The station officer, Charlie Wilcox, ripped the call slip off the teleprinter. “It’s just round the corner – warehouse in Southwark Street,” he told them. “Sounds like it’s well away – we’ll need sets on this one.”

Within seconds they were aboard the appliance and rolling into Southwark Bridge Road, sirens wailing and blue lights flashing. A fine drizzle blurred the September night, slicking the tarmac and haloing the street lamps. As they swung round into Southwark Street, Wilcox called out from the front, “It’s showing.”

As the pump came to a stop, Rose saw a bank of smoke hanging heavily over the street, and in the lower windows of a brick Victorian warehouse, the telltale red-orange flicker of light. Acrid smoke stung her nostrils as she leapt from the appliance and pulled on her mask. She caught a glimpse of huddled bystanders as Wilcox said, “Rose, Bryan. It looks as though the worst of it is still confined to the ground floor. Take in a guideline and check for occupants.” He turned to his sub officer, Seamus MacCauley. “Check round the back, will you, Seamus? See what we’ve got.”

The other BA team from the pump ladder was already laying hose line as Rose and Bryan tallied in their breathing apparatus, checked their radios. “Door’s open,” she heard Wilcox shout as she pulled her visor down, and she registered a faint surprise before focusing again on her task.

They went in low, Rose leading, peering through the smoke, feeling their way into the dense blackness. The heat seared, even through their coats, and she could hear the groaning and cracking of a well-established fire. She fell against something soft and bulky, went down on her knees. Through a momentary thinning of the smoke she saw shapes piled above her like a giant child’s tower of blocks. The disjointed images suddenly coalesced.

“It’s furniture,” she said. “Someone’s piled up bloody furniture.” The polyurethane foam used in furniture cushions and mattresses was highly flammable – the thought of the devastating fire that had started in the furniture department of the Manchester Woolworth’s crossed her mind, but she banished it, concentrating on the job at hand.