Interpol and every police force in the UK were contacted in the effort to trace missing Edinburgh woman Louise Tiffney, the officer heading the team hunting for her told the High Court in Perth yesterday.

Detective Sergeant Alexander Walker said that when he was appointed to the four-man squad in September 2002, he was given six months, with the brief “to find her if she was alive or, if not, to find sufficient evidence to have her declared dead.”

At the end of their allotted time, when there were no confirmed sightings of her, he stayed on to become involved in the criminal investigation that followed.

Sean Patrick Tiffney, known as Flynn (21), denies that on May 27 or 28, at their home in Edinburgh’s Dean Village, he murdered his mother Louise Tiffney, having previously evinced malice and ill-will towards her. He also denies taking her body away in the boot of a car and concealing or disposing of it in an effort to defeat the ends of justice.

DS Walker said they contacted government agencies in case there had been a change of name.

Her details were circulated to all police forces in Britain for computer checks in case she had been in another area and her DNA was entered in the Scottish database but none of these inquiries produced matches or sightings.

Contact was made with all 298 hospital trusts, the 28 banks and 64 building societies, 186 housing associations and 181 women’s refuges in Britain, again without providing any positive information.

There was widespread media interest, with her disappearance covered in newspapers, radio and television, together with an extensive poster campaign in the Edinburgh area. Her details were also posted on missing persons websites and the Big Issue magazine and circulated to the Salvation Army, again without positive result.

Advocate depute Murdo MacLeod asked if there was anything else the officer believed he could have done.

He replied “I have thought long and hard about it and there was nothing else I could have done.” He agreed he had “exhausted every avenue.”

He said there had been 10 reports of sightings, each of which had been eliminated.

Cross-examined by defence counsel Frances McMenamin QC, he agreed one of the sightings was from Utah but officers from Scotland had not gone to the US to follow it up. He said Email correspondence had been sufficient to satisfy him it was not Louise Tiffney.

Interpol were contacted after another reported sighting in Tenerife and Spanish police were asked to go round bars on the island with her picture, but again there were no further sightings.

Re-examined by the advocate depute, DS Walker said he knew Louise Tiffney had left her passport at home and, while she would need money to go abroad, there were no withdrawals from her bank accounts. He was aware she had left £385 in an account.

At the close of the evidence for the day, Mr MacLeod told trial judge Lord McEwan and jurors that counsel are working on a joint minute covering agreed non-controversial evidence, which would avoid the need for between 200 and 300 witnesses to appear in person.

The trial continues.