‘I’ll kill whoever gets in my way.’

‘You’re not going to be doing much of anything any more,’ said Nancy. She laid a hard kick into Jennifer’s stomach with the tip of her black leather boot.

Jennifer gasped, winded.

‘Not so tough now, are we, Mister Snigiss?’ Nancy spat the name sarcastically.

The whole group of them stood over Jennifer, watching her contort on the cold rough concrete as she struggled to regain her breath.

‘What are we waiting for?’ said Shane. ‘Why don’t we just kill her now? I’ve got the drill right here.’

He held up the Black and Decker case he’d been clutching in his right hand.

Nancy shook her head with a nasty grimace. ‘Not yet. I’m waiting for Bailey to get here. I want to see the look on her face as that ten-millimetre drill bit makes mincemeat of her sister’s brains.’

‘Are you really sure she’ll come?’ asked Rick.

‘Of course she will,’ said Nancy. ‘I know how important family is to her. She might have been lying to us about everything else, but that’s one of the few things she was telling the truth about.’

80

Peering ahead determinedly from beneath the brim of her baseball cap, Bailey gunned the BMW M3 down the fast lane of the A2 in the direction of Gravesend. She’d passed through South London and was now heading through the cold dark hinterlands of North Kent.

Tonight she was wearing her undercover outfit – the Hugo Boss jacket, straight-cut blue jeans, white collared man’s shirt and leather boots. Somehow it felt appropriate for the impending showdown.

After the call with Nancy had ended, Bailey had seriously contemplated the possibility of acquiring some kind of back-up despite the instructions she’d been given. But the more she’d thought about it, the more she’d realised that it just wasn’t going to be viable. Two hours just wasn’t enough time to contact the right people, justify the operation, get it signed off, gather the teams together, and brief them appropriately.

And what would she tell them exactly? They’d ask too many questions. She couldn’t use Jennifer as justification – someone who didn’t even exist as a proper person, who was part of a forbidden investigation. Bailey supposed she could have told them the guns would be there, but the problem there was that she didn’t know where exactly the Molloys were holding Jennifer on the building site, and it was likely a big place. The support team would be forced to take a blunt-force approach and storm in, but as soon as they breached the perimeter of the site, and probably before they even got that far, the Molloys would know they were there and then it would be too late for Jennifer.

Bailey knew the Molloys were expert at detecting surveillance and it wouldn’t surprise her if they had spotters all over Gravesend on the lookout for anything suspicious. All in all, there was just too much of a risk that they would kill Jennifer prematurely.