So what had this young woman been doing in it?

He noticed something else. There was a great mess of vegetation entangled around the clutch and brake pedals, and a skein of something else. He reached down and untangled what seemed to be human hair, on which leaves, grass and muck had been caught. He took a small plastic evidence bag from his pocket, and gingerly dropped the tangle of fibres in.

Stepping back from the car and going outside, Gillard held the bag up into the watery sunlight. He’d been right. This hair wasn’t blonde, like the girl found in the car.

It was dark.

Lacey Dutton Caravan Park was a sprawling piece of floodplain, about five acres on the outside bend of the River Wey, three quarters of a mile upstream from Lacey Dutton bridge. From previous visits he recalled it was a sprawling site, a dozen or so static caravans on the higher land, with a couple of dozen pitches nearer the river for camper vans and touring caravans. Now, with the floodwaters mainly receded, the entire site looked like a film set for a re-enactment of the Battle of the Somme. Two chocolatey-coated caravans were stuck in some willow trees, one vertical, one on its side, seemingly grappling each other like overweight mud wrestlers. Empty gas cylinders were strewn around the site like muddy corpses. The site office was the only element unmarked by the fight against the waters. A static caravan surrounded by a neat trellis fence and an Astroturf lawn, with gaily painted concrete gnomes and toadstools standing sentinel over a slimy moat. Approach was only possible across slippery planks recently laid for the purpose. Gillard parked on the road and donned his wellingtons. He met Mrs Deirdre O’Connell, Kevin’s mother, as she emerged from the site office with a bunch of mops grasped in one hand and a vape in the other. They greeted each other casually.

‘Insured?’ Gillard asked, his inclined head indicating the entire sweep of disaster.

The woman gave him a weary look over her steel-framed spectacles which told him the answer. Gillard had known Deirdre on and off for many years. She was a tough cookie, having run the campsite on her own for several years after the death of her husband, with little or no active help from her tearaway kids. The business was only marginally profitable, he guessed, with the long-term prospect of a sale of the land for housing dangling like a jewel in the distance.

For the next few minutes he indulged her tour of the carnage and devastation that the river had brought on her life and livelihood. He gently guided her towards the subject of the yellow Allegro, as they squelched together through ankle-deep puddles, criss-crossing foot-deep muddy tyre tracks until they finally reached a leylandii hedge with a broken gate.

‘This is Kevin’s patch,’ she said as they splashed through. The ancient mildewed caravan that was Kevin’s home had survived the inundation because of its berm of sandbags, but his garden, as Deirdre called it, which ran for twenty yards towards the river’s edge, looked like it had been swatted by some giant hand. The smooth mud was sprinkled with plastic bottles, lumps of polystyrene, and broken branches from the willows further upstream.