‘What a gentleman you are,’ she spat sarcastically. ‘Thank you so much.’

‘Well… actually,’ he said with a suppressed glee in his voice, ‘I can’t not tell you really.’ He gave the lapel of his grey herringbone blazer jacket a self-congratulatory tweak. ‘The whole thing is almost beautiful in its conception.’

‘Beautiful?’ she sneered. ‘The explanation seems pretty simple to me. You’re a bent copper and that’s all there is to it.’ She eyed him with contempt. ‘You’re probably just doing it to pay for all that cosmetic surgery you’ve had. I knew something had changed about you since Hendon. For one thing, your teeth look a bit too white to me. I reckon they’re implants. And they cost a tidy packet, don’t they? And your ears, they definitely used to stick out more. You’ve had them pinned back, haven’t you? I bet that wasn’t cheap.’

He patted his ears self-consciously. A hurt angry look flickered across his face. But then, just as quickly, the smug smile returned.

‘Oh dear,’ he said, shaking his head condescendingly. ‘You really don’t get it, do you?’

She frowned, puzzled. What was he going on about?

‘You know, I had to pull a fair few strings to get you assigned to this operation. So much bloody red tape to go through. Luckily though I managed to convince Frank you were the one we needed.’

‘Get me assigned?’ she said, bewildered. ‘What do you mean? What are you talking about?’

‘It had to be you, Bailey. It always had to be you. Ever since you made it out of that scrapyard alive.’

Her eyes widened as it hit her with a gut-wrenching heave of realisation.

‘Oh my God,’ she gasped. ‘It was you! You’re the one who betrayed me to the car theft gang. You’re the one who blew my cover.’

He nodded very slowly, his bright blue eyes boring into her, a mocking smirk on his face. ‘Now she realises. You see why I had to come here and explain. It would almost have been unfair not to tell you.’

The devastation was complete. The room spun around her. She could barely breathe. His treachery was even more profound than she could have imagined. Her scars, the torture, the trauma, all those sleepless nights… it was all because of him.

‘You should have died in that scrapyard, Bailey.’ He shook his head, his face serious now. ‘I just couldn’t rest knowing that you were still alive, probably trying to work out who’d betrayed you. It was keeping me awake at night, you know. You have no idea how that kind of thing eats away at you. I knew you would discover me eventually. And if not you, Frank. He’d been sniffing around. Getting closer. Too close. So I knew I had to do something.’

‘I can’t believe it,’ whispered Bailey. ‘I just can’t believe it.’

‘That car theft ring had me on their books for several years, and they paid me very handsomely for information… about things like undercover cops, for example. Luckily I was careful to keep contact with them to a minimum, so when they went down, thanks to you, there was only one person among them who was able to identify me. But that was one too many, and the problem was that after he got caught, this bloke started threatening to give me up unless I got him off the hook. But I knew it was too late for that.’ He paused and smiled. ‘But you know what? Fate was on my side. This bloke had a congenital heart problem, you see. And all that stress of being caught meant he had to go to the hospital for an operation. And who should be the surgeon doing the operation, but a fellow Mason from my very own lodge who owed me a favour or two. Needless to say, the bloke died on the operating table.’ Dale absently twiddled the Masonic ring on his finger as he spoke. ‘But you were still out there alive, looking for me, you and Frank. And I had to do something about it.’