Eavesdropping brings language alive. You have a few hours on a new posting when your ears are still sensitised. There was that Turkic flavour, the harmonising vowels that preserved the passage of nomads westwards. I listened to the police, then two workers with the faintly Persian edges of Uzbek in their speech, then a woman with splashes of a dialect that sounded like Uyghur, from near the border with China. She had arrived just after me. From her various complaints about work it sounded like she cleaned on most floors of the Ministry building. She lived with an elderly mother. Her daughter’s upcoming wedding was a source of grievance. She sat close to a man who did maintenance in the same government offices – he had an identical pass to her, on a key chain. At his feet lay a tool bag containing wire strippers, electrical tape, a socket set.

The newspaper gave some carefully filtered insight into the country I was in. There was a lot about officials launching schemes in rural villages. A wind farm symbolised a possible future; Touch-KZ, a new dating site for Kazakhstan’s youth, was taking off. Protests against Chinese companies renting agricultural land simmered in rural areas, but overall there was a lot less hate and a lot less sleaze than in a free press. Nothing about a missing or murdered English woman. I checked what neighbouring devices came up on my phone then logged in to the café’s wi-fi.

New dating app popular among Kazakh singles. I found Touch-KZ on my phone, downloaded it and joined with a fake profile.

A minute later I had a match. One girl, two miles away. Tia Zhang, twenty-eight years old, pretty. Catfish pretty. She looked like stock photos, sounded like a robot.

Hey. You look nice. What are you doing?

Camel racing, I messaged back.

Cool! You seem interesting. Check out this site – lots of fun there.

I ran a virus scan and clicked. It was a website advertising pop bands and TV shows. I declined the invitation to subscribe.

Twitter and SoundCloud were blocked but a Virtual Private Network was easy enough to download and allowed you to search the internet without going through government servers. I looked for prostitutes. Prostitutes were often a good first step to finding both the political elite and underworld fixers. There was little information on prostitutes or red-light Astana generally. One gay traveller on a bulletin board asked where he might meet men. Someone mentioned a sauna, someone said Grindr worked. I checked Grindr. The only men within range currently looking for gay sex were two other Western travellers in a nearby hotel.