Working undercover had never been something she’d been intending to do when she’d joined the police seven years previously at the age of twenty-two. In fact, she’d barely been aware that that kind of thing even went on.

She’d started as a uniformed constable, doing the standard training at Hendon, followed by eighteen months on the beat. At the first opportunity, she’d transferred to the CID to work as a detective, eager to take a more proactive approach to catching criminals. And it was whilst she was there that she’d first become aware of Frank’s operation.

Undercover work was where the danger and the kudos lay. And that was where she’d found her calling, running considerable risks on behalf of the law with the exhilarating feeling that she was really making a difference.

It had been great… until it hadn’t been great.

And so she’d left, never to look back. That was why she’d deleted Frank’s details from her phone. That was why she was sitting here in this office counting down the minutes until the end of the day.

But if she was so keen to put all that behind her then why had she agreed to meet him?

She knew his call could only mean one thing: that he needed her help. But whether she was ready to give it was another matter entirely.

She curled the lock of hair around her fingers and let it slowly uncurl.

She stared at the cryptic crossword.

The answer jumped out at her.

Rite.

The answer was ‘rite’.

Chapter 3

If she had a bad feeling about the meeting, Frank’s choice of venue only increased her misgivings. Although she’d walked past it many a time, she’d never actually been inside the Pig and Whistle. It just wasn’t her kind of place. It was a huge, brightly-lit sports pub with shiny fittings and a big TV screen on every wall blaring out the football highlights. She’d have much rather been in a dojo right now doing her jiu-jitsu grading, but she’d cancelled that to be here and it was too late to change her mind about it now.

She stood inside the doorway for a few moments and scanned the room from under the brim of her baseball cap, taking in the old men sitting by themselves staring vacantly at the football on the TV screens. She found the scene depressing and wondered why he’d chosen this pub when there were nicer and quieter places situated just as close to his office as this one.

Outwardly, it would have been hard to guess that she was a police detective, for she was just dressed casually in jeans and a suede-fringed cowboy jacket, her long brown hair tucked up under her cap, apart from the bit hanging down over the left side of her face.

The pub wasn’t particularly busy and it didn’t take her long to spot Frank sitting at a table in the far corner, his back to the wall, nursing a pint of lager. In his late forties, he had cropped red hair turning to grey and the kind of pasty countenance that made him look ill even when he wasn’t. With his grey suit and black Oxfords, he could have passed for some kind of sales rep sinking a pint after a business meeting in town. For him, Saturday was a workday, no different to any other. It was the nature of the work he did, and she knew just how committed he was to it.