She heaved up her bag and extracted a slightly battered-looking laptop and a small vulcanised case. Tom was certainly no computer expert, but the laptop looked quite old and was festooned with various stickers.

‘I expected more modern tech,’ Tom said, slightly puzzled at the archaic-looking machine.

‘Detective, this is state-of-the-art, trust me. I built it myself with the help of some of the finest tech minds in the CIA. Don’t let appearances fool you.’ She opened the other case and pulled out a small, nondescript metallic box which she attached to the laptop using a cable, before plugging both machines into the wall socket.

‘Okay, where’s this phone you want looking at?’

Tom produced it from the bag on the bed.

‘It’s been on airplane mode since I relieved it from the owner. It’s fingerprint and passcode protected as well. Is that a problem?’

‘Please, Mr Novak, all this talk of end-to-end encryption only goes so far. I can get into any phone. Handset manufacturers won’t admit there are back doors into the phones but, if they want to trade in the US and lots of other countries, they sometimes make exceptions.’

Tom tossed her the iPhone which she caught with ease. As she switched it on, she said, ‘I’m going to assume that there is a remote wipe enabled on the phone so, if we disable airplane mode, all data will be wiped. If we had a faraday cage, we could disable it, but I don’t see the risk is worth it. There may be all sorts I can learn with the handset in its current state.’ She connected the phone to a cable and pressed a few keys on her laptop.

‘Done,’ she said after about thirty seconds. ‘That’s the contents of the phone downloaded onto the hard drive. I’ve enabled it to recover deleted items, so it shouldn’t be a problem. I have e-discovery software, so we can run lots of cross-checking to come up with any links.’

‘How the hell did you break the password that quickly?’

‘I didn’t need to.’

Tom raised an eyebrow. ‘Can I see what’s on there?’

‘Let’s see,’ she said. Her fingers blurred over the keyboard with practised ease. As he moved behind her to see the screen more clearly, Tom noticed a small tattoo of three stars below her left ear.

‘He’s been careful,’ she said. ‘There’s very little on here. I suspect it’s recently been purchased. Hold on.’ Her fingers danced across the keyboard again.

‘Okay, the phone went live two days ago. No calls, no SMS, no social media accounts. I’ve recovered two deleted messages and two deleted calls. One from a landline; one from a mobile. The messages are from UK-based cell phones. I’ll retrieve them.’