The police dismiss the child’s story as fabrication. Amy, an intelligent, yet feral child, lives with her single mother Tina in filth and squalor, and is often left alone without food for days at a time. She befriends an eight-year-old girl named Amy who lives near the Donnellys and who claims to have vital information about the baby’s death. Local reporter Claire Jackson, reeling from a personal tragedy and passed over for a promotion, throws herself into the case. With the family already the target of harassment, Donnelly’s mother is certain that the murder of the baby has been committed by some striking miners, but Robert argues that the miners are his “ mates” and that they’d never hurt a child. The baby belonged to “ one of the Sweetmeadows’ rare two-parent families, the Donnellys.” Four months into the strike, Robert Donnelly, a miner, has returned to the mines as a scab. On Sweetmeadows, a cheap, “ mould-ridden” slum housing estate earmarked for destruction the body of a baby boy is found dumped near the rubbish bins. Bea Davenport’s novel This Little Piggy, set in the north of England during the ’84 miner’s strike, begins with the discovery of a horrible crime.
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