He shoved the card into his pocket without glancing at it. She knew that none of them would ever contact her, but still, she had to try. She updated her status with comms as she slogged along the waterlogged towpath, avoiding dog shit and the odd needle discarded by the smack rats who congregated beneath the next bridge down. Surrounded by abandoned mills and factories, this part of the canal had long since been claimed by Manchester’s cast-offs: the drunks and the addicts, the homeless and the destitute. Only someone with a death wish or a very strong belief in a higher being would venture there after dark. She passed a pair of the latter by the lock, their matching red coats identifying them as volunteers from the neighbourhood church. The elder of the two tipped his hat at her.

“How do, Officer. All quiet on the western front?”

“For once. I think the rain’s keeping them in. Even the geese look cheesed off.”

He chuckled. “It carries on like this and the town centre will go under again. Sandbags are already out down Hearts Cross.”

That came as no surprise. The small village of Hearts Cross bordered Stanny Brook, but it sat squarely in a flood zone and its residents were still counting the cost from the last time the river burst its banks. With government austerity policies biting hard, the council had little in the pot for essential services, let alone flood defences, and they had employed a head-in-sand approach to future breaches in the hope that the sun might finally shine on their patch and negate the need for expensive works. Such blind optimism with regard to the region’s climate confirmed long-held suspicions that most of the councillors were morons.

“Have either of you met a lass called Tahlia on your travels?” she asked. “About fourteen years old? Possibly sleeping rough?”

“No,” the younger chap said. “There are kids dotted about in a few of the mills, but the buildings are death traps, so we stay out of them.”

“That’s understandable.” She gave them her card, issuing the usual request should they cross paths with Tahlia before she did. The church ran youth groups and a food bank and took a mobile soup kitchen into the town centre at night. No one seemed to mind listening to a sermon if they were hungry enough. “Right then, I’d best let you get going,” she said.

They performed an awkward shuffle on the narrow path, Rosie stepping aside and slipping on a muddy verge. Rain was seeping beneath her shirt, and her trousers clung to her thighs as if they’d been spray-painted on. She stamped sticky lumps of mud from her boots as she walked on, her foul mood exacerbated by a WhatsApp message from Kash showing nothing but a Big Mac and a large fries.