Another sigh. Noah might as well have put the phone down; he knew what was coming, knew exactly what Mattsson was going to say. They’d taken note of his concerns, there was no indication that a crime had been committed, there was nothing to investigate, could Noah please stop calling (for fuck’s sake).

‘We’ve been over this several times. As I’ve already told you, we’ve been in touch with your brother and he’s confirmed that there’s nothing wrong. He—’

‘Have you spoken to him on the phone?’ Noah interrupted. ‘Or are you just referring to those emails you received?’

He’d asked the question a thousand times, and always got the same answer.

‘Noah, you know I’ve spoken to him on the phone. Very briefly, admittedly, but that was because he was on his way to a business meeting. Otherwise we’ve been in contact via email.’

Those emails. Mattsson always came back with the same counter-argument: if the family had disappeared against their will, then who was sending all those messages? Noah thought someone else could easily have taken their phones and forced them to reveal their PIN codes, but the police dismissed his objections. That kind of thing might happen in the movies, but not in real life.

‘Remind me – what business meeting?’

‘I didn’t ask, as you know perfectly well.’

Noah was on the verge of panic; he had to come up with something else, something new, something different, something that hadn’t already been said and done. He had to make it clear that the police were failing to do their job. But everything had been said, all the questions had already been asked. They weren’t interested, and if Noah made a real effort he could understand why, to a certain extent. On the surface the situation looked precisely as it should. He wasn’t sure exactly who the police might have spoken to, but every one of his brother’s friends or acquaintances would of course confirm that they’d heard Dan talking about the move to the other side of the world. Noah had called Dan’s father-in-law to ask if he was worried, but no. Apparently the family were due to fly out on the Saturday, and he’d spoken to them on Thursday to wish them bon voyage. This didn’t make Noah feel any better. If everything had been fine on Thursday, what had happened on Friday?

He had mentioned his concerns, but to no avail. Noah was aware that his sister-in-law and her family weren’t close; they spoke only a few times a year, and whenever they got together at Christmas, for example, the results were disastrous.

‘We don’t really know one another,’ his sister-in-law had said. ‘And that’s fine.’