Bernadette Briggs

Bernadette Briggs, known as Berri, is one half of the missing teenage twins whose online correspondence with Jason Dodds helps draw them into danger. In the messages, she is not merely a target being acted upon: she replies, tests the person she knows as Mario, and makes plans alongside her sister, Theresa Briggs. That shared decision-making matters, but it does not lessen the manipulation later uncovered by police. The investigation shows that Dodds had cultivated contact under a false identity and pressed the girls for photographs before persuading them to skip school and meet him in Newcastle.

Identity and the messages

Bernadette appears in the story chiefly through her relationship with her twin and through the smartphone messages that record their approach to the meeting. The girls are together while eating and waiting when a message arrives from Mario, the name they use for their correspondent. His message refers to something discussed earlier and asks whether they are willing to go ahead. Berri answers cautiously that they might be, adding that they will see. The exchange has a teasing, apparently casual rhythm: the twins look at each other and giggle, while Berri continues the conversation.

When Mario asks for a photograph, Berri turns the request back on him, asking him to send a new picture rather than relying on images already visible on his Facebook page. She looks to Theresa, who nods, before Berri sends their picture. His response redirects the exchange toward images of the girls. These small beats show the twins acting together, but also show the conversation’s pressure shifting toward what Mario wants from them. The messages preserve Berri’s participation in the exchange without making her responsible for the deception behind it.

From online contact to a planned meeting

In a later exchange, after the twins have each taken a long bath and washed their hair, they sit together in their room over the smartphone. Mario asks whether the plan is definite and warns Berri not to be messing him about. Berri replies that they are coming to meet him. The message is followed by another request for a picture. The repeated requests connect the apparently playful earlier conversation to a more insistent negotiation: Mario wants confirmation of the meeting and continued access to images, while Berri communicates the twins’ decision to go.

The contents of the phone later give that exchange a more disturbing meaning. Maddie identifies the number as registered to Jason Dodds and explains that the twins called him Mario in their messages. The investigation finds clear evidence that he groomed them, pretended to be someone he was not, and pestered them for pictures while asking them to do increasingly unsavoury things. The girls had sent topless photographs, but, as Maddie explains, they had stuck together and the pressure had not led them to send more explicit material. Dodds also persuaded them to skip school and meet him in Newcastle. The record therefore holds two truths at once: Berri and Theresa made choices within the conversation, and those choices were being shaped by an adult’s deception and persistent pressure.

Missing, and made visible

After the twins disappear, their images circulate through competing accounts of who they are and what may have happened. A newspaper speculates about whether the same man was involved, whether a grooming gang was responsible, or whether the girls had run away. It calls them little tearaways and prints a photograph of Linda Briggs with a cigarette, alongside an image of the family’s untidy-looking home. The presentation risks making the twins’ circumstances seem like evidence against their worthiness of concern, even as their disappearance remains unresolved.

Linda names the inequality directly when Gary Baxter visits. She argues that the missing girls whose pictures dominate the news receive more attention because they are pretty and have money, while her own daughters are poor and working class. She imagines that if the twins were middle class and pictured with a pony, the press would have been more interested and they might have been found. Gary tells her that police are receiving sightings from across the country and cannot keep up with them all. His response describes the practical problem of investigating numerous reports; it does not erase Linda’s sense that public concern is unevenly distributed.

The community answers that neglect with a visible act of its own. Neighbours and the twins’ friends contribute money for missing-person T-shirts, and Iris brings a box to Linda. The shirts use a photograph of Theresa and Bernadette laughing together, taken from the twins’ Instagram page and released to the press when they first went missing, with a request for information and the hotline number. Linda plans for people to wear them until the twins are found and home safe, then gives shirts to Gary to distribute. Iris says the campaign should make Linda’s girls as important as The Phantom and his victims. Bernadette’s smiling image thus becomes more than a clue or a news photograph: it is a means by which her family and neighbours insist on her individual importance.

Discovery and significance

The investigation eventually leads from the phone to Dodds. When Gary tells Linda and Iris that police have found the phone, Linda recalls that the man denied everything. Gary explains that police did not believe him and had him followed to a lock-up unit he had not disclosed. In interview, detectives confront Dodds with the discovery of two teenagers’ bodies in a deep freeze behind shelving at the back of the unit. He denies knowing what they mean, while his interview with Frank McQuillan is still to come. McQuillan later says that the two men had pretended to be younger and made a Facebook page using pictures of good-looking young men found online, exposing the false persona behind the girls’ correspondence.

The confirmation of the twins’ identities is given not through the phone or police interview but through Linda’s recognition of their faces. In a room beyond the curtains, two bodies lie on metal tables beneath sheets. Felix Carver turns the sheets back; Linda says they look asleep, then asks to see them properly and give them a last cuddle. She is told that this viewing is only to confirm their identities and that she can see them after the forensic post-mortem. She identifies Theresa and Bernadette as her girls, then clings to Iris as they sob together. The scene closes the uncertainty about Bernadette’s fate while showing the human consequence of the investigation’s findings.

The novel’s account of Bernadette is necessarily mediated by messages, missing-person images, police evidence, and her mother’s recognition. Yet those records preserve distinct parts of her life: her quick, collaborative exchanges with Theresa; the pressure imposed by Dodds; and the community’s effort to keep the twins’ names and faces in public view. Her ending exposes the cost of the deception, while the T-shirts and Linda’s final identification resist reducing her to either a media label or evidence in a case.