Tom walked towards the board, not sure what he was hoping to find. His eyes were drawn to the girl on the right of each picture, who he knew instinctively was Jasmine. She was happy, smiling, laughing in every one. He glanced at the girl on the left. There were clear similarities between the two of them, but he could sense that this girl was more troubled. This one had to be Esme. Her smile looked forced and her eyes seemed to be unnaturally wide, as if she was doing her best to look happy. He looked back at the first girl, the one that Keith was irritatingly tapping with his telescopic pointer pen. Could this cheerful, lively-looking girl really be Penny?

‘What makes you so convinced it’s her, Keith?’

The sergeant moved his pointer to the photo of the body they had found at the Flash, taken as she sat against the wall of the hide. ‘Tiny scar above the left eyebrow, sir, and a small mole to the left of her chin.’

Tom stepped closer and peered at the image. Keith was right. It was hard to compare photos of a laughing smiling woman of around thirty years of age to one of a body that had been dead for days, but in addition to similarities in general facial structure, Keith was right about the marks of identification.

‘So our Penny is actually Jasmine DuPont. What else do we know about her?’ Tom asked, staring at the two beautiful young women, both of whom were now dead. Maybe life without her twin had proved unbearable for Jasmine and drained the joy from her, to the point where she had asked someone to help her die. It was a heartbreaking thought.

‘Not a huge amount yet, sir. We’re gathering information as quickly as we can. We’ve sent someone round to her last known address and we’re waiting to hear back. Jasmine hadn’t used social media since about three months after her sister died, although in the period immediately after Esme’s death she used Facebook as a platform to denigrate her own parents, and anyone with children who refused to listen to their problems or told them to “get a grip”, as she put it. She didn’t have any privacy settings – it was as if she wanted the world to find her posts. There were several with links to sites that deal with depression, and towards the end even more that deal with suicide.’

Tom let out a long breath. ‘Okay. Well done, everyone. Now that we have a name, we can start to make some progress. But to be clear, just because she was posting links to suicide sites it doesn’t mean we can ignore other possibilities. Keep your minds open and use each bit of new evidence to form a picture – one that right now we don’t know either the shape or colour of. No preconceived ideas, please.’