The clue was ‘Ceremony sounds correct’.

What the hell could it be?

Thinking laterally, it occurred to her that the hint probably lay in the word ‘sounds’. A word for ‘ceremony’ that sounded like the word for ‘correct’. It was on the tip of her tongue…

Her phone rang, loud in the quiet office. She jumped.

Her first thought was that it was her father. On Sunday she was supposed to have lunch with her parents, but earlier that week she’d had a big blowout with her dad, and those plans had fallen through. His phone call would either be an attempt to make up or an attempt to force home some point he’d made in their argument. She hoped it was the former rather than the latter.

Her parents lived in Bromley, not too far from where she lived in Crystal Palace, and she visited them on a fairly frequent basis. They were both in their sixties, and prior to retiring, her dad had worked for the local council as a health and safety inspector and her mum had been a teacher. She had always been closer to her father than to her mother, who was growing worryingly peculiar with age. However, her father was consumed with a very particular obsession, one that he and Bailey often argued about, to the point where they would sometimes end up not speaking to each other for weeks on end.

She sighed and braced herself as she fished her phone out of her bag. She looked at the number flashing on the screen.

It wasn’t her dad.

An anxious tightness gripped her. She recognised the number immediately, even though she had deleted that person’s contact details from her phone. It was her ex-boss, Detective Superintendent Frank Grinham. It had been almost six months since she’d last heard from him. Why was he calling her now, out of the blue?

She looked at the phone flashing, hesitating for a few moments, and then she answered it.

‘Hello Frank,’ she said.

‘Hello Bailey.’

An uncomfortable pause.

‘What can I do for you?’ she asked stiffly.

‘There’s something important I need to talk to you about.’

‘Go on.’

‘I can’t discuss it over the phone. Let’s meet in person. Are you free tomorrow afternoon?’

There was something about his tone that put the wind up her, something ominous yet also compelling.

She opened her mouth to explain that she had a jiu-jitsu grading to go to tomorrow afternoon, but instead the words that came out were: ‘Sure. I guess.’

‘There’s a pub called the Pig and Whistle just round the corner from my office. Know it?’

‘Yeah, I remember.’

‘Half past three?’

‘See you there.’

She hung up.

Frank’s phone call had been almost as cryptic as the crossword in front of her. But his enigmatic air didn’t come as a complete surprise. After all, he was responsible for running undercover operations and secrecy was his stock-in-trade. She’d worked undercover for him on a variety of jobs over a two-year period, which had ended abruptly six months ago when she’d quit that line of work.