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around much.
    WHITE : You only met him three times?
    FISHER : Yeah. I feel like I knew him because – when she got married to him – I read up about him, about how he won all these Oscars in the early ’50s. But, the truth is, I didn’t know anything about him.
    I returned my attention to Lynda Korin.
    The search for her had been complicated by the fact that she seemed to live quite a solitary existence, which meant few really close friends, and so fewer people to notice she was gone. After searching her house and coming up short, White had decided to go door-to-door in the village and in others nearby.
    As I turned the page, I saw that he’d included photographs from inside her house, but it was hard to get a sense of whether anything was awry – the rooms looked tidy and up together. Certainly, there was nothing in White’s report to suggest he’d found anything at the house to raise an alarm, and his decision to go door-to-door seemed to be a fairly obvious reflection of that. After asking around in the villages, he went on to speak to people Korin had done accounts for. He’d even interviewed the women at a book club she went to on a Thursday morning.
    Again, he came away with nothing.
    Buried deep in the file were her mobile phone records and printouts from her email inbox. Her relatively dormant social life meant there was little in either landline or mobile calls to get excited about. Across the three months that White had got hold of – from 28 July to 28 October – he’d gone to the effort of attributing each number to a name, listing who Korin had contacted, or been contacted by. The issue wasn’t really his level of care, more the lack of activity on the phone, something that was also true of her emails. My hope had to be that Spike’s more extensive background search – and the fact that he was going back six months instead of White’s three – might bring me something extra.
    The most obvious person missing from the phone records was her sister, and that was down to the fact that the two of them used WhatsApp. White had gained access to Wendy’s mobile and exported the history of WhatsApp conversations between them, but the news they shared was routine: what Wendy’s kids – both in their thirties, one single, one married with children – were up to, or what fruit she was growing in her garden; messages from Korin about what books she was reading, her job, yoga classes. It was only at the end that something stopped me. The last ever message Korin sent to her sister.
Love you so much, Wendy.
You have always been the
best sister anyone could
have x
    Given the fact that she’d driven to Stoke Point the next day and vanished off the face of the earth, the words felt especially prescient. There were all sorts of reasons to believeshe hadn’t committed suicide – the lack of a body being the major one – but there were, equally, major reasons to believe she might be dead: no activity on her mobile for the ten months she’d been missing; her purse and credit cards left in the car, and – according to bank statements that White had included later on in the file – no attempt to withdraw any money or apply for any other cards. As well as that, she’d had no contact with her sister at all, a woman she’d never failed to keep in touch with for the entire time she’d been in Europe.
    I sat back, looking out at the garden. Beyond the birdsong and the faint sound of traffic, I could hear the thump of distant music. But most of it hardly registered with me. I was too busy trying to make sense of what I’d read so far: that a woman, without any clear motivation for doing so, had driven herself to an isolated beauty spot, left her purse and her mobile phone in the car, tossed her keys into some nearby scrub – and proceeded to vanish into nothing.
    No cameras. No witnesses.
    No trace of her anywhere.

7
    The video call with Wendy Fisher began just after eight o’clock.
    It was the first time I’d