Bailey sat back on her haunches and paused for thought.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ she said. ‘I’ll trade you.’

She reached into the pocket of her jacket and took out her car keys. Attached to the keychain was a mini-torch, a handy little gadget which had an extremely bright LED as well as a laser pointer.

She unclipped it from the keys and shone the red dot of the laser pointer onto the ground, dancing it around a little in front of him, watching him eye it covetously.

She dangled it before him and raised her eyebrow suggestively. He reached for it, but she pulled it away out of his grasp. He shot her a sullen glare, then reluctantly unhooked the shoelace from his neck and handed her the keyring, his hand wavering recalcitrantly. As soon as her fingers closed around the keyring, he snatched the mini-torch from her other hand and immediately began to play with it.

Bailey examined the keyring in the palm of her hand. It weighed very little. She pulled at the kitten’s oversized head, and just as she’d suspected, it came off with a little ‘pop’ to reveal a USB jack. It was a novelty memory stick. She’d seen these kinds of things before for sale on Amazon, pitched at the female market.

Now maybe this would hold some answers, perhaps something more than just a fedora hat…

She looked up at Dave with a grateful smile. ‘Thanks.’

‘How about that spare change?’ he said.

38

Bailey tapped her fingers impatiently on the table as she waited for the laptop to boot up. She was using the laptop Frank had given her as part of her undercover identity as that was the only computing device she had in the Stratford apartment.

Picking up the kitten-themed memory stick, she examined the scorched and melted edges of the plastic. It didn’t seem too badly damaged and she guessed it had been shielded from the worst of the blast because it had been enveloped within Adrian’s severed hand. She knew a memory stick like this was just a lump of silicon with no moving parts and was thus, hopefully, quite robust. She’d find out soon enough.

With the laptop ready to use, she pulled the head off the kitten to expose the USB jack poking from its neck. She inserted it into the USB port on the side of the computer, her heart beating hard with anticipation at what she might discover on it.

The file window opened. The memory stick appeared to contain just a single MPEG4 file called ‘meeting’.

Her fingers trembling slightly, she double-clicked on the file. The video player programme opened up on the screen and the file began to play.

The picture quality was slightly grainy, the camera optimising for low-light conditions. Filling the screen was a large double bed, neatly made, unoccupied, with headboard fittings that suggested it was located within an upmarket hotel.

A woman entered the frame. Probably in her late twenties, she had long blonde hair and a strikingly beautiful face. She was clad in expensive-looking black lingerie which did little to conceal her extremely well-proportioned physique.