If she had a bad feeling about the meeting, Frank’s choice of venue only increased her misgivings. Although she’d walked past it many a time, she’d never actually been inside the Pig and Whistle. It just wasn’t her kind of place. It was a huge, brightly-lit sports pub with shiny fittings and a big TV screen on every wall blaring out the football highlights. She’d have much rather been in a dojo right now doing her jiu-jitsu grading, but she’d cancelled that to be here and it was too late to change her mind about it now.
She stood inside the doorway for a few moments and scanned the room from under the brim of her baseball cap, taking in the old men sitting by themselves staring vacantly at the football on the TV screens. She found the scene depressing and wondered why he’d chosen this pub when there were nicer and quieter places situated just as close to his office as this one.
Outwardly, it would have been hard to guess that she was a police detective, for she was just dressed casually in jeans and a suede-fringed cowboy jacket, her long brown hair tucked up under her cap, apart from the bit hanging down over the left side of her face.
The pub wasn’t particularly busy and it didn’t take her long to spot Frank sitting at a table in the far corner, his back to the wall, nursing a pint of lager. In his late forties, he had cropped red hair turning to grey and the kind of pasty countenance that made him look ill even when he wasn’t. With his grey suit and black Oxfords, he could have passed for some kind of sales rep sinking a pint after a business meeting in town. For him, Saturday was a workday, no different to any other. It was the nature of the work he did, and she knew just how committed he was to it.
He’d already noticed her and was watching her with a thin smile on his face, dashing any notion she might have had of turning around and leaving. She walked over to his table. He stood up and they engaged in a perfunctory and slightly awkward embrace. She put her bag down and sat in the chair opposite him.
His smile, just as she remembered, was purely a permutation of the muscles around his mouth. It didn’t extend upwards to the rest of his face. His pale blue eyes were, as ever, dead, watery and penetrating.
‘Vodka and blackcurrant?’ he said.
‘You’ve got a good memory.’
‘It’s only been six months.’
She watched him as he went to the bar to get her a drink, his profile illuminated by the blue light of the TV screens. Although his cold-fish demeanour could put a lot of people off, she felt a measure of affection for him as her former mentor. She’d learnt a lot from him, not least that you often had to think like an outlaw in order to catch one.
He came back from the bar and placed the drink down in front of her.
‘How’s the job?’ he asked.
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Working towards my sergeant’s exams.’
‘You’ve got rings under your eyes.’
‘I don’t sleep so well these days.’
‘I hear warm milk before bed is good for you.’
‘I’ve tried everything.’
He nodded slowly and looked away.
They filled up the minutes with small talk, him asking her questions but seemingly only half-interested in her responses, his eyes flickering around the pub all the while.
She waited until they reached a natural pause in the conversation and raised her eyebrows at him expectantly. ‘You were never one for casual chit-chat, Frank, so let’s get to the point.’
He nodded slowly. ‘I have some bad news for you. I thought it better to tell you in person.’
‘I knew there was something wrong.’
‘Alice is dead.’
A dagger of shock knifed through her. ‘Alice Simms?’
‘I know you two were quite close.’
She blinked and nodded stiffly. She felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. An unsolicited flood of memories and emotions threatened to overwhelm her. She bit them back. She didn’t want to appear weak in front of Frank. She didn’t want to break down in public and certainly not in a place like this.
Taking a deep breath, she steadied herself.
‘We did undercover training together and you know how tough that is. We became really good mates.’
‘I’m sorry to be the one who had to break it to you.’
‘You could have chosen a slightly nicer place to do it in.’
He shrugged apologetically.
Alice had been one of Bailey’s closest friends when she had been working undercover. The bond they had forged whilst operating in such a challenging environment had been particularly strong. They’d first met on the undercover training course and their friendship had rapidly grown beyond work to the point where they’d ended up sharing a flat together, an arrangement that had ceased when Bailey had quit that line of work. To hear that Alice was now dead left Bailey stunned.
‘What happened?’ she whispered.
‘She was murdered last week. In the line of duty.’
‘Doing what exactly?’
He glanced around. The TV screens blared. They were showing a replay of a penalty, the ball hitting the back of the net again and again from various angles. No one appeared to be paying the slightest bit of interest in them. She realised now that Frank had chosen this pub because it was big enough and noisy enough for them to chat without anyone overhearing.
He turned back to face her and lowered his voice slightly. ‘She was working undercover in a women’s prison. She was going under the name of Alice Jenkins.’
Bailey raised her eyebrows in surprise. ‘A prison? I’ve worked in some pretty dicey places but never anything quite like that. Which one was she in?’
‘HMP Foxbrook. Know it?’
She nodded. ‘I’ve driven past it a few times. Big old Victorian place. Public sector. It’s pretty grim-looking, like something out of Dickens.’
‘She’d gone undercover there to investigate a drugs ring. It’s a very lucrative business, selling drugs in prison. It’s a captive market. Quite literally.’
‘Someone found out she was a cop?’
The very prospect of it filled her with horror. She could envisage all too clearly the reaction of a mob of prisoners suddenly discovering a copper in their midst.
‘She was deep cover. Not even the prison authorities knew she was a police officer. And they still don’t. And we want to keep it that way for the time being.’
‘So what happened?’
‘We don’t know, but it’s quite possible her cover got blown somehow. Maybe she slipped up in some way. But it’s proving very hard to get to the bottom of it. The inmates are being extremely uncooperative, not surprisingly, and the staff aren’t much better.’
‘Forensics?’
He shook his head. ‘Nothing of any specific value. And in the context of a closed environment like a prison, there’s too much cross-contamination for DNA analysis to be reliable.’
Bailey shook her head. ‘I can’t believe it. Alice was good. She was always top of the class. I’m really surprised that something like this happened to her.’
‘It seems she underestimated what she was up against. It was pretty brutal what they did to her. Her body was found in the prison laundry. She’d had her throat cut…’ he hesitated for a moment, ‘…and she’d been scalped.’
Bailey sat there numbly absorbing what he was telling her. She finished her drink and placed the glass back on the table. She regretted not asking for a double.
‘What about CCTV?’ she said hoarsely. ‘Surely that must have caught something.’
He shook his head. ‘No cameras in the laundry. It’s not considered to be a “high-risk” area. That’s probably the reason why they chose to do it there.’
‘They…?’ she echoed.
He shrugged, opening his palms, welcoming an answer to her question.
‘You want me to come back and work for you, don’t you?’ she said.
But it wasn’t really a question because she’d known that this had been the whole point of the meeting all along.
‘I want to find out what happened to her. I’m certain she was onto something and I’m pretty sure that was the reason she was killed. I want to know what she found out.’
He fixed her with his watery, penetrating gaze.
‘Are you ready to come back, Bailey?’