She says, “I had a little cry but now I am over it.” He notes the father, too, is “detached”, “robotic, no emotion, very monotone”. The officer asks an older sister, playing on the computer, how she is coping. The rest of the house seems alright, what one might expect. The police attending discover that only the room of the dead girl, whom we shall call Ebony †, is in such a foul state. He knows that what he has seen is no accidental death. There is just one decoration, a poster of a Victorian painting of a sad-faced little girl, turning away from the world, leaning her head against the wall.
There are no toys or furniture – just the mattress. It looks more like the bleakest of prison cells than a little girl’s bedroom. Her little face is shrunken, a “skull wrapped in skin”.Īn ambulance officer looks around the room and breathes in the smell. She looks only about three years old, even though the father says she is seven. On the mattress lies the tiny, emaciated body of a child. In a bare room littered with faeces is a mattress. The father says, “I can’t bear to go in there.” As they open the door, his words suddenly take on a different meaning to that of a grieving father, for an overwhelming stench hits their nostrils. When the ambulance officers arrive at the scene – a modest house in Hawks Nest, north of Newcastle – they are waved towards a bedroom. It starts with a triple-0 call at 1 pm on 3 November 2007.
