‘You want to buy all these guns from us and you don’t like shooting?’ said Shane, arching his eyebrows sceptically.

‘Guns are just a commodity to me,’ Bailey replied. ‘Just something to shift to make cash.’

‘Can’t argue with that,’ said Rick. He was a businessman. He knew the score.

The shoot commenced with the beaters driving the birds out of the bushes. Moments later, they tumbled from the sky, the sound of shots echoing across the flat, open landscape.

Bailey observed the shooters from a safe distance behind. The key members of the Molloy family were present, along with an assortment of other employees and associates. Nancy, dressed in a long tartan skirt, Barbour jacket and flat cap, enthusiastically plugged away at the flapping pheasants; Archie coolly and methodically blew them from the air one by one; Stephen, with his short little arms, struggled to manoeuvre the large shotgun but still managed to hit a decent number of birds. Bailey noticed that Rick was an excellent shot, not missing a single pheasant he aimed at. She saw Wendy standing off to one side, looking bored, not shooting either, idly checking her mobile phone from time to time.

Bailey wondered when Rick would give her the sample, but she didn’t want to push him. She could see they wanted to make a day of it and she imagined he’d get around to it in his own time. At any rate, this was also a social invitation of sorts and she got the feeling this was their way of gauging her a little more.

However, with all these shotguns around, it had occurred to her that an ‘accident’ could happen very easily. But she quickly expelled the disturbing thought from her mind. They wouldn’t try something so clumsy. If they suspected she was a cop and they wanted to kill her, then it would be something the authorities wouldn’t be able to investigate quite so easily.

As they walked across the fields in pursuit of further game, Bailey caught Stephen watching her distrustfully. In fact, it seemed that every time she glanced in his direction, his little round eyes were glaring at her. Did he genuinely smell a rat or was he just naturally suspicious? The more concerned she got that he’d sussed her, the more she met his gaze, and the more she did that, the more suspect she realised she must have looked.

She forced herself to try and ignore him, and it was thus almost a relief when Nancy fell into step beside her, distracting her from her anxious thoughts. Nancy’s shotgun was nestled in her elbow and she had an unlit cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth. She opened her Dupont lighter with its distinctive ‘cling’, this time actually sparking the flame to light the cigarette.

Nancy was small, shorter than Bailey, who herself was only five foot six. Women grew smaller as they got older, as Bailey had noted with her own mother, who it seemed would eventually shrink out of existence altogether at some point. However, in Nancy’s case, Bailey got the sense that as her size decreased with age, so her intrinsic malevolence increased, growing ever more potent and distilled.