But the central tenet that had been drilled into them incessantly was that, whatever the circumstances, you had to maintain your cover, however tempting it might be to reveal the truth, however much someone might claim that they knew you were a police officer.

Never break cover.

Never admit that you’re a cop.

Never. Break. Cover.

Chapter 9

Bailey stood under the jet of water, her eyes closed, massaging the prison-issue shower gel over her body, working up a lather. The shower gel smelt cheap and harsh and left her skin feeling dry and sensitive and she made a mental note there and then to check if the prison shop stocked anything of a slightly better quality.

She didn’t particularly enjoy communal showering and had been apprehensive about exposing her scars but knew that she would have no choice in the matter. She was self-conscious about them at the best of times, and in here she didn’t quite know what reaction they would elicit.

The one down the side of her face was what most people saw, if they noticed it beneath her hair, but that was the least of them, for they stretched in an extensive zigzag lattice down across her breasts, shoulders and back, interspersed here and there with a number of small round burn marks.

As it turned out, in the shower she’d got a few glances of interest and several double-takes though no one had actually said anything. Maybe in an environment like prison, scars weren’t such a big deal. If anything, the other inmates had given her a slightly wider berth, and she realised that her disfigurement constituted a useful asset as it seemed to confer on her an aura of criminal credibility that she wouldn’t otherwise have had.

Looking around her, she was amazed by the number of tattoos. She’d never seen so many in one place. Some of the artwork was quite impressive, but for the most part it was pretty tacky, the kind of thing she’d seen on sex workers she’d encountered in the course of upholding the law.

Bailey herself had no tattoos. She’d never seen the point in getting one. Once upon a time, if anyone had asked her why, she’d have responded by saying that tattoos were an identifying feature – not necessarily a good thing if you were an undercover police officer. People remembered things like tattoos, and at some point down the line, on a different job, under a different cover, you might bump into someone from a former job who might otherwise not have recognised you were it not for your distinctive tattoo and who might then realise that you weren’t who you claimed to be. But now she had the scars, all of that seemed immaterial, for they were probably even more of an identifying feature than a tattoo.

The girl next to her, slim and boyish, ran her hands through her bleached blonde hair, slicking it back, and as she did so, Bailey noticed the track marks running along the insides of her forearms. The ugly puncture wounds dotted along the paths of the veins were clear evidence of intravenous hard drug use and they looked recent.