Colin Flynn

Colin Flynn is a detective sergeant working under Gary Baxter during the investigation into the disappearance and deaths of the Briggs twins. His role is practical and procedural: he reports what searches have—and have not—produced, participates in interviews with the two suspects, and helps turn an uncertain case into a record of questioning and admissions. The narrative gives little information about his life outside the investigation, defining him instead through the work of building a case under evidential limits.

Position in the Investigation

Colin is identified as Gary’s detective sergeant and is waiting for Gary and Jane Bowman when they return to the incident room. By then, warrants have been obtained and Jason Dodds’s house and car searched. Colin reports that the searches yielded nothing. The negative result matters: despite the suspicions surrounding Dodds, the searches have supplied no additional physical evidence to strengthen the case.

Gary tells Colin that Dodds denies everything and that the phone linking him to the twins is circumstantial evidence. Colin asks what they should do next. Gary answers that they will question Dodds once more at two o’clock, but that without an admission he cannot justify continuing to hold him. Colin is thus present at the point where the investigation’s urgency meets its legal constraint. The team may believe they have identified the right suspect, but belief alone cannot sustain detention.

Searches, Release, and Surveillance

The immediate outcome confirms that constraint. At a quarter to three, Dodds signs for his possessions and leaves the police station. The narrative shows Gary watching him go, then telling Detective Superintendent Tom Downes that Dodds has been released. Colin is not shown making the release decision; it is Gary who explains that the team has no grounds to keep Dodds longer. That distinction places Colin within the investigating team without assigning him authority or actions the account gives to Gary.

Gary asks for twenty-four hours of covert surveillance because he believes Dodds may lead the police to the twins. Downes approves the request, and Gary hurries off to put it in motion. The sequence sharpens the contrast between the empty searches and the continuing investigation: the police cannot hold Dodds, but they can keep watching him. Colin’s earlier report of the searches helps establish the evidential situation that makes this alternative important, though the account does not specify that Colin personally conducts the surveillance.

Questioning Jason Dodds

After the twins’ bodies are found in a freezer concealed in Dodds’s lock-up, Colin and Jane conduct a further interview with Dodds while Gary observes through one-way glass. Dodds has returned with his appointed lawyer, Gareth Snell; Frank McQuillan, the other man connected to the lock-up, is being held separately for questioning. Colin begins with the interview preliminaries, then puts the central question to Dodds: how two teenagers came to be dead in a deep freeze hidden behind shelving at the back of his lock-up.

Dodds denies knowing what Colin is talking about. Colin follows the denial by confronting him with the fact that he and McQuillan had spent much of the morning at the lock-up and asks what they were doing there. Jane adds questions about how the twins’ phone came to be in Dodds’s wheelie bin and how the girls came to be in the freezer. These are distinct lines of challenge: Colin presses the suspects’ presence at the lock-up, while Jane connects Dodds to the phone and the concealed bodies.

Dodds then refuses to say more until he has spoken with Snell. Colin ends the interview, gives the required details for the recording, and leaves the room with Jane. The narrative notes that Colin meets Snell’s gaze and that the solicitor looks away; Colin considers that Snell may eventually drop his client. The moment offers a limited glimpse of Colin’s assessment of the interview, but Dodds’s refusal to continue means it produces no immediate admission from him.

The McQuillan Interview and Its Significance

Colin and Jane also conduct McQuillan’s interview, with Gary observing and Eve Strong joining him in the observation room. McQuillan describes how the men set up a Facebook page using pictures found on the internet and presented themselves as younger, attractive men. Colin prompts him to clarify what kind of pictures they used. The exchange begins to expose the deception through which the twins were approached, rather than leaving the case at the level of the men’s later presence at the lock-up.

The investigation’s account of McQuillan’s confession is subsequently relayed by Eve: the twins believed they were meeting men closer to their own age, but the meeting ended in their deaths, and their bodies were taken to the lock-up and hidden in the freezer. Colin’s part in the story is not to deliver that later summary or to make the principal investigative decisions. It is to conduct the questioning through which a suspect’s account enters the case. Across the failed searches, Dodds’s release, and the interviews after the discovery, his contribution marks the procedural progression from suspicion and circumstantial evidence toward testimony about how the twins were deceived and killed.