‘I went to some lengths to try to find the woman,’ Nathan continued. ‘If you read to the end of the letter, you’ll see Hannah wrote that her new friend was planning a holiday in Myanmar. She told me about a boat trip up the river and how much she wished she could go with her. The holiday was planned for January, so when I arrived in Manchester and realised Hannah was missing, I wondered if she might have gone too. There was no sign of her passport in her flat, so I took myself out there and sailed up and down that bloody river three times.’

Tom gave him a puzzled look. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I knew the name of the boat and that the booking was for January, but it could have been any one of three trips. At the start of each one I waited at the hotel for the group to arrive, expecting Hannah to turn up. It was supposed to be a surprise! But she didn’t, obviously. So I tried to work out which of the new arrivals might have been on the retreat with her, thinking if I could find the friend, she might have some idea where Hannah had gone.’

Tom was astonished. Nathan hadn’t told him about this when he came to the office. He’d said he had undertaken his own investigations, but then they had been sidetracked by the visit to the mortuary.

‘Did you find the friend?’

‘I didn’t identify anyone, no. She’d talked about a woman, not a couple, so I was specifically looking for single women travelling alone or with friends. There were a few, but the trips attracted mainly older couples, mostly from the States and Australia, so I only had one or two suspects. It was a stupid idea and a bloody waste of time, if I’m honest.’

‘Did you ask if any of them knew Hannah?’ Tom asked.

‘Not outright. I tried to find out a bit about each of the possibles. I don’t have a recent photo of Hannah, and given my lack of knowledge about my sister’s life I was concerned about asking too many questions. They might have doubted I was her brother – I could have been a stalker or an ex-lover with some other motive – and knowing who I was and what a crap brother I had been might have made them even less likely to tell me anything. So I tried as subtly as possible to identify the friend. I used my middle name, Paul. I hoped if anyone did know Hannah they wouldn’t connect her with me, particularly if she had mentioned me in some bloody spill-your-guts group session.’

Tom bit his bottom lip. ‘Any good leads?’