‘He’s very cagey about giving out any more information than he needs to, isn’t he?’ said Dale.

‘He’s very careful,’ Bailey replied. ‘That’s why he’s never been caught.’

‘Well, this time we’ll get him,’ said Frank. ‘And we’ll make sure he doesn’t get to put any more guns on the street for a very long time.’

The three of them paused for a moment, reflecting on how important it was to nail Rick.

Dale looked up and snapped his fingers as if he’d just remembered something.

‘Oh, by the way,’ he said, ‘I got contacted by the Essex police this morning. You remember that shipment of ecstasy pills that was supposed to be coming into that airstrip on the third of February?’

Bailey looked at the date on her watch. ‘That was yesterday, right?’

Dale nodded. ‘Yeah. Well, they swooped on the hangar but it turned out there were no ecstasy pills. Either Adrian gave me dud information or the Molloys got suspicious about something and changed the date or the location.’

Bailey digested the news, trying to think if it might alter anything in relation to her infiltration. She couldn’t envisage any immediate problems.

‘It might not mean anything,’ Dale continued, ‘but I thought it best to mention it to you all the same, just in case it turns out to have some bearing on what you’re doing.’

‘Thanks,’ she said, nodding. ‘I’ll keep it in mind.’

36

William Buttmeal had been working as a private detective for a few years now. He’d come up with a tagline for his business which read ‘Where there’s a Will there’s a way’. As well as being a rather clever pun on his name, he thought it conveyed exactly the kind of positive, can-do attitude you’d expect from a highly efficient private detective and he bet that no other private detectives called Will had been clever enough to think of it.

Sitting in his deliberately anonymous-looking Toyota Prius, he covertly observed the subject of his latest assignment. The man’s name was Richard Molloy and Buttmeal had been following him around since the beginning of February. It was now the sixth of the month and he was wondering just how much longer he’d need to continue tailing Molloy. Despite the romantic impressions Buttmeal liked to project to other people regarding his job, most of his time as a private detective was taken up with sitting around in his car and it required a great deal of patience.

He was currently parked across the street from an expensive steak restaurant in Ilford that Molloy had entered an hour and a half earlier along with two other men. Now he watched as they left the restaurant, crossed the street and climbed into a large black Range Rover Velar with tinted windows. Lifting up his digital camera, he discreetly took some photographs of them.

Buttmeal hadn’t been able to ferret out a great deal of information about his subject; there was a marked dearth of anything useful on the internet and the other sources he normally utilised hadn’t yielded anything particularly insightful either. It was almost as if the man was intentionally trying to maintain a low profile. As far as Buttmeal could ascertain from his movements, Molloy appeared to be some kind of businessman, with interests in a wide variety of enterprises, spending much of his day travelling between them in his black Range Rover.