The only later text messages in English were ones from the Oxford conference, welcoming him to the country, and some from the phone service provider about roaming services. Gillard scrolled back in time, looking for anything from Penelope in the preceding days. There was nothing.

‘There must have been other messages on other phones, or emails, something like that,’ Gillard said. ‘Arrangements must have been made before he set off.’

‘It might be easier for us to trace Penelope’s email,’ Rainy said.

‘Rob, I’d like you to make that your top priority,’ Gillard said. ‘First of all to see if we can find out who sent the email, and secondly to see if anyone called Penelope is connected with the conference organisers.’

Townsend nodded. ‘It’s probably a false name,’ he said.

It was only another hour later when another raft of translations from Dr Chen’s laptop arrived from Taipei. ‘Oh, this is it, the motherlode,’ said Rainy Macintosh, who was sitting next to Carl Hoskins.

‘What have you got there?’ he asked.

‘An English precis of each of the twenty most significant Chinese-language documents from Dr Chen’s laptop. It’s a canny piece of work. They must be working into the wee hours over there in Taipei.’

Hoskins called up the master list of all documents on the laptop. ‘There are still thousands of others they haven’t done. And they could have done it on Google Translate.’

Rainy looked at him over her glasses. ‘Och, Carl, I’ve got a new career for you: gift horse’s dental consultant.’

‘What?’ Hoskins said.

‘Never mind. The value is in the precis as much as the translation. Look at this one: “personal correspondence with sister arranging lunar New Year holidays.” That saved translating a 600-word email.’

‘See what you mean,’ Hoskins conceded.

‘I’ll send half the translations to your terminal, for you to take a wee look.’

‘Like I didn’t have enough work to begin with,’ Hoskins muttered.

The two detectives sat in silence scanning through the list. Hoskins found a document that was already fully in English. He started to read it.