The questions pounded in her head. Tom was fighting towards him through the ripping current.

Then Helen saw.

Not Oliver at all. It was Gerry.

Oliver was still down there, under all that rush of water.

Oh God. Please. The words wrenched themselves out of her. Gerry’s head went down again. Then she saw something else, a flash of white and a dark length like a dead log. Two heads.

Please, God. Inching towards the island. Too slowly. Hardly moving, and Tom still too many feet away. Both heads gone again. She plunged frantically to the water’s edge.

‘Stay there.’ Tom shouting at her. Impotence choked her. She was too weak a swimmer to hope to reach them.

There, Gerry’s head again. And miraculously Tom’s beside him. A weight between them, dragging them down. The terrible gap between them and the island closing, so slowly.

Get help. Decision galvanised Helen. She ran up on to the bridge where the road mocked her with its emptiness. There was no-one at all, no-one to shout to. She turned and scrambled down the steps to Follies, down to the tip of the island. Tom’s head splashed out of the blackness with Gerry beside him, gasping and choking with his eyes shut. Helen flung herself down and stretched out her arms. With a groaning heave, Tom shoved Gerry towards her and she groped for him, then caught at his icy wrists. For a moment he hung there and the water almost snatched him away again. Helen’s arms were burning in their sockets before he kicked feebly and then found the strength to roll and scramble up on to the bank. Once he was clear he staggered and collapsed behind her. But she had no thought for him now. Tom was fighting in the water with the black, unmoving weight of Oliver in his arms.

Again she leaned over the mud and swirling water.

‘Hold him. Just hold him,’ he gasped at her.

Sodden velvet and slippery satin in her fingers now. This one was motionless and unbearably heavy. The water pulled greedily at him but she hung on, her eyes shut, ready to be torn in half before she would let go.

Tom pulled himself up beside her, coughing the water up out of his lungs. Together, the pain stabbing in their chests, they dragged the arms, the shoulders, then the long back out of the water. The feet came, unwillingly, as they hauled him out on to the grass. His head rolled back and Helen glimpsed the terrifying whiteness of his face.

Behind them Gerry raised himself on all fours and coughed. River water gushed out of his mouth. Tom didn’t even spare him a glance. He was thumping at Oliver’s chest with the heel of one hand pressed over the other. He wrenched the white face to one side.