The house of Bill Sikes and Nancy, as David has envisaged it, may once have been the home to decent, respectable people, but those days are long gone. Standing bleak, cold and uncared for in the snows of winter, it epitomises the lives of those who inhabit it.
   The brutal and ruthless Sikes has never exhibited a vestige of humanity, except perhaps to his dog. "He treats you like a dog! worse than a dog, for he humours him sometimes," observes the wily Fagin to the unhappy Nancy, who has been so dehumanised by Sikes that her conscience is all but extinguished. When she does make an attempt to save Oliver, she is battered to death by her loathsome partner.
   A suggestion of the horrors that this house has witnessed is evocatively captured in David's sculpture. A pristine covering of snow on its roof cannot conceal its essentially sinister character. Or is that simply because we know what lies in the room upstairs?