‘We did a bit of business together in the past,’ replied Bailey.

‘Business?!’ exclaimed the baby-faced one, with a look on his face like she’d personally insulted him. ‘What kind of business?’

With some insight from Dale into the sorts of things Adrian had been involved in, Bailey had come up with what she hoped was a suitable explanation.

‘I got chatting to him at a party one time. Told him I had a few keys of coke I wanted to offload. He helped me out. Then he told me all about these guns. And here I am.’

They glanced at one another. With Adrian dead, they knew they wouldn’t be able to verify her story. Obviously, if Adrian was alive, he’d be here and he’d be able to vouch for her, but all they had to go on were her words, and she could see they were wary.

‘Adrian never got round to telling me who you were exactly,’ said Rick. ‘Unfortunately he was blown up before he had the chance to. I guess you probably saw it on the news.’

She wondered if she should commiserate about Adrian’s death. It was hard to tell how they felt about it; their expressions were closed with no overt indication of grief. They were all dressed in blacks and dark colours which might have been because they were in mourning for Adrian, or it might just have been because that was the way they dressed normally.

‘I was sorry to hear about what happened to him,’ she said. ‘I was hoping we’d get to do a bit more work together.’

They observed her aloofly, maybe even suspiciously. Nancy’s eyes in particular seemed to drill into her with a glacial intensity. But if they were jumpy about one of their own being murdered, they did a good job of hiding it.

Rick spoke. ‘Well, just because Adrian happened to think you were all right, that doesn’t mean we’re automatically going to trust you.’

‘What other business have you done?’ demanded the baby-faced one.

One thing Bailey had learnt working undercover was that if you started doling out your cover story unprompted, it was an instant red flag that you were a copper. No criminal worth their salt would ever readily give up details of their illicit undertakings without at least a little inducement.

‘I do a bit of this and that, here and there,’ she said, remaining intentionally vague in order to intimate that her activities didn’t necessarily reside on the proper side of the law.

‘This and that?’ sneered the baby-faced one incredulously. ‘Here and there?’

‘Yeah,’ shrugged Bailey defiantly. ‘You know. Stuff.’

‘Stuff?!’ His voice rose an octave. His eyes widened even further and he shook his head in disbelief, throwing a glance over his shoulder at Nancy and Rick, but their faces, as always, remained unreadable.

He might have sounded pissed off, but inside Bailey was secretly pleased. Her reverse psychology seemed to be working. They were virtually begging to hear her justify herself.