Ella was staring at Danny, biting her lower lip to still its trembling, swallowing the lump of fear rising in her throat and threatening to choke her. Tears prickled behind her eyes and she blinked rapidly to stop them falling. Not yet, she told herself fiercely, don’t let them see you cry again; at least, not yet.

They had indeed found Danny’s car. They presumed it had been travelling along the coast road some miles north of Lynthorpe where it ran along an embankment just below the sand-dunes. Then the sea had broken through, ripping aside the sand and vegetation, bearing aloft anything in its path and hurling the car over and over, plunging it down the bank until it had come to rest upside down in a deep dyke, where it lay undiscovered until the floodwater had subsided.

And they had found Kate.

She had been trapped inside and possibly, from the bruising on her head, knocked unconscious. ‘From the position we found the car, we think she was coming back towards home,’ the kindly policeman told them. ‘Do you know why she was travelling on that particular road and at that time in the evening?’

Ella saw her grandparents exchange a glance. Her grandpa’s voice came huskily. ‘We think she was going to meet someone that afternoon, but she didn’t say who it was or where exactly she was going.’

‘So you don’t know whether she actually met whoever it was, or not?’

Grandpa Godfrey shook his head and sighed sadly, ‘Maybe we’ll never know now.’

The policeman’s sympathetic gaze came to rest on the young, white-faced girl. He seemed to guess, without being told, who she was, for he squatted down in front of her and held out his huge hands towards her. ‘Your mum, was it, love?’ and when Ella nodded, he added, ‘She could hardly have known what was happening. She wouldn’t have suffered . . .’

But the sensitivc child thought differently, and for many nights to come and even intermittently through the years, her nightmares would he haunted by the thought of her mother trapped in the car, alone and hurt, with the water rising relentlessly . . .

Of course they would not let her see her mother, not even when they brought her back to the local chapel of rest at the undertakers’ whilst a funeral was arranged. Danny and her grandfather had been obliged to identify the body and though they had tried to prevent Esther seeing her, their efforts had been in vain.

‘I’ll see me daughter and no one’s goin’ to stop me, not even you, Jonathan.’ So she had gone, resolutely walking into town alone to the undertakers’, forbidding anyone to accompany her.