For a moment I was about to mutter some desperate platitude about being at rest now, and beyond all pain, but then I realised with a jolt that he was not talking about the viewing at the mortuary.

He meant the last time he ever saw Hana alive.

‘When Hana got into that truck,’ he said, wiping his nose with his hand. ‘I have never seen her so frightened. She was a brave woman! She was strong! After our parents died, she was the head of our family. It was a shock for me to see the fear on her face. I think it was because they took her passport away.’

I let it settle for a moment.

‘You saw her get into the lorry?’ I said. ‘You were there?’

He nodded.

‘I carried her suitcase to the meeting place. But the man – the man from the lorry – the driver – he would not permit luggage. I had to take her suitcase back home with me. And he took her passport. He had all their passports.’

I remembered the stack of passports that Edie had found in the cab. I remembered them spread out on a workstation in West End Central. And for the first time I felt I could feel the presence of the man who put a rubber band around that stack of travel documents and tossed them inside his cab.

‘Nenad,’ I said. ‘Listen to me.’

‘Nesha,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Nesha,’ he repeated. ‘In Serbian – for Nenad we say Nesha.’ He looked at me as if for the first time. ‘Nesha to our friends.’

‘Nesha, this is really important. Anything you can tell me about this man – his nationality, what he looked like, anything at all he said – will help us find justice for Hana and all those other women.’

He took his cheap little phone out of his ragged coat and tapped some buttons. He handed it to me.

There was a photograph on the cracked screen.

Hana and Nesha Novak. Brother and sister. Standing on a frozen street in a blacked-out city that could be anywhere but I knew was Belgrade. A selfie – taken hurriedly – brother and sister holding on to each other, both smiling shyly, a souvenir of that last goodbye.

And in the background of their selfie, I saw a man turning away, his face in profile and out of focus and obscured by the shadows of the sleeping city. But I could see the elaborate scarring that ran down one side of his face, like a parody of tribal markings.

The driver.

‘What nationality was this man, Nesha? It’s very important.’

‘I don’t know. Maybe Albanian? Or Turkish?’

‘Did he give a name?’

‘No name.’

‘Any more photographs?’

‘No more. He was very quick. He was in a hurry to leave. He rushed us to finish. He wanted to go.’