A weighted silence settled over the bedroom. Sara had a lump in her throat and she kept swallowing, but it wouldn’t clear. Her sister’s bedroom represented comfort, but now the girl was cut adrift, alone and unprotected. Mrs Carter tipped her head to one side in a grotesque display of coquettishness.

‘I think you do.’

Sara shook her head over and over again. ‘I don’t, honestly. I promise.’

In one swift movement, Mrs Carter smacked the hockey stick against the square of carpet in front of her daughter. Sara flinched. The room filled with the violence of torn air.

Tears slid from Sara’s eyes, even though she was the defiant one, the stronger of the two sisters. Mrs Carter repeated the action, interspersing each strike of the hockey stick with a word. She did not raise her voice.

‘Where.’ Thud. ‘Are.’ Thud. ‘They?’ Thud.

But fear muted Sara. She could not speak now, even if she’d wanted to.

Mrs Carter pressed her face up close to the girl. Sara could see where foundation had settled into her mother’s pores and the rheum in the corner of her eyes, turned black by mascara. She smelled sour, of red wine and bitterness, and there was spittle at the edges of her lipsticked mouth. But the spark of joy that arced from Mrs Carter as she threatened her youngest daughter was the most terrifying part of it all.

‘I will ask you one last time. Where are they?’

Marshalling every bit of her inner strength, Sara stammered out an answer. ‘I don’t know.’

The girl could not anticipate how her mother would react, but she did not expect laughter. Mrs Carter chuckled, throaty and amused. The delight that emanated from her was palpable.

She stroked the hockey stick, her fingers caressing its solid wooden curve.

‘Get onto the bed. Face into the pillow, please.’

‘No,’ said Sara. No. And it wasn’t a refusal, but a plea. ‘No, please don’t.’ Her lower lip trembled. Please don’t.

‘Do as I say.’

Mrs Carter’s voice was light, not a trace of anger or aggression. But Sara knew what her mother was capable of. The threat of violence, certainly. But its execution too.

And a doctor in the family proved useful at times. For medication. Sutures. Proper dressings. But not too often. Not enough to raise suspicion. The odd accident here and there, a childhood rite of passage. A taster perhaps, but not the main course. Physical violence was too obvious, too easy to document, too difficult to explain away.

No, the Carters’ stock-in-trade was fear and humiliation.

‘Get onto the bed,’ Mrs Carter said again.

Sara lay across the duvet, that same crushing feeling in her chest making it feel like all her organs were being squeezed until she couldn’t breathe. She buried her face into Shannon’s pillow, caught a trace of the scent of her sister’s body spray.