struck dumb by the grotesqueness of those smiling, cruel eyes.

From the alcove in the far corner where she had been flung, Sal watched with wary eyes, afraid to move a muscle. She had seen this man once before. On a particular day outside Nelly’s house, when she and her mammy had run away. Sal remembered how terrified her mammy had been on seeing this man. Now she felt that same terror. But mingled with the fear was a spiralling disbelief. Also shock and fury. Joe had brought these men here! At first Sal couldn’t bring herself to believe that he had done such a terrible thing, not even when Tilly had said so.