“What?” The question squeaked out, and Jem felt her palms begin to sweat. “No, no, we can’t! You don’t understand. This kind of thing, it doesn’t—not for me…” She couldn’t explain. She could barely raise her voice above the traffic on the motorway and the rain that had started to batter the tarmac. “We need to wait for backup,” she said, but the officer brushed off her feeble plea.

“It’ll be fine. Trust me.” She shuffled forward and called down to the man. “Hang in there, pal. We’ll be back in a jiffy.”

“Stop taking the piss!” he yelled, twirling again, the L-plate flapping to reveal exactly how cold he was. He was still ranting as the officer tugged Jem’s hand, encouraging her to her feet.

“I’ve got a tow rope in my car,” she said. “Do you have anything we can make a harness out of? For him, not for us. I was joking about the abseiling.”

Jem’s instinct for career preservation made her falter, but she was already thinking, imagining a rough design fashioned from lifting belts and stretcher straps. “Possibly,” she conceded, dragging the word out. “Give me a couple of minutes.”

“Fab.”

They parted at the kerbside, the officer rummaging in her car boot while Jem headed to the ambulance. She found Trevor hastily crushing a fag beneath his boot.

“HART gave an ETA of ninety minutes, and control reckon that’s optimistic at best,” he told her, none too subtly blocking the rear doors.

“Right.”

When she went to step around him, he parried her move.

“No,” he said. “Whatever you’re planning, just—no.”

He was older than her but less experienced, and in terms of qualifications she outranked him. Given her reputation, though, she understood his reticence.

“We can’t leave him there for ninety minutes,” she said. “He’s already panicking. He’ll do something stupid and end up in the canal.”

“Or you’ll do something stupid, and then it’ll be our fault.” Trevor seemed to ponder this for a moment and then smiled sweetly. He reached for his radio with one hand and unlocked the ambulance with the other. “Okay, okay, go ahead. I’ll have a word with our dispatcher.”

With no time to worry about ulterior motives, Jem scrambled into the back and started to pull equipment from the cupboards. Trailing luminous strips of plastic, she met the officer on the hard shoulder and sat with her on the kerb to clip and tie and rearrange their kit until they had something resembling a scaffolder’s harness, if they squinted at it and used a lot of imagination.

“Think it’s big enough?” the officer asked, holding the rig in front of her to check its size. She only had an inch or so on Jem height-wise, but she was slimmer around the waist and backside, and two of her would have comfortably fitted into it.