‘What happened?’ she whispered.

‘She was murdered last week. In the line of duty.’

‘Doing what exactly?’

He glanced around. The TV screens blared. They were showing a replay of a penalty, the ball hitting the back of the net again and again from various angles. No one appeared to be paying the slightest bit of interest in them. She realised now that Frank had chosen this pub because it was big enough and noisy enough for them to chat without anyone overhearing.

He turned back to face her and lowered his voice slightly. ‘She was working undercover in a women’s prison. She was going under the name of Alice Jenkins.’

Bailey raised her eyebrows in surprise. ‘A prison? I’ve worked in some pretty dicey places but never anything quite like that. Which one was she in?’

‘HMP Foxbrook. Know it?’

She nodded. ‘I’ve driven past it a few times. Big old Victorian place. Public sector. It’s pretty grim-looking, like something out of Dickens.’

‘She’d gone undercover there to investigate a drugs ring. It’s a very lucrative business, selling drugs in prison. It’s a captive market. Quite literally.’

‘Someone found out she was a cop?’

The very prospect of it filled her with horror. She could envisage all too clearly the reaction of a mob of prisoners suddenly discovering a copper in their midst.

‘She was deep cover. Not even the prison authorities knew she was a police officer. And they still don’t. And we want to keep it that way for the time being.’

‘So what happened?’

‘We don’t know, but it’s quite possible her cover got blown somehow. Maybe she slipped up in some way. But it’s proving very hard to get to the bottom of it. The inmates are being extremely uncooperative, not surprisingly, and the staff aren’t much better.’

‘Forensics?’

He shook his head. ‘Nothing of any specific value. And in the context of a closed environment like a prison, there’s too much cross-contamination for DNA analysis to be reliable.’

Bailey shook her head. ‘I can’t believe it. Alice was good. She was always top of the class. I’m really surprised that something like this happened to her.’

‘It seems she underestimated what she was up against. It was pretty brutal what they did to her. Her body was found in the prison laundry. She’d had her throat cut…’ he hesitated for a moment, ‘…and she’d been scalped.’

Bailey sat there numbly absorbing what he was telling her. She finished her drink and placed the glass back on the table. She regretted not asking for a double.

‘What about CCTV?’ she said hoarsely. ‘Surely that must have caught something.’

He shook his head. ‘No cameras in the laundry. It’s not considered to be a “high-risk” area. That’s probably the reason why they chose to do it there.’

‘They…?’ she echoed.

He shrugged, opening his palms, welcoming an answer to her question.

‘You want me to come back and work for you, don’t you?’ she said.

But it wasn’t really a question because she’d known that this had been the whole point of the meeting all along.