I left the Garda Station wondering if I should go to see Mary, to let her know what I’d told Molloy. My intention had been to head back to Malin and spend the day by the fire with the papers, but I had no newspapers, and this was no ordinary Saturday morning.

I drove back up town and parked in the square. It was hard to imagine that we were so completely cut off, though the effects of the past twenty-four hours’ rain were impossible to miss. Wherever you looked the surface water levels just kept rising and rising. Suddenly I remembered the leak in the office. Whatever I decided to do, I’d better go there first. God knows what state it was in with all the rain that had fallen since.

Crossing the square, I saw Phyllis standing outside her bookshop, gazing into the distance as if looking for someone. Her face was pinched and anxious.

I called over to her. “Are you all right?”

She looked up in alarm. “Oh, Ben, perfect timing – can you give me a hand here?”

I crossed the road and when I reached her, she gestured towards her feet. She’d shoved sandbags against the bookshop door and I immediately saw why; water was lapping about twenty feet away. “Cripes, Phyllis.”

“I know. The Fire Service gave me those. But that’s not going to last too long, not with what’s coming.” She was breathless, almost wheezing with panic.

And she was right. The floods were going to reach her sooner rather than later. Like my office, Phyllis’s shop was on a slope but at the lower end of the town. Plus, the bookshop itself was on an incline; the floor of her shop dipped at the back. One thing was sure, she didn’t have long.

She pushed open the shop door and I followed her in, standing for a second on the threshold to take in the Aladdin’s cave that was her bookshop, imagining the devastation if the flood reached the door and water came pouring in.

She looked around her and breathed in. “I’m going to have to move the books.”

“All of them?” I asked incredulously. There were books everywhere, not just on the shelves but on stray chairs, on stools, piled up on the floor too. Stacks and stacks and stacks of them.

She placed her hands on her hips. “Aye, as many as I can. I’ll move them upstairs to the flat. The flat should be safe enough.” She looked at me quizzically. “Can you help or are you in the middle of something?”

I shook my head. “No. Of course I’ll help. But it’s going to take more than two of us. Shall I call Liam?”