For someone as paranoid as he was about being under surveillance, this was an ideal place to conduct illicit business. There were no buildings out here for the police to hide in and take photos, and any other vehicle could be spotted miles away.

That meant, of course, that Bailey, as an undercover police officer, was particularly vulnerable. When she’d informed Frank about this meeting, he’d offered her the services of a back-up team tailing her covertly at a distance to ensure her safety, but she’d refused. For one thing, savvy criminals could spot police surveillance if they knew what to look for, and if her cover was blown because her back-up team didn’t keep a low enough profile, then she could suddenly find herself in a position of very real danger. Ironically then, it was often safer to operate completely alone in order to preclude those sorts of risks. All the same, in truth, being out here unprotected from potential peril did induce in her an undeniable sense of unease.

‘What kind of things do you keep on your farm?’ she asked in a tone of mild interest.

‘Pigs mostly.’

‘Pigs, huh?’

Rick gave her a cadaverous smile. Bailey knew pigs were a not uncommon way to dispose of bodies in the underworld. She wondered with a chill just how many of Molloys’ victims had ended up as pig food.

‘We make sausages,’ he added. ‘Which we sell to selected retail outlets. One of our more legitimate business ventures.’

‘Of course,’ she smiled nervously. ‘So what’s the plan for today then?’

‘We’re going shooting. Pheasants. It’s almost the end of pheasant season, so we thought we’d have one last crack at them.’

She shrugged agreeably. That seemed reasonable enough, not that she’d ever hunted game birds before. She supposed this was the sort of thing you did for leisure if you came from these parts and had lots of money. And if you were like them, it didn’t matter that it was a Thursday, because they didn’t subscribe to the nine-to-five routine that most people were slave to. They could do whatever they wanted whenever they wanted.

Rick beckoned Shane over. Dressed in much the same way as Rick, Shane was holding two shotguns, also broken open. He handed one to Bailey, but she shook her head.

‘Er… I think I’ll just watch.’

‘Not shooting?’ said Rick, looking faintly disappointed.

‘I’m probably more of a liability than anything else.’

Bailey’s experience with guns was extremely limited. The last time she’d fired any kind of weapon, it had been an air rifle at the funfair in Bexleyheath when she was fifteen years old with her boyfriend at the time, Neville. They had won a teddy bear though.

As an undercover police officer, firearms training was by no means mandatory, or even necessary, because, at the heart of it, undercover work was more about subtle human interaction and the art of infiltration. When it came to needing to shoot people, Bailey preferred to leave that kind of thing to the strike teams who swooped during the final stages of an operation. Ultimately, she’d never particularly liked guns or the idea of having to kill people. It was an ethos that had served her well so far and she wasn’t inclined to depart from it any time soon.