An unannounced visit. They didn’t look happy. This wasn’t good. A knot of fear immediately formed in Bailey’s stomach.

They moved into the cell so they were all standing around her. Toni nodded to Keisha, who pulled the cell door shut behind her. This definitely wasn’t looking good.

‘Hey guys, what’s up?’ She tried to sound light-hearted. But they weren’t smiling.

‘Muscles,’ said Toni.

Muscles grabbed Bailey from behind, pinning her arms behind her back. Bailey squirmed in her grip, but Muscles was far too strong.

‘I don’t understand. What’s going on?’

‘What’s going on is that we think you’re a cop.’

‘A cop?’ said Bailey, evincing an expression of shock. But inside, her heart rate had suddenly gone up exponentially.

‘Yeah. A fucking pig!’ spat Toni.

‘Just admit it,’ said Keisha. ‘It’ll make things a whole lot easier.’

A whole lot easier for them to kill me, thought Bailey.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said.

‘It’s so obvious,’ growled Toni. ‘You come in here. You join our gang. Terry gets arrested. All a little bit too convenient.’

‘You’ve got it all wrong.’

‘No, I think we’ve got it all right.’ Toni eyed her with a nasty leer. ‘You see, Keisha here happened to be talking to someone called Carly Potson, who swore on her grandmother’s grave that she was arrested by you one time.’

Fuck.

Bailey’s heart sank at the mention of Carly Potson. She realised now that she had made a fatal error in hoping that Carly would forget about her following their encounter in the canteen. Bailey had seen Carly around the prison, and Carly hadn’t approached her again, so Bailey had assumed that she had moved on, but apparently that wasn’t the case.

‘Now, normally we wouldn’t place much stock in the say-so of a worthless parasite like Carly Potson who could just be trying to ingratiate herself with us to get off the hook for money she owes us.’ Toni paused and tilted her head thoughtfully. ‘But then I did some thinking… of the mathematical kind. The two-plus-two kind. And it all suddenly adds up. You’re. A. Fucking. Pig.’ With each venomously hissed word, she poked Bailey hard in the chest with her forefinger.

This was exactly the kind of situation where the prime rule of working undercover was put to the test.

Never break cover.

However sure they were that she was a serving police officer, whatever evidence they had, however convincing, Bailey had to deny it to the hilt.

Because if she didn’t, she was dead.

Sure, there was that little perverse itching temptation that every undercover cop had in a situation like this, which was to give in and admit it, to free oneself of that horrible weight of pressure caused by the constant need to conceal and deceive.

She fought it back.

She remembered her training. The life-saving mantra.

Never. Break. Cover.

‘That’s absolute bullshit,’ croaked Bailey, her mouth dry with fear. ‘She’s got me muddled up with someone else.’