“You’ll be back all the earlier the next day,” he says, squeezing my hand tightly, his dirty fingernails, and the few meagre coins that represent the ‘reward’ for my labours, cutting into my skin.

I wince, trying to pull my hand away, but he grips me still. “You hear?” he confirms, looking down his long, thin nose, like an eagle staring down its prey. “Early!” he snaps.

I nod, submissively. “Yes, Mr Marley,” I squeak, as my hand eventually escapes his clutches. In my desperation I drop a coin—I’m not sure which one—and it rolls under his desk. He grunts, a not-so-hidden snigger, mocking my subservience. I need this position—how else am I to feed my family—and he knows it. He knows it, and takes great pleasure from it.

I crouch, my hand grasping into the blackness, searching for my money. “Leave it,” hisses Marley. “If you are parted from your coin so easily, Sir, then perhaps you should not have it in the first place.” I look up at his sneering smile, and his hand dismissing me from his presence. “Take your day with your family, you have paid for it.”

“Do not mistake our kindness for weakness, Cratchit,” his partner chips in from the desk in the corner. I turn, his pasty face seems to pierce through the dimness of the subdued lighting. “For you will most definitely find we are not weak, despite our benevolence.”

I look down at the floor once more. I need that money. It’s Christmas Eve, and there is still much to be purchased if we are to have any celebration worth the name. “But my wages…”

“Go home,” Marley says. “Your carelessness is the cost of our benevolence.”

There is nothing to be done. I cannot complain further, else they sever my employment, and where then shall I be? They are monsters. Heartless, unfeeling monsters who value nought but the columns of profit that relentlessly accumulate in their ledgers.

I linger in the coldness of the snow-covered street, rubbing and blowing into my hands in a futile effort at heating them. How can I go home? With half my wage stolen back through no fault of my own? We will barely manage to feed ourselves for the next week, let alone have any little extras for the children. How can I go home to Emily knowing I’ve let them down yet again?

Were I to report it to the constables they would most certainly laugh it off. And, even if they did take my side, I would be out of my employment anyway. What is there to do?

The creaking of the business door pulls me from my self pity. I watch as Marley carefully makes his way down the five ice-covered steps, heading home to his no-doubt warm lodgings. I hate myself for wishing he’d slip and crack his head on the steps. That would be nothing less than adequate reward for his piracy.

I find myself following him, stealthily, at a discreet distance. There is silence. I do not even hear the crunching of my feet as they trudge their way through the snow. The thought never leaving me that, in these treacherous conditions, a man could easily fall, knocking his head. Many are the precarious little steps that punctuate Marley’s route home. The thought never leaves me.

The thought, too, that if we can’t have a Christmas, then why should he?