Her Father tiptoed across the room, looked out of her window down the hillside at the rows of squalid back-to-back houses with their curling whisps of chimney smoke, and beyond, to the bright lights of Belfast city centre.  The night was peaceful.  Her little room was warm and homely.  She breathed slowly, deeply.  Nothing is as beautiful as the sight of a sleeping child.  ‘So innocent!’  Martha had bathed the twins before going to Church.  The little girl smelt of Johnson’s Baby Powder.  Her cheeks were flushed as pink as her flannelette nightie. ‘ So sweet!’

“Daddy’s little angel!” he whispered, stroking her unruly mop of naturally curly golden-brown hair, watching her slowly arouse, her eyelids heavy and blinking, but revealing her clear hazel eyes surrounded by their long, curly, slightly blonde tipped lashes.  “My little sweetheart!”  He bent over her, casting a dark shadow across her face, and kissed her brow.  The child flinched at the feeling of his stubble against her head and the warm, vile smell of nicotine on his breath.

“Let’s play our secret game!  Be a good girl for Daddy!”

CHAPTER 3

  EUROPA BUS DEPOT, BELFAST.

The girl stood, a pathetic little figure, a stark contrast to the gleaming modern blue tiles and unmarked chrome of the new Bus Depot, grubby hand outstretched, begging.  The child knew how to make a sweet smile work, and how a worried frown could elicit just enough sympathy to suck in some travellers who would give her “money to get home,” especially on a day as rainy as this!

Home!  A place, judging from her dishevelled appearance, she obviously hadn’t been in a long time.   Those who did, or didn’t give her money, seldom, if ever, noticed.  Just a mucky, untidy, typically working class ten year old with rain clamping her mousy hair to her head.  Maybe one of the Travellers, the Irish gypsies, or perhaps the daughter of a Belfast dole bludger, scrounging for her alcoholic parents’ drink money.  That’s what they often thought of her.  Fewer, the less cynical, thought she was a poor country kid in genuine distress.  Most who gave at all, simply handed her a coin in case she became a nuisance.  They rarely gave her more than a 10p piece, and they never made eye contact with her when they handed it over.  They always looked elsewhere.  Today, they studied the blanket of rain flowing down the Depot windows, a glass Niagara Falls!  Avoiding eye contact was always deliberate.  If they didn’t look, they didn’t have to acknowledge that there was a problem.  It somehow absolved them from the sin of inaction.  If someone stopped these people a few yards away and asked them what the girl looked like, they would be unable to describe her shabby denim jeans with their knees out, or the two grubby sweatshirts she wore under her damp black unzipped jacket.  They would not have noticed the way, when she moved,  the bubbles squelched out of the flooded, cheap, filthy blue canvas trainers which were totally inadequate for this weather.  They wouldn’t know if she had brown eyes or those piercing blue-grey ones which shone of false innocence and a hint of growing hunger!