Robin clicked on the tag. @OzTarryn’s circular profile picture showed a cold-looking but grinning woman with a surfboard on what looked like a beach in North Devon. Grey water, grey sky, leaden sand – Bondi, eat your heart out. Aussie girl taking time out from the 9 – 5 to see the world, said the bio line. Current location: Workshop of the World, UK, aka Land of the Ancestors.

‘Got her,’ she said to Maggie.

The first two rows of pictures, posted only an hour earlier, were location-stamped Edinburgh, and a couple would have been recognizable anyway: the castle on its crag, a view down the Royal Mile. One posted yesterday showed a slightly tatty-looking café with a jumble of wooden tables and wheelback chairs. Where it all began, Tarryn had written. The Elephant House! Birthplace of Harry Potter! Never met an exclamation mark they didn’t like, these girls. Robin ran her eyes down the comments hoping for some return fantasy-fiction fan-girling but alas, no @BeccaWoods95.

‘She’s not in any of these Edinburgh pictures, is she?’ asked Maggie, over her shoulder.

‘No. Would have been nice, wouldn’t it, to show Valerie Becca posing around among the bagpipes with her new bezzie mate?’

‘Can we get in touch with her on here? Tarryn?’

‘If I create an account. I’ll do it now.’

In the couple of minutes it took to do that and come back to the page, another picture had appeared, this one an iron cage over a grave in a moodily twilit churchyard. Last night at Greyfriars Kirk … Mortsafe – to keep out the body-snatchers!

Robin clicked to comment straight away – maybe she could catch her online. Hi, she wrote, I’m trying to get in touch with @BeccaWoods95 and heard that you’re friends. Really appreciate if you could DM or email me. Thanks. She gave the Hotmail address she kept for mailing lists and online shopping and opened that account in a new window.

While she waited, she went back to her deep dive on the syndicate of investors. After an agonizing process cross-referencing Facebook and the photograph from the Post, she had isolated the right Tom Harris from about a hundred others and identified him as the owner of a chain of seven local shoe shops: Droitwich, Shirley, Perry Barr, Redditch. He was forty-nine, went to Catholic school then university in Lancaster before moving back to Brum and opening the first shop. What had made him choose shoes, of all things? Like Iain Ferguson and Steve Perry yesterday, though, he seemed to be an upstanding member of society; three of the four little articles she found were to do with the twenty pairs of shoes he gave away in September each year to children whose parents would otherwise struggle to afford them.

The Dell’s fan laboured as she toggled back to Hotmail then Instagram. Nothing from Tarryn yet though there’d been no new pictures since the mortsafe, either.