She kicked the heel of her boot morosely at the bumper of the lorry. Rick was going to get away with it again. Just like he would with those guns. She recalled with a rising bile that today was the day he was due to pick them up… wherever they were. She glanced at the date on her watch. It was Friday the eighth of March.

In her mind, she could visualise him there right now, overseeing the delivery of big piles of weapons, gloating in the knowledge that there was fuck all that anyone could do about it…

Staring out despondently at the river, she watched the big container boats chugging slowly to and from the port on the other side. She idly followed one with her gaze, a massive blue freighter with the name ‘Sirena’ painted in white letters high up on its bow.

She afforded herself a small glum smile. It seemed incongruous that such a big, heavy, masculine thing like that freighter should have such a feminine name, but then it occurred to her that boats were always given female names—

Her breath stopped in her throat as a bolt of insight hit her.

Kaia.

Wendy had talked about Rick meeting someone called Kaia in Torquay. She’d overheard him on the phone. And she’d seen it written in his diary… on Friday the eighth of March.

Bailey looked at her watch again just to double-check.

Today was indeed Friday the eighth of March.

Wendy had assumed Rick was spending a dirty weekend in Torquay with this woman, Kaia. But now that Bailey thought about it, the transaction she’d been planning with him had been due to take place on the ninth of March, the day afterwards… and would Rick really have been conducting the sale of a large quantity of firearms right in the middle of his dirty weekend?

He’d smugly told her that the guns were coming in, as planned, the day before he’d been due to sell them to her.

So as for what Wendy had heard him talking about on the phone, rather than boasting to his mates about a mistress, had he actually been talking business and referring to a boat that was carrying guns? Torquay did have a harbour, after all. And Bailey knew how Rick liked to camouflage his business talk over the phone. It would have been so easy for Wendy to misinterpret…

Bailey’s heart beat hard in excitement. She was sure of it now. The guns were coming into the UK today on a boat called Kaia and Torquay was the place where it was going to dock.

She looked at her watch again. It was still early. There might just be time.

Jumping to her feet, she hurriedly went in search of a phone to call her contact at the National Crime Agency.

85

Bailey sat by her father’s bedside in the hospice, her hand resting on his, watching his chest gently rise up and down. It was hard to tell if he was asleep or awake, his eyelids fluttering softly as he drifted in and out of consciousness. Her mother sat on the other side of the bed, a Bible in her hand as always, looking down at her dying husband with an expression of wistful affection on her drawn face.