“So, if I’m kidnapped, I just tap in a code and you report it?” Jemima is playing dumb, her eyes wide, winding a strand of honey-blond hair around her fingers with their manicured nails.

“Yep,” the man says. He too seems a little dumb, and has zero decorum regarding looking down her blouse. “As long as it can verify it’s really you. Otherwise we just get a load of false issues and the police get mad and stop responding.” I think I want to slap him to make him focus on something other than Jemima’s tits.

“Like a fingerprint scan?”

“Generally facial recognition. Just using the camera on your phone or laptop.”

“I’m never sure about facial recognition. My uncle says it’s rife for the hacking.”

“It’s foolproof. Unless you’re an identical twin, and then your twin could hack you. But we can use a retinal scan. In fact, we had a client recently and the system saved her life.” He is growing more animated.

“Really? OMG, what happened?”

“Well, she came in right before the first lockdown, so early March, and upgraded her security. Said she had a bad feeling about her sister going after her money. We added the retinal scan then, just to be sure. It flagged up when she was being held hostage.”

“Oh, my. So the police found her?”

“Well,” he shifts a little in his seat. “Not exactly. There was a bit of a balls-up with some location muffling, but we’ve learned our lessons now. No, she saved herself actually. But there was a bit of a hoo-ha, and she used the retinal scan as the final proof of her identity to the police.”

Per Chris’s timeline, Megan killed Leah in mid-February. If Chris is telling the truth, she could have altered the account details so she was able to “prove” she was Leah. Very clever indeed. Not that it matters though; it would just be “Leah’s” word against his. Same as the fingerprints on file with the U.S. Border Agency from the trip to Vegas. I need to find something more concrete.

I have also tasked Jemima with trying to track down the medical records from the accident Chris told me about. The one that gave Megan a distinctive, if subtle, scar on the back of her neck. Jemima may have to trawl through the archives of the hospital though; they were still using paper back in 2004 and the NHS is notoriously poor at record-keeping. I have a vision of swishing my robe as I cross the courtroom toward Megan in the witness box, medical records in hand as I prepare to unmask her in front of the judge and jury. Obviously, it wouldn’t really happen like that, but sometimes it’s fun to imagine a little piece of theatrics.

I can prove that Leah is lying about not having seen Megan for months. Or at least I can prove they were both in the same area at the same time back on the seventeenth of February. This is the day that Chris tells me Megan killed Leah and became both of them. There is CCTV footage of both their cars on the same stretch of road, and a crystal-clear image of Megan’s number plate in a car park just down the road from the cabin. Where it stayed for five days before being collected. Five days during which Megan was pretending to be Leah in London.