‘No one meets Mister Snigiss. No one! That’s the whole point. You never see him. No one sees him. I’ve never seen him. I’ve never even talked to him… not directly anyway.’

‘Mister Snigiss is in danger. Those other people who are looking for him. They’re out for revenge. There was a car bomb. Mister Snigiss was responsible.’

On hearing the words ‘car bomb’, Claudia blanched and swallowed.

‘You need to get out of my flat now,’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘I can’t talk to you about that.’

Bailey eyed Claudia closely. ‘Tiffany. She died in the car bomb. You knew her, didn’t you?’

Claudia now looked overtly distressed, her beautiful face suddenly sallow and drawn.

‘I said I can’t talk about it.’ She looked around fearfully. ‘Please leave.’

‘I saw the sex tape you made with Tiffany and that politician.’

Claudia’s jaw dropped. ‘How could you have seen that?’ she gasped.

‘Mister Snigiss murdered Tiffany because she made her own tape, didn’t he?’

‘Tiffany made a mistake,’ stammered Claudia. ‘She betrayed us. She paid the price. Mister Snigiss punished her.’

Bailey scrutinised Claudia with a detective’s eye, noting the microscopic quivering of the lower lip, the slight shaking of the head in self-denial.

‘You ratted on Tiffany, didn’t you?’ said Bailey. ‘That’s how Mister Snigiss found out about the tape she made. You knew about it and you told him.’

Claudia put her hand to her mouth, aghast, and Bailey knew she’d hit the nail on the head.

‘I had to,’ gasped Claudia. ‘I had to tell him. He would have punished me too otherwise. I didn’t know he was going to kill her though. I swear.’ Her face creased up with guilt and remorse and she looked like she was about to start crying.

‘How did you know about the tape?’ Bailey asked.

Claudia’s voice started to wobble. ‘Stop questioning me. I don’t want to talk about it. Just get out of here and leave me alone.’

‘Just tell me what happened and I’ll leave you in peace. I promise.’

Claudia stared at her in silence for a few long moments, then her shoulders sagged in defeat. ‘We’d just done a job. The two of us. Together. I had to make a call, but my phone had died, so I borrowed hers whilst she was in the shower. I knew her PIN because I’d borrowed it before. Anyway, I was just flicking around on her apps, and there was this video app. And that’s how I found the video she’d made. The one with the politician. I knew she shouldn’t have had it on her phone. We never normally see the videos that Mister Snigiss makes. Only he gets to see those. We don’t even know where he hides the cameras. We just meet who he tells us, do what they want, and that’s the end of it.’

She swallowed hard and continued. ‘When she came out of the shower, I confronted her about it. And she got all defensive. Then she pleaded with me not to tell Mister Snigiss. So I made her explain. She said she was sick of working as a hooker, wanted to make enough money to get out of it for good. So she thought she’d make her own video, make some of her own cash off these punters that Mister Snigiss was filming. They’re all rich, powerful, y’know. So she bought this little miniature camera, one of those that feeds back to an app on your phone. And she hid it in the room and made her own video. I mean, I understood where she was coming from with wanting to get out and everything, but I knew it was a bad move. You don’t cross someone like Mister Snigiss.’