Shit. What was going on?

She smiled nervously. ‘Hey guys. This is the second time you’ve invited yourselves in here. Have you heard of a thing called a doorbell?’

None of them said anything. Their faces were cold and unsmiling.

Shane, who’d been standing closest to the door, deftly stepped behind her into the hallway and positioned himself with his arms crossed, squarely blocking off her exit route.

She gulped and shrank a little, her heart suddenly beating harder. This wasn’t looking promising. Something was up. Something serious.

Stephen, who’d been leaning against the mantelpiece, pushed himself forward and swaggered over to her. There was an almost gleeful glint in his little round eyes as he spoke in his squeaky voice.

‘We think you’re Old Bill,’ he said.

An icy chill stabbed through her like a dagger. Those words were ultimate anathema to any undercover cop.

She swallowed, trying to maintain a semblance of calm while her mind furiously analysed the possible reasons for their accusation. Her thoughts were immediately wrenched back to the time her cover had been blown when she’d been working undercover in the car theft ring. In that particular case, the gang had claimed to have had a source inside the police who’d tipped them off as to her real identity. Was it going to be the same with the Molloys, or was it going to be something else? Some inconsistency in her cover story perhaps? Or perhaps some police operation against them that they’d decided could only have been possible with the aid of an infiltrator?

Whatever their reasoning, there was only one course of action she could take to try and dispel the seeds of doubt. And that was to deny it totally and completely.

Never break cover.

‘Old Bill?’ she sneered. ‘You must be having a fucking laugh.’

‘Do you see us laughing?’ rasped Rick, his face like stone.

He’d been sitting on the sofa, but now he stood up. In the small confines of the flat, she realised just how big he was.

‘The police and Customs hit an airstrip in Essex recently,’ he said. ‘They’d heard that we were bringing in a large shipment of ecstasy pills.’

Bailey’s hackles went up. It was that drugs shipment Dale had mentioned. The one scheduled for the third of February which had never materialised.

‘The thing is,’ said Stephen, ‘it was fake information designed to flush out a rat. We know that the person who provided this information to the police was a grass.’

‘Who’s this grass?’ she said, well aware that it was Adrian they were referring to.

‘Never you mind,’ growled Rick.

‘The problem we have,’ said Stephen, ‘is that this grass could have planted an undercover police officer inside our organisation.’

Shit. This was exactly the kind of thing she’d been afraid would happen should the Molloys ever discover that Adrian had been a confidential informant.

She put on an act of shocked realisation. ‘Wait a minute! Are you telling me that Adrian was the grass?’