‘That doesn’t surprise me. She was always very resourceful.’

‘She would use it to call and text me with updates. We recovered it along with her body. She must have been pretty panicked if she didn’t even have time to use it to call me for help. We downloaded all the data from it, but there was nothing on there of much help.’

‘I’ll see if I can get hold of one once I’m in there.’

Frank shook his head. ‘Uh-uh. I don’t want you doing that, especially in light of what’s happened to her. If the phone is stolen or confiscated, the information on it – the sent texts and numbers called – could compromise your security. So no mobile phones. Got that?’

‘Sure.’

‘You’ll call me via the public phones in the prison. We’ll set up a fake law firm to take your calls, so it will seem like you’re phoning your solicitor. It’ll provide an element of plausibility and it’ll also make it easier to clear the number with the prison as they have to approve all telephone numbers. Crucially, it also means that they’re not allowed to listen in on the calls like they can with normal numbers. We want to maintain maximum secrecy.’ He paused and tilted his head. ‘I’ll also come in and visit you from time to time,’ he said. ‘Just so you don’t get too lonely.’

‘As my lawyer?’

He shook his head. ‘It’d be too risky for me to pretend to be a lawyer in case I bumped into a real one in the waiting room. He’d soon clock that I was a fake. No, it’ll look better if I’m a family member. Like your brother or something.’

‘You don’t look anything like me. Your nose is too big for one thing.’

He snorted at her response. ‘I’ll be your half-brother. Same father, different mothers. That can explain the age difference as well.’

‘Am I expected to wear a wire?’

He shook his head. ‘It’d be too difficult getting it into the prison. And then you’d have to conceal it from your cellmate and also from the guards. There’s too much risk that it could get found.’

‘That’s a relief. I never liked wearing those things anyway.’

‘Your role, therefore, will be primarily to gather intelligence and to inform us about anything that might be going down. You’ll be our eyes and ears on the inside.’

‘And presumably at the critical point you’ll swoop in and make arrests.’

‘That’s right.’

‘So what kind of intel had Alice gathered so far? Do I have anything to go on?’

He grimaced and shook his head. ‘She hadn’t been in there long enough to identify any specific individuals or groups associated with the drugs ring. She’d been in there barely a few weeks before she was murdered.’

Bailey frowned. ‘Yet you said you thought that she was onto something big. And that’s why she might have been murdered.’

‘I can only think that she found something out very suddenly and was murdered before she had the chance to properly tell me about it. The last communication I had with her was a text message in which she refers to the source of the drugs. She says it’s well concealed, or not immediately obvious at any rate.’