Her room was quite neat, and quite empty. No clothes on the picture rail, no photos on the little chest of drawers. Something made him open the microwave and look inside; all he saw was the circular plate. On the bed were two envelopes, one for the landlord, the other for Mrs. Ridgewell. Nothing for him.

Mrs. Ridgewell asked if they’d had a quarrel. No, he said, they never quarrelled.

“She was a nice girl,” the manageress said. “Very reliable.”

“Like a Polish builder.”

“I hope you didn’t say that to her. It’s not a nice remark. And I don’t think she was Polish.”

“No, she wasn’t.” He looked out to sea. “Oorals,” he found himself saying.

“Pardon?”

You went to the station and showed a photograph of the missing woman to the booking clerk, who remembered her face and told you where she’d bought a ticket to. That’s what they did in films. But the nearest station was twelve miles away, and it didn’t have a ticket office, just a machine you put money or plastic into. And he didn’t even have a picture of her. They’d never done that thing couples do, crowding into a booth together, the girl sitting on the man’s lap, both giggly and out of focus. They were probably too old for that, anyway.

At home, he Googled Andrea Morgen and got four hundred and ninety-seven thousand results. Then he put her in quotes and cut it down to three hundred and ninety-three. Did he want to search for “Andrea Morgan”? No, he didn’t want to search for someone else. Most of the results were in German, and he scrolled through them helplessly. He’d never done languages at school, never needed them since. Then he had a thought. He looked up an online dictionary and found the German for “swimmer.” It was a different word if you were a man or a woman. He typed in “Andrea Morgen” and “Schwimmerin.”

Eight results, all in German. Two seemed to be from newspapers, one from an official report. And there was a picture of her. The same one he’d found in the drawer: there she was, second from the left, arms around her teammates, big wrinkles in her white swimming cap. He paused, then hit “Translate this page.” Later, he found links to other pages, this time in English.