Lambton helped her into the Land Rover. It felt wonderful to be out of the screaming wind.

Dawes got into the passenger seat. He looked grey, his eyes sunken, his lips purple. He was soaked.

‘You look terrible,’ she said, though her bottom jaw had given up working properly.

‘I wouldn’t recommend a selfie just at this moment either, ma’am.’

Anna tried to smile but her facial muscles seemed to be made of cardboard all of a sudden. ‘Thanks for… for coming with me.’

The driver’s door opened and Lambton got in. He nodded towards an ambulance further up the road. ‘She’s barely conscious. They’re taking her to Southmead.’

‘We… should go… too,’ Anna said, trembling with each forced word.

‘No,’ Lambton said. ‘Your DC, Holder, is going there. We’re going straight to HQ. We’re all hypothermic. You two need to get out of your clothes now. I’ve got towels and blankets in the back.’

Anna’s hands were shaking badly as she peeled off her clothes. She felt lethargic and desperately tired. Lambton kept up a stream of talk from the front. ‘She’s been in the water for a long time but if she was responding to your voice, that’s good. Very good. They’ll probably stick her on cardiopulmonary bypass and warm her blood like central heating. Slow and steady. Safest way, by all accounts.’

Anna was only half listening. She had a blanket over her shoulders, now down to her bra and taking off her trousers. She kicked them off and rubbed a towel over her skin with fumbling hands before wrapping another two blankets around herself. Warm air from the heaters was pumping in, but still she shivered and kept on shivering until they arrived at HQ, blue lights flashing.

Lambton drove them around to the sports hall. Khosa met them and took Anna to the female changing room. It was warm and dry and Khosa plied her with hot tea. Half an hour later, a quarter of an hour after she’d stopped shivering and the tingling had all gone from her toes and fingers, Anna took a shower, trying not to think about Beth Farlow strapped to a chair, feeling the cold muddy waters of the Bristol Channel rise all around her, waiting for a slow and inevitable death. But her insides churned at the thought. Gradually, as she dried herself, horror turned to a simmering anger. Someone taped Beth Farlow to that chair and left her there.

Norcott, ill though he may have been, had a lot to answer for.

Khosa lent Anna some joggers, a hoodie and trainers and, an hour after leaving the flooded amusement arcade, the two women plus Dawes sat in the MCRTF office drinking more tea. Rainsford was away in Cardiff at a meeting and decided to stay the night rather than risk the long journey up and around through Gloucester – the only way back to Bristol now both Severn Crossings were closed. All the other staff had long gone home to batten down the hatches. Dawes spoke to his wife and then Khosa got Holder on speakerphone from the hospital at Southmead.

‘Is there any point us coming over there, Justin?’ Khosa asked.

‘Not really. They’ve got her in intensive care on a bypass machine. She had a Glasgow coma score of eight. They tell me that’s pretty bad. But her heart was still OK, which they said was amazing.’

Lambton had hung around until he was sure Dawes and Anna were OK. He’d explained to them how sometimes severe hypothermia could send victims into heart failure.

‘They’re not letting us anywhere near, ma’am,’ Holder said. ‘We’re going to leave a uniform here overnight.’

‘Thanks, Justin. No point you hanging around either. Go home.’

‘How about you, ma’am?’

‘Yes, me too. Our priority will be to find Norcott, but no one can do anything in this weather. It’s meant to blow over by the early hours. We’ll pick up where we left off tomorrow morning.’

‘The docs said another hour and she’d have probably died from cardiac arrest if she hadn’t drowned,’ Holder said. ‘You made a good call, ma’am.’

‘I’ll drink to that, Justin.’ Dawes raised his second mug of tea. ‘Now let’s all try to head home.’

---

Later, Anna sat on the floor of her living room with Lexi next to her, amazed that it was still only ten, nursing a glass of wine and listening to one of her dad’s old vinyls. When Ben turned up, he smelled of antiseptic from having washed his hands a hundred times. It was a clean, good smell. She wrapped her arms around him, buried her head into his shoulder and just let him hold her.

‘Want to talk about it?’

‘Not now,’ she murmured into his neck. ‘Maybe never.’ She moved his hands to the bare skin under the too large hoodie Khosa’d sourced for her. His touch was smooth, his hands soft, thumbs sliding over her ribcage to her breasts easily. She turned her head to look up at him. ‘Thanks for being here.’

‘This is no hardship, Anna.’

She pushed away and pulled off the hoodie, used a thumb to slide down the baggy jogging bottoms. She had no idea why she wanted to do this, but suddenly it felt like shedding the day’s horrors. Ben looked at her, bemused but not displeased. She came back to him as naked as the day she came into the world and pressed herself against him, wanting to forget the cold caress of the dirty water and only feel his good clean hands upon her. She didn’t question it. The irony of Anna Gwynne – who usually needed no one and nothing – needing Ben Hawley more than anything she’d ever needed before.

‘We’ll talk tomorrow,’ she said. It emerged as a croak.

The bedroom was warm. An hour later, when they’d finished, Anna let Ben spoon her into sleep, both of them tired from their day’s work and their evening activities.

They slept well.

But it was Beth Farlow Anna first thought of when she awoke the next morning, her mind struggling to imagine the horror she’d been through, the terrible hours of freezing loneliness as the waters rose and the storm raged. How on earth had she managed to breathe through that tiny slit in the tape? It was so far beyond normal human experience that Anna’s imagination simply gave up. Which was something Beth Farlow had not done. And with that realisation Anna came fully awake, buoyed by a new and steely determination.

Beth had survived against all the odds. Trussed up and left for dead by some monster.

Now that monster needed to be brought to book.