I want to go inside, look around, see if I can find something, anything, that might point me towards Anna Meier, or Julia, or both. But I know there won’t be anything left a decade after anyone called Meier moved away. ‘Yes, I’m fine. I’m sorry to have disturbed you.’

Frustration overwhelms me as I walk back into town. Every tiny lead I have turns out to be nothing. I knew it was a long shot, coming to Thun, but I didn’t expect my fledgling mission to be over so quickly.

At the station I scour the board for train times back to Montreux, but my eye is caught by another name. Reichenbach im Kandertal. It takes me a few seconds, and then I remember that’s the place where Daniel Buchs’ hiking club was. I take out my phone and search the online map and realise it’s not that far from here. The train leaves in ten minutes.

I wonder, for the hundredth time, why he hasn’t responded to my last email. Maybe, seeing as I’m so close, I should go and find out why.

Reichenbach feels different to Thun. Smaller, more rural, more like the Switzerland I imagined when I thought about coming here. It smells of flowers and manure and summer. I walk from the station into the village and pass houses that look like the sort of thing I saw on chocolate boxes at the airport – wooden chalets with weathered shutters and balconies bedecked with flowerpots. Some are clearly very old, their facades decorated with carved patterns, animals depicted in faded paint, words drawn in an elegant calligraphy. Chopped firewood is stacked up in piles under overhanging balconies. Some houses have shopfronts on the ground floor, one’s a bank, another is labelled Gemeindeverwaltung, whatever the hell that is. I stop outside a bakery – that’s clearly what Bäckerei means, even without the visual clue of edible treats in the window.

‘Grüessech,’ says the lady behind the counter after the bell over the door signals my arrival. Given it sounds similar to what the other woman in Thun said to me, I imagine that’s Swiss German for hello.

I point to a macaroon and hold up one finger. She nods, wraps one in paper and hands it to me, saying what I assume is a price.

‘Er, sorry, I don’t speak German.’ I hold out my hand with some change in it and she smiles, takes a few coins.

‘Um, can I ask you something?’

She nods.

‘I’m looking for someone who might live here. His name is Daniel Buchs.’

‘In Reichenbach?’ she frowns. ‘I don’t know, but I only live here recently,’ she says. ‘You ask Linda Keller in the Gasthaus Hirschen. She is here a long time.’