‘That was where the Allegro was for the last however many years,’ she said, pointing to the middle of the quagmire. ‘He lost his Vauxhall Nova too, that’s the one that worked.’

‘Just to be clear, you say Kevin was with you throughout the flood?’

‘Yes. He was backwards and forwards with ropes and sandbags. He did a great job considering he normally doesn’t shift from sitting on his arse watching TV.’

‘And there was no young teenage girl staying with you, or with Kevin?’

‘No. But I might recognise her if you have a photo.’

‘Not with me.’ Gillard did indeed have an image on his tablet, but as it was of the face of a corpse, he didn’t feel he could share it. That would eventually be Perry’s decision as SIO for this case.

‘Is there any other access here, apart from past the site office?’ Gillard asked.

‘Yes, the riverside path, which is actually a drive for two of the bungalows, went right past here.’ There was no sign of it. ‘I think a big chunk of the bank has disappeared,’ she said. ‘We owned it and we want it back.’ She barked a brief sarcastic laugh. They made their way carefully down towards the river’s edge.

Gillard opened up his Ordnance Survey map. ‘So there was vehicular access?’ he asked.

‘Not after four o’clock on Sunday, I wouldn’t have thought. Mike and Betty in the first bungalow said the waters were up to their front step. By midnight they were halfway up her new kitchen units.’

‘Did you see any vehicles or any strangers on the site in the run-up to the floods?’

She shook her head. ‘We had four bookings over the weekend. One was a regular from the statics, but everybody else from the lower pastures we brought up into the office once the river came over. Three cars got washed away, but we managed to save the Dutch camper van.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

She blew out a huge vape cloud and watched it dissolve in the now bright blue sky. ‘We’ll carry on camping,’ she said, and smiled at him, a survivor’s mask that covered the pain. ‘You’ve got to keep going, haven’t you?’

Kevin O’Connell arrived pretty promptly at Epsom Police Station to give a statement. DI Claire Mulholland met him at the reception desk and escorted him into an interview room. O’Connell was a rough-looking slab of a man, in his early twenties and over six feet tall. He had a shaven, lumpy head and one of those bushy dark beards that looked like it had been bought from a joke shop and glued on. His stained trousers sagged, and as he sat at the interview table they revealed a wedge of hairy bottom, and stretched across it the word Friday on the purple waistband of his day-of-the-week underpants. Claire had bought her own teenage son a seven-pack of the same cheap brand, to remind him to change them every day. And like with O’Connell, the waistband day was always wrong. She reflected that unchanged underwear were worse than stopped clocks, only right once a week.