But enough wallowing. If the sheep wasn’t going to help, I’d better come up with another plan. I grabbed my phone from my bag and clicked to contacts.

Okay… who to call?

Not my parents. They were hundreds of miles away, and would be blissfully asleep for another hour at least.

Not Marcus, obviously, since he was a scumbag liar who I was never talking to again.

My thumb hovered over Lucy. As someone who worked for me, was it okay to wake her up this early in the morning and ask her to come to my rescue? Maybe, but considering that later today I’d be terminating her internship, it hardly seemed fair. Besides, she couldn’t drive. What was she going to do, order an Uber to pick me up from ‘shallow ditch, winding road, back of beyond, somewhere in the Midlands’?

Were you supposed to call the police under these circumstances? I twisted round to see if I could tell whether the back half of the car was sticking into the road. Thanks to the sizeable verge, I didn’t think so. Could I call them anyway, or was that a waste of police time, given that there was no emergency? I wasn’t hurt beyond several bumps and bruises, and a quick check of the car door confirmed that I was quite capable of exiting the vehicle without assistance.

And once I had to provide my name, let alone other details like why I was here in the first place, driving through the heart of a severe weather warning in what might possibly have once been a stolen vehicle in the middle of the night…

I didn’t want to go there.

The perfect person to call was Charlie. While she was unlikely to be able to help, as the person who I was on my way to visit, she lived at least somewhere in the area and would surely know someone who could. Either way, she would turn the whole thing into a hilarious story by the end of the call, and have a bath running and a hot chocolate waiting for me when I finally made it to her farmhouse.

But I couldn’t call Charlie, because the last phone number I’d had for her had stopped working over a year ago, around the same time she disappeared on social media for the hundredth time since I’d met her.

I opened the maps app to find out the name of the road I was on, in case I could persuade a local taxi firm or an all-night breakdown service to come and help. Bolstered by discovering that I was on Ferrington Lane, given that the village nestled into the border of Charlie’s family farm was Ferrington, I began searching, managing to type in ‘taxi’ right before the screen went black.

And yes, while racing about my flat chucking random stuff into bags four hours earlier, I’d forgotten my charger.

This was not good news.

I slipped a few inches lower in the seat, shrinking my hands up into my coat sleeves and tugging the hood over my head.