She stifled a sob. He squeezed her hand gently again.

‘But for the time being,’ he said, ‘they’re going to keep me here in hospital while they tinker with the dosages of the drugs that they’re giving me.’ He nodded up at a device standing next to his bed. It was a box fixed atop a stand with a tube feeding from it into his upper arm.

Trying to process everything that her father had just told her, Bailey remembered then that it was only the sixth of January. If he’d just had the tests the previous week, that meant he must have had some inkling that something was wrong with him over Christmas.

She felt guilt start to well up inside her. During that argument they’d had over Christmas, the cancer had been growing inside him, its poisonous tentacles silently spreading through his body, dragging him away from her.

‘I’m sorry, Dad,’ she blurted, tears now running openly down her face.

He frowned and looked surprised. ‘Sorry? Why?’

‘For arguing with you.’

He shrugged it away with a smile. He handed her a tissue from the box on his bedside table. ‘Let’s not worry about that now. Let’s think about happier times. While we still can, eh?’

And so they tried to talk about the old days, avoiding for the time being the subject of Jennifer, and instead harking back to the more innocent halcyon times before her disappearance. Holidays they’d spent together. Bailey’s childhood. The little memories. The ones that mattered. They talked and they even laughed. And before Bailey knew it, several hours had passed and eventually, reluctantly, she stood up to leave.

Outside, it was completely dark overhead. It was almost five thirty in the evening and the sun had set over an hour before. As she walked through the hospital car park, the thought of how little time her father had left brought tears to her eyes once more. She felt like she hadn’t spent nearly enough time with him, and what time she had spent, she had mostly spent arguing with him about Jennifer.

Bailey realised that she herself now had some important decisions to make. Should she quit this new undercover job right now so she could spend more time with her father before he died?

11

Bailey spent the next morning in the gym on the ground floor of the Stratford apartment block, trying to work off some of the emotional tension that was burdening her around her father and what she should do next.

After the gym, she came back up to the flat, took a shower, ate lunch, and was now sitting on the sofa holding her undercover phone in her hand, locked in a debate with herself about what would be the best thing to do.

She had Rick’s number here and she could call him right now and kick off the operation immediately, but she knew that once she embarked on that course of action, there would be no turning back.