Rona Dougall: Parents everywhere will hold their children a little closer after horror of little girl’s killing

Dawn is breaking, but I’m wide awake now, sleep impossible, waiting for my daughter to come home. Every muscle in my body is tensed and all my senses are on high alert.

I’m listening so intently for the key in the lock that every creak in this old house is magnified. Foxes shriek outside, a taxi idles at the kerb as a neighbour gets an early flight, the milk float comes and goes, the unidentifiable sounds of the night continue. And she’s still not back.

The radio alarm on the bedside table glows green and I’m checking it compulsively. When you’re waiting, time seems interminable. A minute seems to last a painful lifetime. I’m thrumming with low-level anxiety and I’m fighting monsters in my mind that I don’t want to name.

I tell myself I’m making a fuss, that there’s nothing to worry about but I can’t stop fretting. I feel my constant worry is the talisman that keeps her safe. I drift to the window occasionally and stare down the street as if through sheer force of will I can make her appear.

I’ve come downstairs, giving up on the fractured sleep and disturbing dreams and I’m desperately trying to distract myself, attempting to put into words the very special kind of torture we go through in these wretched twilight hours.

But I’m sure many of you will know what it’s like to wait for a loved one to come home. It is a universal experience, no matter who we are.

Just when I think I can’t bear this any longer I hear the gate clang and footsteps on the path, the front door slams behind her and that syllable of sound frees me from the torment.

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She’s had a great time and despite her dripping wet hair, and smudged mascara she looks as beautiful as only a teenage girl can look in the early hours after a big night out. Flushed with dancing and life. My face is saggy with relief, showing every one of my years. But I don’t care, all is right with the world.

But what if the unidentifiable evil that haunts every parent crashes into your home and violates the space where you think your children will always be safe?

The murder of nine year old Olivia Pratt-Korbel in Liverpool this week is beyond horrific. Watching the news the next day, the TV reporter at the scene invites us to imagine what had happened and with terrible clarity takes us on a journey I will never be able to forget; the men pushing in, the gunfire, the mother desperately trying to protect her girl, the collision of two worlds that never should have met.

It’s almost impossible to grasp how an ordinary Monday evening, in an ordinary household could end in such tragedy.

It’s a trite cliche, I know, to say that Olivia’s murder has shocked the nation, but I think that expression has never felt so apt. The local community has expressed their incredulity that something like this could happen. The picture of the little girl in her pink dungarees who’s been described by her headteacher as the life and soul of the class, stares out at us from the newspapers and reminds us of the awful randomness of life.

The behaviour of the two men involved in the horrific crime is beyond contempt. And the friends of the intended victim who picked him up and took him to hospital, leaving Olivia to die in the arms of her mother, leaves me speechless. We saw the very worst of human nature that night.

The legacy of the terrible murder will of course last a lifetime for the family of this beloved child. But it will also linger in the minds of every parent who will feel that little bit less safe now, knowing that nowhere is off limits, not even your own home, with evil like this in the world.

We tell our children that the monsters under the bed aren’t real that nothing can hurt them. Then this. The monster has become real. A boundary has been crossed and there’s no going back.