‘Yeah, yeah, sure. Alice wanted to leave you. You killed her in a rage because if you couldn’t have her, no one could. You quietly held a grudge against me for years after that, supposedly for poisoning her against you. Then one day you flipped and started killing everyone.’

‘You make me sound like some sort of nutter,’ Ben said with a wry smile.

‘You’ve not exactly helped yourself there. But why you, Ben? We’re twins. We’re virtually the same. We shared a womb. Our DNA is more or less identical. We had the same upbringing. How could you do what you did? Because I certainly never could.’

‘You really think that’s true?’

‘I know it is.’

‘Then you’re wrong, Dani. At one time I thought like you’re thinking now. I’d have said the exact same thing. But it’s plain wrong. All humans are the same. We’re all made of the same stuff, and deep down every single one of us is a potential killer.’

The way Ben said it chilled Dani to the core.

She stayed in the interview room for nearly forty-five minutes before their conversation fully dried up. She wouldn’t say it was nice, or even rewarding, to be there with him, but her mind did somehow feel more at ease by the time she left the prison. Maybe confronting Ben really was an important step to her moving on.

Having detoured and stopped off for lunch in Warwick, it was mid-afternoon by the time Dani made it back home. She set herself down on the sofa in the lounge. She was all out of alcohol, and had deliberately not bought any more. Sitting on her own for hours on end, she knew how easy it was to turn to the bottle for comfort, but she was determined to break the habit.

After sitting in silence for a few minutes she grabbed her laptop and opened it up and navigated to West Midlands Police website. She headed into the portal to gain access to the intranet, typed in her details then held her breath as she hit return. Would they have suspended her access?

She sighed in relief moments later when the screen refreshed and she realised she was on the inside. Feeling her heart rate building, as though she were a hacker who’d just hit gold, she entered into the HOLMES 2 system which detailed all of the force’s cases. It took her a few moments to set up a simple search to look for any new murder cases. There had been two in the last couple of days, but neither seemed in any way related to the deaths of Reeve or Natalya.

Similarly, none of the new missing persons cases jumped out at her.

Nonetheless, Dani carried on her search, looking into various cases both familiar and otherwise, reading notes and interview transcripts and all manner of other information contained within.