Pymm had spread a series of photographs across the table. ‘These are the photographs containing the mysterious young woman that Shaun identified in the background of the pictures he retrieved from social media.’
‘OK,’ said Warren.
‘These are scene photos taken from the search of the house that Biljana and Malina Dragić lived in. What do you notice?’
Grimshaw spotted it first. ‘All of the social media pictures are taken in the house.’
‘Isn’t that what we’d expect?’ asked Martinez. ‘We know that these photos were all taken at house parties. Presumably, Aunty Silvija’s place was the place to hang out.’
‘Not all of them were taken at parties,’ said Pymm, pulling over one.
The photo was a selfie, Biljana’s arm stretching out towards the lens. She and her sister were clearly playing with Instagram filters, their images overlaid with cartoon bunny ears and noses. In the background, the unknown woman had her hand up, trying to avoid being in shot.
‘So?’ Grimshaw looked confused. Martinez shrugged.
‘They’re wearing pyjamas,’ said Pymm, impatiently.
‘Oh.’ Grimshaw paused. ‘Slumber party?’ He smirked. ‘I’ve read about those.’
Pymm sighed, but Ruskin beat her to it. ‘Look which room it’s taken in. It’s in a bedroom; you can see they’re sitting on a bed. But look at the walls; no posters or pictures, so it’s not Biljana’s or Malina’s room.’
Grimshaw squinted at the picture. ‘That’s the sofa bed in the living room.’
Meera Gupta’s report from the search of the flat confirmed the team’s suspicions.
‘The sofa bed in the living room was definitely used recently,’ said Gupta. ‘There were dents on the carpet that correspond to the fold-out legs.’
‘Could it have been from someone staying over occasionally?’ asked Martinez. ‘We know that the house was a bit of a party destination.’
‘Perhaps, but there were a lot of overlapping fingerprints, mostly from the same person, on the mechanism inside the sofa. I’d say that the bed was opened and closed regularly. The same fingerprints also appear all over the bathroom, the kitchen and the crockery and cutlery, alongside the girls’ prints and a few from their aunt.’
‘It could have been a regular visitor,’ countered Martinez. ‘Presumably their guests used the bathroom, and if they ate there would be using plates and bowls.’
‘The fingerprints were on clean crockery and cutlery in the drawer. Unless the guest also regularly washed up and put things away in the cupboards, I can’t see how they would have left their prints behind.’ She smiled tightly. ‘And who invites a guest over and gets them to wash the rolling pin and chopping board?’
Grimshaw smirked at his friend’s discomfort. Martinez was rightly playing devil’s advocate, but Gupta wasn’t having any of it.
‘We also looked in the bathroom. The medicine cabinet has three shelves, one of which is empty and has marks suggesting bottles have been removed. The wire basket hanging over the back of the shower stall also has room for more bottles. It’s not exactly a spacious bathroom, and there was a bag with different, half-used shower gels and shampoos tucked next to the loo, with Malina and Biljana’s fingerprints on them. Why wouldn’t they keep all those bottles to hand in the shower or the cabinet?’
Martinez looked as if he was about to object again but thought better of it.
‘And the kicker, we found evidence of a third person’s hair in the shower trap.’
She pushed a high-resolution image across the desk. ‘At first we though that the hairs belonged to one of the girls, but when we looked under the microscope, you can see that there are three distinct hair types.’
The picture was clear: a blonde hair labelled ‘Malina’, a dark brown hair labelled, ‘Biljana’ and another, darker hair, with a thicker shaft, labelled ‘unknown’.
‘DNA?’ asked Warren.
Gupta shook her head, ‘No, none of the hairs we’ve found so far have a follicle, so we’ve nothing to extract.’
‘Then any idea who the prints belong to?’ asked Hutchinson.
‘Nothing in the database, so they’ve not previously come to our attention.’ She smiled. ‘But they do match some prints found in the kitchen area of the massage parlour, and on the handle of the wheelie bin that belongs to the business.’
‘Annie,’ said Warren and Richardson immediately. The mysterious young woman who only appeared in the background of the sisters’ selfies was living with the two sisters.