‘You’re a dirty liar,’ he hissed, ‘and you’re going to get your comeuppance.’

Nancy stroked his hair. ‘Come now, Stephen. Calm down. The poor girl is going to be dead quite soon. We should let her come to terms with it.’

Rick leaned forward and plucked the warrant card off the plate.

‘I suppose you’re wondering how we got hold of this. Although it must be pretty obvious by now.’ He smiled at her. ‘I get the impression that you two were almost an item.’

Dale, conspicuous by his absence, returned once more to Bailey’s consciousness with a sting of anguish.

‘Normally it’s such a challenge to find a plod to corrupt,’ continued Rick. ‘You’ve got to find a weakness, like a gambling addiction, or a drug addiction, or some kind of embarrassing sexual proclivity to blackmail them with. Or else you can just try and buy them… because everyone has their price.’ He paused. ‘But it’s a process fraught with risks and difficulty. You just have to be so careful these days.

‘But your gentleman friend, he just turned up on my doorstep yesterday afternoon. Out of the blue. Very entrepreneurial of him. Normally I wouldn’t have given him the time of day. I would have been way too suspicious. But when he promised me this warrant card, I knew he meant business.’

Bailey felt like she was going to throw up. Hearing it directly from Rick’s mouth unequivocally destroyed any last vestige of hope that Dale was not the agent of her betrayal.

How could she have misjudged him so seriously? How could she have been so blind? And, more to the point, what had driven him to do such an awful thing? The questions pummelled her remorselessly.

‘Shame about those guns,’ said Rick. ‘I was so pleased to have found a buyer… and you turn out to be the bloody Filth.’ He paused philosophically. ‘Still, it’s not going to stop me from selling them. I’m too far down the road not to. Luckily for me though, your bent-copper friend said he already knew a few people who might be interested. Genuine criminals.’

A heavy nausea suffused Bailey at the thought of all those guns flooding the streets with Dale’s connivance.

‘Now, normally,’ Nancy intervened, ‘we’d just kill you straight away because you’re Old Bill. That’s just par for the course. As I’m sure you understand. However…’ She paused, her eyes narrowing slyly. ‘… Your fella told us something very interesting. He told us that you’ve been looking for Mister Snigiss too. Something to do with your missing sister, who apparently, according to him, is actually still alive…’

On top of everything else, a deeply worrisome feeling now gripped Bailey. If things were already bad, they had just got even worse.

‘Fancy that?’ said Nancy. ‘All along, we’ve both been looking for Mister Snigiss. And you know what?’ The thin smile on her face blossomed into a horrible grin. ‘Your fella told us that you’ve actually met Mister Snigiss, that you know who he is… and that you can positively identify him.’