She meant that if a painter and decorator came to see them because his wife had died, they didn’t save his phone number in case they needed someone to do up the kitchen in twelve months’ time. They would call a different painter. Noah had always stuck to this rule, but not any more. He was faced with an emergency, and his parents would have understood if they’d still been alive. This was about their son, after all.

If only they were still around. They too would have realised that something had happened to Dan. Neither Noah nor Dan had expected to lose their parents so early, before Noah or his brother had turned forty. They had died in a car crash on the island of Crete. The dividing line between life and death was so thin, so thin.

One of Noah’s clients had been a police officer, a man in his fifties whose wife had died of cancer. Noah searched his database for the man’s name. Alex – or Alexander – Recht. There he was. A quick internet search brought up references that were no more than a few months old; Alex Recht had spoken out on some union issue. Good, in that case Noah dared to hope he was still with the police.

However, he wasn’t sure if he had the right contact details. He wasn’t too bothered about the address, but he wanted to be certain that he could reach Alex Recht on this phone number. He was utterly sick of the way the police had handled, or rather failed to handle, the disappearance of Dan and his family. It was beyond belief that someone could be missing for almost two months without anyone taking action.

Noah punched Alex’s number into his mobile. Tina’s visit had changed everything. She was the one who’d given him the strength, even though she didn’t know it. He was no longer alone; someone else could see there was something very wrong with this move to Australia.

‘I can’t get hold of them,’ she’d said. ‘They’re not answering their phones, and I’ve had these weird emails asking me to stop bothering them.’

However, something else had given Tina cause for concern. Like Malin’s father, she had spoken to Malin on the Thursday, two days before they were due to leave.

‘I’ve got a million things to do,’ Malin had told her. ‘Can I call you tomorrow? I should have time in the afternoon.’