‘May I?’ Gillard asked.

Collins shrugged. ‘Be my guest.’ He bent over, and heaved the heavy box onto the counter where Gillard could see it. As he was doing so, Claire descended the stairs and greeted Gillard.

‘What are you doing here, Craig?’

‘Solving a mystery, hopefully.’ He looked at the parcel, which was franked and had a typed sticky address label but no business dispatch information. He was just about to start tearing off the parcel tape, when he stopped himself. ‘Hope it’s not a bomb. I wouldn’t put anything past this guy.’ He gently picked the parcel up and walked out and down the steps into the car park.

Claire followed at a safe distance, and watched as the detective chief inspector put down the box, then brought out his own mobile phone. He punched out a number, put the phone to his ear, and then knelt down in the car park with his other ear to the box.

‘It’s in there,’ he said. ‘I’ve rung her number. It’s on silent but I can hear the buzz.’

He walked away from the box. ‘I think you’d better get the bomb disposal people to have a decko. I’m going to have a look at the bridges at Lacey Dutton.’

Sir Robin Loxcombe had in 1763 donated money to build a ‘great stone bridge’ over the River Wey at Lacey Dutton, to replace the narrow Gorlaston Bridge half a mile downstream. Gillard reckoned the local aristocrat would be turning in his grave to see the state of it now, less than a week after the flood. Reopened to traffic and controlled by temporary traffic lights, it was splinted in scaffolding. Contractors’ vehicles were squeezed behind cones on the upstream side of the bridge, which had been damaged by the trees and cars that were ground against it.

The detective watched from the car park of the Jolly Boatman, before going inside to briefly greet the landlady who had been kind enough to provide him and Sam with blankets and food after the flood rescue. The detective looked at his iPad, on which the report of the fire and rescue service was displayed. It was absolutely clear that a full search had taken place at the time of the flood. But what if Sam’s body had been dumped here in the last few days? He couldn’t bear to hold that thought in his head, but he had to check it out.

He made his way along the bridge, walking the narrow pavement on the downstream side. He looked over the parapet, and saw that the river was getting down towards a more normal level. His earlier scouring of the Environment Agency website, and a conversation with the duty officer, had revealed that the depth of the river here was not normally sufficient to hide anything like a body for very long. The water was a thick brown mud, rather than the usual clear-running waters, and there was plenty of debris still in it. One new and quite substantial sandbank in the lee of the middle pier of the bridge held a child’s pushchair, a broken table and a moped. Nearer him was a more general raft of timber: everything from bits of garden shed, right through to rustic planters and a kitchen chair, all woven together with a dense mass of torn willow branches.