I don’t know how long it is between Thea going and coming back, but she returns with a bowl of soup, some bread and butter and a glass of wine on a tray. She puts it on the table beside me and I lean forward and start to eat. She’s talking to me in a low voice, and gradually I begin to feel numb.

I feel Thea’s hand under my armpit. She’s lifting me from the chair and helping me towards the bed. There’s a mist over my eyes, and it’s getting darker by the second.

CHAPTER 30

30

Tom Douglas leaned back in his chair and pondered the case at Pennington Flash. Information was coming in thick and fast about Jasmine DuPont, the woman found in the bird hide. They now knew that her deceased twin sister, Esme, had been troubled for years. She had suffered from depression since her early teens and had been bulimic for a while. Jasmine, it seemed, had always been the cheerful one, supporting her sister through her illness, desperate to protect her from the worst of the demons that had haunted her.

In spite of Jasmine’s insistence that her parents could have done more for her twin, Tom could only imagine how difficult it must be to deal with a child who was suffering from any kind of mental health issue. However much you might want to help, it would be so easy to take the wrong step. But Jasmine clearly felt they should have done better with Esme.

He thought back to the night when, as far as they could determine, Jasmine had died at the Flash. The witness, Sharon Carter, had seen two people get out of a car and only one get back in, so it seemed certain that Jasmine had been driven to the place of her death on the night the big freeze began. The driver appeared to go with her into the hide, carrying a bag which must have contained the cylinder of gas, although it was impossible to tell for sure. The post-mortem and the routine toxicology analysis revealed plenty about the drugs that Jasmine had been taking around the time of her death, but they didn’t kill her. Amy Sanders had been unable to find any other cause of death, so the only logical conclusion, given the lack of helium found in the gas analysis of her lungs, was that an exit bag filled with nitrogen was used.

It seemed that Jasmine had voluntarily got out of the car and gone with the man – if it was a man. Maybe after all those months of missing her twin it had seemed to her that she had nothing left to live for, and so she had sought the help of a person she could trust. Maybe she felt that dying at the place where her sister had originally tried to kill herself would bring them closer together in death.