Misinterpreting the frown on her face, he smiled and said, ‘Don’t worry, the drinks are on me. I know this place isn’t cheap.’

She blinked away her preoccupations. ‘It’s fine. I don’t mind paying my way.’

Whether or not this was actually a date or just an informal work catch-up, both of them had clearly made the effort to look good. Not normally a fan of make-up, Bailey had stretched to a dash of lip gloss and a bit of eyeliner, and she’d decided to forego the baseball cap she normally liked to wear when she dressed casually.

Dale’s striking blue eyes flickered curiously over the scars on her face and neck, his interest more overt now that he’d had a drink to lessen his inhibitions. He didn’t appear to be repulsed by them, however, much to her relief, and she felt flattered for that reason, but at the same time she also still felt deeply insecure about her disfigurement, particularly because she found herself attracted to him.

She brushed her loose lock of hair down further over the scar on her face and tried to divert his attention onto something else.

‘So how did you get into working with informants?’ she asked.

He pursed his lips as he thought about it. ‘Well, working as a detective, I found I had quite a knack for getting confessions out of people. And from there it was a logical progression into recruiting informants.’

‘It must be quite challenging work.’

‘It can be. Yes. As I’m sure you probably know from your own experience, informants can be pretty unreliable people and they’ve almost always got some self-serving agenda of their own.’

‘You mean they don’t do it because they care about justice?’ said Bailey sarcastically.

Dale smiled. ‘Adrian was no different to the rest of them, although perhaps his motives were a little more personal. He was quite a flamboyant and reckless person. Liked to flash wads of cash around, liked to race high-performance cars, talked himself up endlessly, had a gigantic ego, and took a lot of cocaine. All in all, not a great recipe for a reliable source of information. But you’ve got to work with what you’ve got.’

‘Sounds like he’s delivered the goods though,’ she said, thinking about the information Adrian had provided on the ecstasy and the guns.

‘Yeah,’ conceded Dale, ‘although I found I had to turn a bit of a blind eye now and then.’

‘He had other schemes running?’

‘These people always do, and sometimes they really take the piss. I was very clear with him at the beginning on the rules. The deal was that he could only participate in a crime if his role was minor and he didn’t engage in any of the planning or committing of it; and I told him he had to keep me, as his handler, fully informed about everything he was doing. I said if I found out he was involved in any crimes he wasn’t telling me about, then he’d be liable for arrest and prosecution.