I follow him as he scrambles down the slope, hops over the thin trickle of water at the base, and onto the other side. From here it’s possible to see that the van had two people in it when it left the road. Oddly, neither had been wearing seat belts, their foreheads hitting the windscreen as the front end of the van crunched into the solid earth. A halo of dark blood round each head. I get closer. The driver’s face is familiar, but I can’t place it. The whole scene reminds me of an old school friend of mine; she and her boyfriend had lost control in fog and ended up in a ditch very like this one.

‘Foggy out here last night?’

‘Not according to the local station. Said it was as clear as can be.’

I walk further down so I can see the far side of the van. Scraped paint and a series of dents. The whole van’s a little beaten up, but this looks fresher.

‘Run off the road.’

Jansen nods. ‘That’s what we thought too,’ he says just as it comes to me, why the man looks familiar. He was the courier I’d seen outside Nellie’s and then after interviewing Patrick Wust.

‘He was following me.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, saw him twice. Too much of a coincidence.’

‘What about the other man?’ Jansen asks. I get the feeling he’s leading me along, that he knows something he’s not telling me yet. Normally I’d be impatient, but today I just play along and take another look. His face is harder to make out, squashed against the glass which is ready to crumble into a million tiny pieces.

‘I give up.’

Jansen whistles to one of the uniforms who walks over with something in his hand. He tosses it over the ditch, Jansen catches it, then hands it over. It’s a leather wallet. You can tell it’s expensive. I open it up: credit cards, a few receipts and a driver’s licence. I pull it out. I don’t recognize the face, but the name I do, Joost Beltmann.

‘I looked him up, seems he worked for DH Biotech,’ Jansen’s saying as I hand it back.

‘He did. I spoke to him on the phone. Looks like they’ve started cleaning house already.’