“We met a couple of times. My fella’s a journalist. Bad business.”

“You’re not kidding,” another said with feeling. “Now, if you’d said it was Mrs. M. that took a bread knife to him, I wouldn’t have been half as surprised. But dying like that, a casual bystander in somebody else’s war, that’s seriously bad news.”

“You thought his wife had done it?” I asked, trying to keep my voice light and joky.

They all snorted with laughter. “Gail? get real,” Penpusher said scornfully. “Like Tez said, if it had been a bread-knife job, nobody would have been surprised. Them two fighting behind the bar’s the nearest thing you used to get to cabaret in here.

But rigging up a drum of cleaning stuff with cyanide? Nah, Gail’s too thick.“

“When Gail writes the daily specials up on the board, there’s more spelling mistakes than there are hot dinners,” another added. “She probably thinks cyanide’s a perfume by Elizabeth Taylor.”

“Must have been a hell of a shock, then. I guess it hit her hard,” I said.

The one I’d backed up gestured over his shoulder with his thumb toward the bar. “Looks like it, doesn’t it?”

I looked across. “Which one’s Gail? I never met her, just Joey.”

“The bottle blonde with the cleavage,” Penpusher said.

I didn’t have to ask for more details. Gail Morton’s tumbled blond mane looked as natural as candy floss, and the bra under her tight V-necked T-shirt didn’t so much lift and separate as point and aim. As I looked, she served a customer with a laugh that revealed perfect teeth and healthy tonsils. “A bit of a merry widow,” I remarked.

“Widow’s weeds up until the funeral, then back to normal.”

I began to wonder if my eager inquiries down the line of industrial sabotage had shunted Jackson off the right track. After all, it’s one of the great truisms that when wives or husbands die of unnatural causes, the prime suspect is the spouse. I was going to have to eat more than my usual portion of humble pie with Jackson if Gail Morton turned out to be Joey’s killer. But that didn’t explain why Mary Halloran had died. Time to go and pick some more brains.

I made my excuses and left. I headed east out of Stockport, and soon I was on the edge of the Pennine moors. About a mile before I hit Charlesworth village, I turned right on to a narrow road whose blacktop had been laid so recently it still gleamed in my headlights. The road climbed round the side of a hill and emerged in what had originally been a quarry. In the huge horseshoe carved out of the side of the hill stood ten beautiful stone houses, each individually designed by Chris.

For as long as I’d known them, Chris and Alexis had cherished the dream of building their own home, designed by Chris to their own specifications. They’d joined a self-build scheme a few years back, and, after a few hiccups, the dream had finally become a reality. Chris had swapped her architectural skills for things like plumbing, bricklaying, carpentry and wiring, while Alexis had served as everybody’s unskilled laborer. The site was perfect for people who get off on a spectacular view, looking out through a gap in the Pennines to the Cheshire plain. There isn’t a pub within three miles, the nearest decent restaurant is ten miles away, and if you run out of milk at half past nine at night, you’re drinking black coffee. Me, I’d rather live in a luggage locker at Piccadilly Station.

The house wasn’t quite ready to be inhabited yet. A small matter of connection to the main gas, electricity, telephone and sewage systems. So for the time being, Alexis and Chris were living in an ugly little caravan parked in their drive. It must have been a bit like going out for dinner to the best restaurant in town with your jaw wired up.

The light was on in their van, so I knocked. Chris opened the door in her dressing gown, blond hair in a damp, tousled halo round her head. Seeing me, a broad grin split her face. “Kate!” she exclaimed, then made a point of leaning out and scanning the area beyond me. “And you made it without a team of native bearers and Sherpa guides.”

“Sarcasm doesn’t become you,” I muttered as I followed her into the claustrophobic’s nightmare. The caravan was a four-berth job which might conceivably have contained a family for a fortnight’s holiday. Right now, it was bursting at the seams with the worldly goods that Chris and Alexis simply couldn’t do without. Once they’d packed in their work clothes, their casual clothes, a couple of shelves of books, a portable CD player with the accompanying music library, two wine racks, a drawing board for Chris and the files Alexis deemed too sensitive to trust to her office drawers, there wasn’t a lot of room left for bodies.

Alexis was sprawled on the double bed watching the TV news in a pair of plaster-and-paint-stained jogging pants and a ripped T-shirt, her unruly hair tied back in a ponytail with an elastic band. She greeted me with a languid wave and said, “Kettle’s just boiled. Help yourself.”

I made a cup of instant and joined the two of them on the bed. It wasn’t that we were planning an orgy; there just wasn’t anywhere else to sit. “So what brings you up here in the hours of darkness, girl?” Alexis asked languidly, leaning across me to switch off the TV. “You finally decided to tell me why you’ve been doing a Cook’s tour of the E.C.I”

“I bring greetings from civilization,” I told her. “Cliff Jackson’s just arrested two suspects in the Kerrchem product-tampering scam.”

I had all her attention now. Alexis pushed herself into an upright position. “Really? He charging them with the murders?”

“I don’t know. If he does, he’ll be making a mistake,” I said.

“So, spill,” Alexis urged.

I gave her the bare bones of the tale, knowing she wouldn’t be able to say much in the following day’s paper because of the reporting restrictions that swing into place as soon as suspects are charged with an offence. But the details would be filed away in Alexis’s prodigious memory, to be dragged out as deep background when the case finally came to court. And she wouldn’t forget where the information came from.

“And you believe them when they say they had nothing to do with the two deaths?” Chris chipped in.

“Actually, I do,” I said. “Breaks my heart to say so, but I don’t think the job’s finished yet, whatever Cliff Jackson decides to charge them with.”

Alexis lit a cigarette. Chris pointedly cracked the window open an inch and moved out of the draft. “I know, I know,” Alexis sighed. “But how can I possibly be a laborer without a fag hanging out of my mouth and a rolled-up copy of The Sun stuffed in my back pocket? Anyway, K.B., I suppose this means that you’re here for access to the Alexis Lee reference library?”

“You can see why she’s an investigative reporter, can’t you?” I said nonchalantly to Chris.

“So what do you want to know?” Alexis asked.

“Tell me about Joey Morton,” I said. First rule of murder investigation, according to all the detective novels I’ve read. Find out about the victim. Embarrassing that it had taken me so long to get there.

“Born and raised in Belfast. Came over here with a fanfare of trumpets that said he was going to be the next George Best. Unfortunately, the only thing Georgie and Joey had in common was their talent for pissing it all up against the wall. United took him on as an apprentice, but they didn’t keep him on, and he never made it past the Third Division. Gail believed the publicity when she married him. She was expecting the days of wine and roses, and she never forgave him for not making the big time. So she gave him the days of bitter and thorns. They fought like cat and dog. When we were living in the Heatons, we used to pop into the Cob and Pen occasionally for a drink and the spectator sport of watching Joey and Gail tear lumps out of each other.”

“So why didn’t she leave him?” I asked.