‘So if there really was a woman in it, she’ll have drowned.’

‘Probably.’ He looked out of the window. ‘It looks like it has stopped raining now.’

‘Thank God.’ She picked up another biscuit. ‘It’s funny how things turn out. I was a bit dubious about the mountain biking given the weather forecast. But all that gear of yours earned its keep this evening.’

‘I always keep it ready in a big rucksack, in the car. You never know.’

She stared in wonder at her husband. ‘Craig, you’re ready for anything. You make me feel so safe.’

It was a sentiment she soon wished she had never voiced.

The Gillards’ final journey home was hardly without incident, with heavy rain and gusty winds making driving conditions treacherous. Only five miles from Chipstead, they joined an unmoving tailback. Sam stuck her head out of the passenger-side window into the downpour to see what the problem was, and spotted an elderly motorist vainly trying to shift a heavy sycamore bough that had blocked the road. No one seemed to be helping him, so she and Gillard ran up to help. The detective shouldered the weight of the branch, which allowed Sam and the old man to pivot the bough so it no longer fully blocked the carriageway.

Once back in the car, the radio news was full of reports of flash floods right across Hampshire, Surrey and the Home Counties caused by an unprecedented intensity of rainfall, and made worse by a two-hour power cut. An elderly lady had drowned in her own basement attempting to rescue a family heirloom from the rising floodwaters. Two children who had been seen playing near the River Wey in the afternoon were missing. In all more than two dozen motorists had been rescued from their cars, including six wedding party guests whose vehicle had stalled under a flooded bridge in the New Forest. Their own involvement at the Lacey Dutton crossing was mentioned in passing.

Gillard could tell from monitoring the Surrey Police radio traffic, something he could do from his own smartphone, that emergency resources were stretched to breaking point.

‘Thankfully, only one person seems to have died,’ Sam said.

‘I think we will have to wait until the morning to be sure of that,’ Gillard replied. ‘There were an awful lot of cars bobbing down the river. I wouldn’t be surprised if they discover someone stuck under a bridge somewhere who didn’t make it.’

He was right.

It was firefighter Geoff Holt who made the discovery, just before three a.m. His powerful torch illuminated a small yellow car bobbing upside down in what had been Lacey Dutton’s riverside park, and was now a backwater of the river. Further progress downstream was blocked at the hamlet of Gorlaston by a slim and rather beautiful hundred-year-old stone bridge, now used only by pedestrians, and against which a dam of floating branches was lodged. The vehicle was entangled between the most leftward span and the lower limbs of a willow. This tree was one of a dozen which had originally marked the riverbank, but was now well within the vastly enlarged waterway.