She walked up to him and put her hands on his shoulders. “On this one, none whatsoever. See you around.” The doctor received a peck on the cheek. We left him standing, bemused, shaking his head, and in my view, head over heels in love.

“Nice guy.”

She nodded. “A sweetheart and a pushover. Always was, always will be.”

We were walking out of the building, down the ramp where bodies were transported in and out.

Nazari sat at the wheel of her Peugeot, a safe hundred yards away from the morgue. She dug in her jeans and pulled out a resealable polythene zipper bag from the change pocket. She grasped a corner with two fingers and held it up. “Found it inside of another bag. That one wasn’t as clean.”

I looked closely. Inside the little plastic bag was a tiny SIM card.

I said, “I know what this is, but not the details of how it works.”

She was pulling her own phone out of the other pocket. “There are different phone standards around the world. Most countries use GSM, which stands for Global System for Mobile. GSM takes SIM cards. So this SIM goes into a GSM phone, like mine.”

I said, “You can change a SIM card and it’s like you’ve got a different phone, as far as the network is concerned.”

“Network sees the SIM card, not the big thing with the screen.”

“So it’s the brain of the phone and you can replace it.”

“Yup. It’s the brain of the phone and you can also store stuff on it, instead of storing it on the actual phone.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Phone numbers, contacts, call records, and other stuff, like photos, or files, or even documents I guess. Depends on the memory capacity of the SIM card.”

“Did the dead guy have a phone on him?”

“Negative. But since pretty much everyone has a phone, it was assumed stolen. Remember, there was the assumption of robbery.”

“Right. Keep going.”

“So if I’m correct, and this is a phone SIM card, the dead guy would have kept two of these. I’d guess that the one in his stolen phone corresponds to his identity and cover as an Afghan asylum seeker. Matches up to the identity documents that were found on him. So, maybe this SIM card right here corresponds to his real Iraqi identity, if your theory is correct.” She flicked the plastic baggie.

“So the assumption is that he had another one of these in his phone when he was murdered. And it got stolen by the murderers.”

“I think that’s a reasonable assumption.”

“What can we do with that thing?”

“I’m going to see what happens if I put it into my phone.”

“Is that safe?”

“Might be safe, might not be safe. No idea.”