‘But you did, didn’t you?’ said Bailey.

Dale nodded. ‘To satisfy my own curiosity. So I checked the Police National Database but—’

‘The name threw up nothing,’ she said, interrupting him.

‘You’ve already checked?’

Bailey nodded slowly.

A heavy silence descended over them.

Dale looked at Bailey in concern.

‘You really do look like you’ve seen a ghost, Bailey. I’m worried that I’ve spooked you.’

Bailey was indeed spooked. More than she’d been in a very long time. For so many years she’d been confident that her father had been chasing nothing more than a phantom of his paranoid guilt-riddled imagination. But now she wasn’t so sure.

‘Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned it,’ said Dale.

‘I think I need another glass of wine,’ said Bailey.

Dale sighed. ‘Anyhow, I’ve already passed the name onto the murder investigation team on the off-chance this Mister Snigiss might have some involvement.’

Bailey blinked and frowned in confusion. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Remember you asked if I thought one of Adrian’s schemes might have backfired on him and that was the reason he got blown up? Well, if Mister Snigiss is connected to one of Adrian’s schemes, then that makes him a potential suspect in the car bomb.’

Bailey nodded and swallowed, still trying to take it all on board. ‘So has it led to anything?’

Dale shook his head. ‘Nothing so far. The whole murder investigation has basically hit a dead end. But I’ll let you know if anything changes.’

For Bailey, though, everything already had changed.

30

Later that night, Bailey sat alone on the sofa in her apartment, locked in a stupefied trance, staring out of the large windows at the glittering lights of the city beyond.

Her evening with Dale had eventually petered out into long, pensive silences on her part as she’d wrestled with what he’d told her. Despite his attempts to talk about other things, she couldn’t shake it from her mind. Eventually they’d parted ways stiltedly, and now she was sitting here unable to sleep, her mind churning ceaselessly in a furious tangle of speculation.

Mister Snigiss.

The revelation had stripped her raw on the inside, shattering her emotionally. The name she’d repeatedly dismissed for all these years had now returned with a vengeance, resonating right through to the very core of her being.

Could this really be the same Mister Snigiss? Had Mister Snigiss been more than just an invisible friend? Had he really been responsible for Jennifer’s abduction?

In the light of what Dale had told her, it all now seemed to make a horrible sense. It had always been Bailey’s notion that Jennifer had been swallowed into some dark, sordid world of sexual exploitation, never to re-emerge. But now she knew there was someone called Mister Snigiss in that world, it only served to confirm those unpleasant suspicions.

At first, it had seemed unbelievable that she should encounter, here, on one of her very own undercover police operations, the very same Mister Snigiss from her childhood. But then the more she thought about it, the more likely it seemed that sooner or later their paths would cross, for he was a criminal and she was a policewoman, and the world, perhaps, wasn’t such a big place.