It was a gorgeous Saturday morning in August as Sarah Martin listened to the 8am speaker at the nurses' conference. She'd got up bright and early for this particular talk about postnatal depression - a harrowing topic, but one that didn't dampen her spirits because, in her words, 'everything was right in my world'.
Sipping her coffee, her mind drifted to her year-old daughter Alice, a free-spirited girl who was on a gap year across Europe.
She wondered where she might be. Her phone lit up on the table. It was a Facebook message from a stranger called 'Houssain'. She didn't know any Houssains. Then it dings again and I thought - yep, a scammer. An hour or two passes by and I receive a Facebook friend request,' Sarah, now 60, tells me. She opened the message; it was in broken English. Her heart started to pound. I think she's having some sort of mental health concerns. Sarah, a perioperative nurse, felt her stomach twist in knots.
Was this a scam - or was it something worse, like a kidnapping? Was her daughter even alive? Alice Martin left was in the depths of psychosis while travelling solo in Istanbul.
Days later a man she was dating, Houssain, contacted her mum Sarah right on Facebook Messenger. She viewed Houssain's profile. This young man was not a stranger to her daughter - she remembered seeing a photo of them together on her social media only recently.
