‘You mean they’re just going to brush it under the carpet?’ she said incredulously. ‘This is a murder we’re talking about! A car bomb!’

‘Look at it from our perspective, Bailey. All we have linking this sex tape and Mister Snigiss to this murder is the say-so of a homeless bloke and the testimony of some poor bastard being tortured in a gangland interrogation… and as we all know, people will say anything under that kind of duress.’

His last point was one that she was painfully well aware of.

‘Where is this Marcus bloke anyway?’ said Frank. ‘Has anyone seen him since the interrogation?’

Bailey frowned. She had no idea what the Molloys had done with Marcus after the interrogation, but she didn’t rate his chances of survival very highly.

‘We’ll probably find him floating face down in a canal in a few days’ time,’ said Frank, ‘Or, knowing the Molloys, we’ll probably never find him at all.’

Bailey swallowed and blinked, still trapped in a state of shocked disbelief that the powers-that-be could show such monstrous self-interest at the expense of the truth.

‘But covering this up won’t put Ballantyne in the clear,’ she said. ‘Okay, so Adrian and Tiffany aren’t around any more to go to the media. And Marcus is very possibly dead. But Mister Snigiss is still out there and if you were listening to what I just told you, the whole point of that sexual liaison in the first place was so that he could film Ballantyne with two hookers and use that footage to secretly exert influence over him. I mean, Jesus, if Ballantyne does get elected as Mayor, then there’s a good chance he might even end up as Prime Minister one day. Do you really want Mister Snigiss to be able to secretly control not just the potential Mayor of London, but possibly even the future Prime Minister of England?’

She paused for breath. Frank and Dale stared at her in silence, momentarily stunned by her outburst.

‘We have to find Mister Snigiss,’ she continued. ‘If not to solve Adrian’s murder then at least to stop him getting his claws into our political system.’

Frank gave her a sympathetic, almost sad look. ‘Bailey, as I recall, the reason you’ve been looking for this Mister Snigiss is because of your sister. You’re doing this for personal reasons. And that’s never a good idea with undercover operations.’

Bailey chewed her lip in frustration. He was completely right of course, not that it altered her desire to follow through with this.

‘The top brass might be able to shut down the murder investigation,’ she said, ‘but they can’t shut down the Molloys. I know Nancy Molloy. She won’t give up until she finds the person who killed her son, and as far as she’s concerned that person is Mister Snigiss. And when she finds him, she’ll kill him. More specifically, she’ll drill a hole through his head with a power tool. And if she does that, I’ll never find out what happened to Jennifer.’