Her cellphone woke her, buzzing furiously across the nightstand. Turning over – aching from sleeping in the same position for hours – Jo glanced at the clock.

7 a.m.

Who the hell would be calling her so early on a Sunday morning?

She scooped up her phone, wondering if it might be Ethan, and then grabbed her glasses, sliding them on.

‘Hello?’

‘Ms Kader?’

‘Yes.’

She rubbed at an eye.

‘It’s Patrick. We talked the other day.’

She frowned.

Patrick. The British guy who’d called about Adrian Vale.

‘Ms Kader?’

‘Uh, yeah. I don’t think we agreed seven in the morning, did we?’

‘No, I’m so sorry for calling you so early. Something’s come up here that I have to take care of, but I still wanted to make sure that I got back in touch in order to follow up on what we talked about. You know, Adrian Vale and Beatrix Steards, and all of that.’

Jo sat up in bed and then hauled herself to her feet.

‘Ms Kader?’

‘Yeah, I’m here, I’m here.’

She wandered through to the living room, wiping the sleep from her eyes, and looked around for the legal pad she’d used during their phone call the day before. It turned out she hadn’t written much down, mostly because she’d had a crashing hangover and about two seconds after she’d ended the call with this guy, she was puking into the toilet bowl. But at the top she’d written his name: Patrick.

‘Do you remember what we talked about?’ he asked.

She glanced at her notes again. She’d written down the name Beatrix Steards, but aside from that there wasn’t much to jog her memory.

‘I think we’re going to have to start from the beginning, Mr, uh …?’

‘Oh, okay.’ He didn’t offer his surname. ‘How come?’

‘I wasn’t feeling so good yesterday.’

‘I see.’ A pause. ‘That’s why I said I’d call back.’

This time, it was Jo’s turn to pause.

‘Do you remember anything at all?’ the guy asked her.

It was a weird question: he hadn’t framed it as an insult, more like some kind of a test. She frowned, fully awake now, her brain kicking into gear.

Was he the same as this yesterday?

‘Ms Kader?’

‘You mentioned Adrian Vale possibly having a connection to a disappearance over there in the UK.’ She glanced at her notes. ‘Beatrix Steards.’

‘Ah, of course,’ came the reply.

There was something else now too: she wasn’t any expert on British accents, but she knew enough, and the guy yesterday had been from the north. Even with a hangover, she remembered thinking how much he’d sounded like a character from Game of Thrones.

But this guy didn’t have the same accent.

‘What did you say your surname was, Patrick?’

No response this time.

‘Patrick?’

The line went dead.