He swiped his phone into life. ‘Here we go. The soup shop has a website.’ Dan was clicking through the website pages. ‘Simas Gudelis and Indra Ulbiene. Lithuanian. Both from Vilnius originally. They’ve lived in Tower Hamlets for three years, and before that they lived in Cambridgeshire for two years.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Agricultural labourers on various farm camps.’

He showed me an image of the two of them, outside their shop. They stood at their blue front door. The man was shaking a bottle of champagne and the woman was cutting a piece of yellow tape. She was recognisable as the one we had just met, although her build and muscle tone were heftier then and her hair was darker. Simas was taller than Indra. A brown line clung to his jawline and top lip, and he had thick eyebrows. At least we had something to go on.

Andy was rubbing his unmasked face as though wanting to shake off the things he’d seen. ‘Extremely unpleasant in there.’

‘I bet. Could we look through the photographs on your camera? We need to ID the bodies.’

‘Sure.’ He fetched it from the ground and passed it over.

With Dan looking on, I flicked through the camera’s memory card. The images showed two bodies, lying on a surface with their arms round each other. The pose – the man curled round the woman like a spoon – was a peaceful one but their melted, greasy appearance and the fire-charred room was a vision of agony.

‘Jeez.’ Unless they’d grabbed hold of each other out of terror, it suggested they’d been curled up in bed together when the fumes and flames got to them.

‘If it’s any consolation,’ Andy said, ‘the two people in that room would have become unconscious extremely quickly and died within minutes. The accelerant was focussed on the hall and staircase. The fire will have ripped through the centre of the building.’

In the image, the man’s face was shiny and burned back to tissues and fat, but his cheeks and the area around his mouth was much darker, which could be from having a beard and moustache.

Dan lined his phone up with the camera so that one of the internet images was next to the shot. ‘Looks like him, doesn’t it?’

‘There are definitely similarities but it’s hard to be sure from these images.’ It was frustrating. Facial profiling might help but it wasn’t a reliable method on its own. ‘We need to find out from Indra if she has anything of Simas’ which might have his DNA on.’

‘And whether he had any identifying marks,’ said Dan. ‘The sister might be able to help too.’

I glanced at the images again. ‘We can’t be certain it’s Simas, but it seems probable. Let’s hope someone has reported the woman missing.’

‘I’ll get Alexej to check the MisPer Register.’ Dan began to dial on his mobile.