Nancy chewed her lip pensively. It was an exceedingly unpleasant but very valid point. Had Adrian gone so far as to contaminate their organisation with an undercover police officer?

‘What we need to do,’ said Rick, ‘is focus our attention very closely on anyone who’s recently entered our orbit.’

He turned to his left.

‘And Stephen here has got a very good idea who we should start with.’

41

‘I was thinking that you should get a manicure, Bailey.’

Bailey looked down at her nails as she stood there in the warm aromatic environs of the beauty salon. She’d never really bothered that much with her nails before.

‘Um… sure,’ she said. ‘Why not?’

Wendy smiled at her amenably. ‘What colour would you like?’

‘Er… aquamarine?’ It was Bailey’s favourite colour.

Wendy frowned and shook her head. ‘Aquamarine?! No, no, no.’

She turned to the rack of nail varnishes next to her and scanned them thoughtfully, eventually picking one out.

‘I think a dark metallic grey would do you right.’

Bailey shrugged and let her get on with it, waiting for her to get around to sharing more details of her marital issues.

Wendy had been pestering her by text for a few days now, inviting her to come in for a session that Wendy had said would be ‘on her’. Although Bailey had concluded that there wasn’t a great deal of mileage to be gained in pursuing Wendy as a source of information, she’d finally agreed to come in as she sensed that Wendy wanted to unburden herself of her problems, and Bailey figured it was best to try and stay in her good books for the sake of the operation with Rick.

Sitting at the table, Bailey observed Wendy carefully apply the nail varnish whilst the customers and the salon employees chattered softly around them.

‘So what did you get up to over the weekend?’ asked Wendy lightly.

Seeing as it was a Monday, this was no doubt the main topic of light conversation filling the beauty salon this morning.

Bailey had spent a considerable portion of the weekend down at the hospice visiting her father. With his strength fading, and with all the painkillers being pumped through his system, he’d spent much of his time slipping in and out of sleep, unable to engage much with her. It was therefore a relief, in some ways, that he hadn’t been in any state to badger her about Mister Snigiss, and even if he had, she wouldn’t have disclosed the nature of what she’d discovered so far; it was all too tied up with a confidential investigation, and at any rate, she still had no clue as to Jennifer’s ultimate fate.

‘Oh, nothing much. I just chilled out,’ said Bailey, unwilling to discuss her father’s situation with Wendy. ‘How about you? Have you been up to anything exciting since I last saw you?’

It was all the prompt Wendy needed. She looked up from Bailey’s nails with a slightly strained expression.