He took a deep breath to speak. She leaned forward in anticipation.

‘Well…’ he said. ‘When he was alive, Adrian was always trying to tap me up for information, stuff that was probably connected to schemes that he was secretly running on the side. You have to be careful when you’re running informants that they don’t end up running you. They’re crafty sods. Instead of you getting information out of them, it’s them getting information out of you. The balance can easily tip the other way. That’s what these people are like.’

Bailey nodded. She understood only too well how the criminal mind operated, with its innate deviousness and cunning.

He paused and took another deep breath.

‘Anyhow, it was a few days before Adrian got blown up that I met up with him and he asked me if I could “look into” someone for him. Now, what that usually means is that he’s got some rival, or someone he’s looking to screw over, and he wants to know details of their criminal record, convictions, known associates, and so on, to give him some kind of advantage. So this bloke he wanted me to look into… well, he implied that he was some kind of pimp, or at least operating in that general milieu. Made out like this guy was a fairly serious player. He gave me a name…’

Bailey felt the hairs on the back of her neck rising.

Dale stared at her with his unblinking bright blue eyes.

‘The name was Mister Snigiss,’ he said softly.

Bailey’s breath caught in her throat and a powerful shiver went through her. She felt as if someone had walked over her grave.

It couldn’t be. Surely not.

‘Mister Snigiss?’ she whispered. ‘Are you sure?’

Dale nodded. ‘Adrian did refer to him as exactly that – “Mister Snigiss”. Not “Snigiss”, but “Mister Snigiss”. No Christian name. Just “Mister”.’ He raised his palms. ‘But then it could just be a coincidence.’

Bailey found that she was shaking her head. She’d never been a big one for coincidences. Snigiss was an odd enough name as it was, but the precise appellation of ‘Mister Snigiss’ took it beyond what in her eyes could be considered a coincidence.

She blinked as she tried to grasp the ramifications of Dale’s revelation, that Mister Snigiss wasn’t a figment of Jennifer’s childhood imagination, that, God forbid, her father had actually been right in his assumptions all along…

‘I assumed that this Mister Snigiss character was connected to one of Adrian’s schemes,’ Dale was saying. ‘I figured that perhaps Adrian was trying to get into prostitution or sex trafficking or something like that. I asked him why he wanted to know about Mister Snigiss, but he was extremely cagey. I warned him he wasn’t supposed to be involved in any kind of criminal enterprise that he hadn’t told me about, and that he’d be liable for prosecution if he was. I told him that I didn’t know the name… because I didn’t. And I refused to check it out for him.’