With a start, Bailey realised she didn’t recognise where she was. The bed felt odd. The shape of the room was different. Then, as her disorientation began to evaporate, she remembered she was in her new apartment. Her undercover apartment. Her tension started to subside a little.

It was dark outside beyond the blinds. She leaned over and pressed the button on her phone on the bedside table. The illuminated screen told her it was three thirty in the morning.

It had just been a dream. A nightmare. But it had seemed so real. It always did. She’d had it so many times, but it never got stale. The horror was always as fresh and visceral as it had been the first time. She might have a new identity, but she still couldn’t get rid of the nightmares from the old ones. Still she awoke in the middle of the night skewered by the savage memory of that botched job that had gone so terribly wrong, leaving her scarred for life both inside and out.

She’d been working undercover to catch a gang of professional car thieves when her cover had been blown. They’d left her to the mercies of a gangland torturer who’d taken his sweet time and enjoyment to make her give up the name of the informant who’d infiltrated her into their group.

Spyros.

But she hadn’t given up the name. Despite the razor slicing her face, neck, breasts, belly. Despite the red-hot cigarette burning its way through the layers of her skin. Despite the sexual violations that had been inflicted upon her.

Her torturer’s face was etched into her memory, leering as he desecrated her flesh in every way. She would catch up with him one day. She would punish him for what he’d done to her. But her attempts to track him down had so far proved fruitless. She didn’t know his name and had failed to dig out even the smallest piece of information about him – he was too professional, too anonymous, and probably long gone now, vanished back into the darkness from whence he’d emerged.

Now she just screamed the name of the informant every night in her dreams to try and make them stop. To give her torturer what he wanted. But it didn’t work. It never worked.

She’d known for a while now that she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. On the last undercover job, when she’d been incarcerated at HMP Foxbrook, the prison psychologist, Doctor Bodie, had diagnosed her as such. He might not have known who she was in terms of her true identity, but he definitely knew what she was – a woman with severe emotional damage.

When she wasn’t on an undercover job, she was required to attend periodic appointments with the police psychologist. Bailey hadn’t found her to be of much help however. She just found it too hard to open up. But she knew if she didn’t turn up to the meetings, or if the psychologist found her to be mentally unfit, then she would be withdrawn from doing undercover work and Bailey couldn’t afford to let that happen because undercover was what she lived for. So she exercised her skills in deception to maintain a convincing appearance of good mental health.