‘About six weeks ago, I got a newspaper cutting in the post. Sent anonymously. Typed address. London postmark. Eerily reminiscent, you might think, of how my mother alerted Martin Caldwell to the fact that my father wasn’t dead. The cutting was an article that appeared in a Swedish newspaper, Aftonbladet, last October. I didn’t know what to make of it. I had to get a Swedish friend of a colleague to translate it for me.’ Nick fishes a plastic wallet containing the cutting out of his bag. He lays it on Wada’s desk. ‘I’m guessing you can’t read Swedish?’

‘You are correct.’

‘OK. I’ll give you the gist, then. The article’s basically an interview with a woman whose husband disappeared in early April last year. Karl-Erik Fagerholm, aged sixty-four, a retired university lecturer. He left his home in Uppsala, north of Stockholm, supposedly travelling to Malmö to visit an elderly aunt living in a retirement home there. He normally went to see her every six months or so, but this visit was only four months after the last one, which was slightly odd. Odder still, he never showed up at the retirement home and hasn’t been seen or heard of since. Nor has he taken any money out of the joint bank account he holds with his wife. He hasn’t contacted anyone who knows him, either. And there’s no record of him leaving the country.’

‘Does his wife have any idea what’s happened to him?’

‘Well, he’d recently been diagnosed with leukaemia and the prognosis wasn’t good. She said he was very strong-minded. Quite capable of deciding he’d prefer to die on his own terms rather than lingering in a hospital.’

‘She suspects suicide, then?’

‘Yes, but she’s puzzled by the fact that a large sum of money was deposited in their bank account a few days after his disappearance.’

‘How large?’

‘She was coy about that. But a lot, that’s clear. And she couldn’t account for it. He’d done nothing likely to generate such a sum. He wasn’t a gambler or a speculator. She described him as completely unmaterialistic. The interviewer asked her if it was enough for her to live comfortably for the rest of her life and she said it was enough for her and their children.’

‘Who paid the money in?’