Dale raised his eyebrows and shook his head. ‘I don’t think I could do what you do. I just haven’t got the bottle. I guess you’ve got the natural instinct for it though.’

She felt pride in her abilities well up inside her, vindicating her choice of career. The kudos from colleagues was one of the main reasons people worked undercover.

‘Frank told me you got a commendation for the last job,’ he continued. ‘Where was that?’

‘In a women’s prison.’

‘Well, I’m glad to hear it turned out well.’

‘If only they all did,’ she muttered, rubbing reflexively at the scar on her face.

She saw him register her movements with a tiny probing twitch of his eyes. She self-consciously brushed her loose lock of hair back down over her scar.

‘Anyhow,’ he said. ‘What I also wanted to say was, seeing as we’ll be working closely together on this job, why don’t we catch up for a drink soon? Get to know each other a little better.’

He suddenly looked a little uncertain as he awaited her response, almost shy, and it occurred to her that perhaps he wasn’t quite as arrogant and self-assured as she’d first assumed.

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Why not.’

There was a ‘ping’ as the lift arrived. She stepped inside and turned around to wave goodbye to his smiling face as the doors closed on him.

As the lift descended to the ground floor, Bailey realised with some surprise that he’d just asked her out on a date. Or had he? It had been so long since she’d been on one that she’d forgotten what it felt like to be asked.

No. Surely not. Not with her scars. Why would he want to do that?

6

Two days into January and Bailey found herself on the tenth floor of a tower block looking out over the cluttered sprawl of East London beneath the grey chill of an overcast sky.

She turned away from the floor-to-ceiling window to face back into the apartment she’d just entered.

It was a new-build flat in Stratford, situated on one of the upper floors of a shiny tower block that had been thrown up in the wake of the 2012 Olympics when the whole area had undergone a regeneration of sorts. Fairly spacious for a one-bedroom apartment, it possessed generous windows and questionable taste in interior design, and it was reserved especially for the use of undercover police officers, but it also occasionally functioned as a safe house when the need arose.

With the more lightweight undercover jobs, Bailey would just return to her own flat at the end of the day, but for an operation like this it would be necessary for her to live a deep-cover lifestyle twenty-four hours a day. An organisation like the Molloys was likely to have good surveillance and it would be too risky for her to go back to her own place with the possibility that someone might be following her.

‘I have to say, I prefer South London,’ she said to Frank, who’d just let her in and was showing her around. ‘But this flat does have a good view though.’