Joanna had sent the email from a place called KS. If they were as rigorous as the café I’d just tried, then I had a potential lead to whatever ID she was using. I found KS on Daraboz Street. It turned out the initials stood for Kiber Sports, or Cyber Sports. You had to knock to get in. It was small, with booths divided by plyboard screens. One security camera focused on the door rather than the PCs. The ‘sports’ in its name presumably related to the old arcade machines at the back.

Two men in their early twenties sat behind the counter, working on a broken hard drive.

When they asked for ID I gave them the Bell passport and watched them make a photocopy on an old beige Xerox. They scribbled down the details in a logbook then assigned me a PC and wrote the number down too.

‘Can I see which computer I used last time?’

They looked confused. I took the sign-in book before they could object, leafed back to the date Joanna was here. I ran a finger down the page until I got to the right time. Eleven people signed in that afternoon, one woman: Vanessa McDonald.

The handwriting was Joanna’s. Joanna in a hurry. They even had which PC she used.

‘I want that one. Number three.’

I got the booth, with a grubby PC and a torn leather office chair. When I clicked into the control panel, the IP matched my records. She’d been sitting here. I checked files on the desktop, then searched the browser history for that date. It had been wiped.

More recent searches involved a lot of porn. The computer was running anti-block software. The country had a blanket ban on adult websites, so a lot of these cafés put on various forms of circumvention and made their money selling access to that part of the web. I sifted through the searches for various sexual practices, through Kazakh sports sites, social media, scrolled slower through news and local politics, but couldn’t see any leads.

I went up and paid.

‘One more favour. This woman, Vanessa McDonald,’ I pointed at the name. ‘Presumably you took a photocopy of the ID.’

They found it. The passport matched the name she’d given. In the passport photo she had shoulder-length brown hair. I wrote down the passport number.

‘This mark beside it – the star. None of the others are marked.’

‘She didn’t pay.’

‘Why not?’

‘She just got up and left.’

‘Do you have CCTV footage?’

‘No. The cameras don’t work.’

‘Did the woman seem scared when she was here? In a hurry?’

‘In a hurry.’

‘She was hurt,’ the other one said. He gripped his arm. ‘Maybe injured.’

FOURTEEN