‘I’m lodging there.’ He looked at the upturned faces. ‘If it’s the same place. It might not be. Hilda Armitage. She’s got a baby.’

‘Betty, her baby’s name,’ said the landlady. ‘I’m sorry, son, but the place is a ruin.’

‘Are tha sure?’ said Silas.

‘Yes, love. We’ve seen nowt of Hilda or Betty. Louisa Leigh lived there, an’ all. An’ Hilda had a lodger…’

‘Fred Sharrow? I know Fred. I were wi’ him. I think, I think he might be dead.’ Silas put his fist in his hair and pulled at his scalp. He didn’t want to break down in tears in front of these people, but the landlady’s face blurred and the image he struggled to blink away was not of Fred but of the baby, of Betty being laid in a nest of blankets in an open drawer while Mrs Armitage dished up his meal.

‘What’s that about Fred?’ An older man, small and wiry, clutched Silas’s arm. He shook him off.

‘An’ me dog was tied up outside, in the backyard. Shandy, her name is.’ He looked at the faces around him. ‘A collie.’

The man spat on the sawdust. ‘The dead animals are bein’ put in pits and I weren’t askin’ about tha dog. What about Fred, then?’

‘George, we’ll find out soon enough,’ said the landlady. She turned back to Silas. ‘I bet she’s a good dog, yes? Sheepdogs are survivors. I wouldn’t go looking in the stables. Most of the people laid there have come from further up the river. I don’t know what’s happened to Hilda or to Louisa. They might have escaped, love.’

‘I did. I escaped,’ said Silas. ‘I got swept under and I escaped.’

‘Well, then, lad, there you go.’

He asked for directions to the Armitage house and was sent back the way he’d come. He stopped to watch a commotion outside a partially ruined house. The front of the house was missing, its contents scooped out, leaving only the floorboards of the upper rooms spilling down like unravelling entrails.

A knot of people stood before it, all peering up, a woman at the front wringing her hands. ‘Come on, love, jump down. He’ll catch tha!’

A constable stood in the shadow of the building, legs braced, arms outstretched. Silas followed the man’s gaze to the upper storey of the house. A child, a girl of no more than eight or nine, was crouched against the back wall, balancing on the last remaining plank of wood on what had been the floor of the room.

‘Can’t tha fetch a ladder?’ The woman who had been shouting to the girl was now tugging on the constable’s sleeve. ‘Look at her, she’s petrified!’

‘You can’t put a ladder against that,’ a man said. ‘It’s not stable.’

Silas approached a man standing a little way off the others.

‘I’m lookin’ for Mrs Armitage’s house. Can tha help me?’

The man jerked his thumb over his shoulder – ‘End o’ this row’ – and turned away. Silas crunched towards the end of the terrace, where a gable-end chimney stack pointed accusingly into the blank blue sky. In the gaping maw where the house had stood, roof beams hung or were scattered across the ground like tossed matches. At the foot of the bank, the river flowed by. There was no sign at all of the bridge the coachman had dropped him off at the day before. Was that only the day before? Silas felt he’d been wandering this wasteland for an eternity.