“It’s fine. I’m on my way home now.” Rosie checked the clock on her dash, calculating the time as a plan started to form. “Come whenever you can. I’ll be a while yet as well. The roads are carnage.”

The splashing stopped as Jem paused, gasping quietly. “Yeah, tell me about it,” she said, once she had the energy to reply. “I’m knee-deep on one at the moment.”

Rosie closed her eyes, reluctant to overstep the boundaries Jem had established, even if she didn’t understand them. “Just take your time,” she said. “And I’ll see you soon.”

She restarted her engine and made a U-turn, pausing to see whether common sense might kick her notion into a cocked hat. A bus went by at ten miles an hour, its passage sending waves onto the submerged pavement. It was heading toward Stanny Brook. She waited for it to pass and turned in the opposite direction.

In the hours since she had last driven down Bennett Street, most of its inhabitants seemed to have fled for higher ground. Here and there candles threw silhouettes against drawn curtains, but the majority of the houses were unlit, and the street itself was black as pitch. To her left, the old mill seemed even darker, a huge beast hunkered in her periphery, chucking out the occasional fridge or mangy armchair as the overflowing river freed the rubbish abandoned around it. She parked in the driest spot she could find and swapped her trainers for the wellies stashed in her boot. Raising her coat’s hood provided little protection, but she felt safer somehow with her face concealed, as if the monsters lurking in the mill might not be able to see her coming.

She made it to the hoarding before she conceded defeat and announced her presence to monsters real or imaginary by switching her torch on. Its beam cut a stark line above the multiple streams winding through the wasteland. The relentless pound of the river was too close for comfort, but she chose her route with care, traversing no man’s land without snapping anything, and locating the window she had previously used for access. A couple of the stacked crates had succumbed to the rising water, but she clamped her torch between her teeth and managed to hoist herself through.

“Now what?” she said, more to dispel the creeping fear than out of hope of inspiration. Her tendency to barrel straight in and ask questions later had brought her to the mill, but she couldn’t very well scour five storeys of dubious integrity on her own in the dark.