In practice, before compulsory registration was introduced in the late sixties and seventies, a lot of properties still changed ownership on a handshake and the exchange of a fistful of title deeds for a fistful of readies. And, since those properties haven't changed hands again since then, they're still not registered. This doesn't just apply to farmland that's been in families for generations; there are whole chunks of rented terraced housing in Manchester where ownership has remained the same for thirty or forty years. In terms of the Registry, it just doesn't exist. Frankly, I think it'd be an enormous improvement if it didn't exist in reality either.

Anyway, when someone like Brian Lomax pitches a farmer like Harry Cartwright into selling him a chunk of land, all the paperwork goes off to the Land Registry. And I'm not talking pristine forms and word processor-generated contracts. I'm talking dirty bits of paper covered in spidery writing and sealing wax. When it got to the Land Registry, I now knew, it would go on the Day Listing and be given a provisional title number. When Lomax then split the land into plots and sold them, the buyers' solicitors would carry out searches with the Land Registry to see if Lomax really owned it, and the individual plots would be given a number. So far, all very straight.

What happened next was what had done the damage. Lomax had obviously sold the land twice over in short order. But for the scheme to work, there had to be a crooked solicitor handling the second, moody purchase of the land, a solicitor who wouldn't consult the Land Registry's Day Listing, a solicitor who would lie to his clients about the title to the land. And that solicitor was Martin Cheetham.

The problem, as I saw it, was that it was a lot of risk to take for so small a profit. When the people who had been ripped off realized what had happened, they'd be on to the Law Society with their complaints faster than a speeding bullet. Which might well mean the end of Martin Cheetham's career as a solicitor, and all for a half share of fifty grand. Unless… I had a horrible thought. What if they hadn't just sold the land twice, but had sold it three or four times over? What if there was a queue of punters who didn't even know yet that they'd been conned? After all, it was only by coincidence that Chris had happened upon the surveyors. If they hadn't been there, Chris, Alexis and all their self-build cronies probably would have handed over the rest of the cash. The mind boggled! I began to wonder if getting Alexis's money back was going to be quite so easy after all. If Lomax and Cheetham had any sense, they'd be planning to do a runner any day now before it all came on top.

And there was very little I could do about it. Apart from anything else, I had to sort out Ted Barlow's problem before he went bankrupt. I pulled into a Happy Eater and ordered a brunch of hash browns, omelette and beans while I studied the register entries for the seven properties which had lost their conservatories. I'd also taken the precaution of dropping by the office to pick up the stuff from Josh and from Rachel Lieberman. Taken together, an interesting picture began to emerge. Unfortunately, it was more like a Jackson Pollock than a David Hockney.

Firstly, all the houses in question had been rented from DKL. All the tenants in question shared their surname with the owners of the house. All the title deeds showed that there was a charge against the property. Unfortunately they didn't tell me how much, although the dates of these existing charges corresponded roughly to the dates the conservatories had been bought, and in all cases the charge was held by the finance company that was a subsidiary of Ted Barlow's bank. Surprise, surprise. Interestingly, Josh's searches had revealed that all the owners had good to excellent credit ratings, which explained why Ted's bank's finance company had been so ready to grant them the remortgages. What it didn't explain was how those remortgages came to be granted to someone other than the owner.

Somehow, the remortgages held the key. What I needed to find out fast was how big they were. If those charges were anything like you'd expect from a one hundred per cent remortgage, then things would begin to fall into place. Bearing in mind that each of the houses had been owned by its present owners for at least four years, then the houses had been bought for significantly less than they were now worth. Given that the mortgages had presumably been paid for at least four years, the amount now outstanding should be considerably less than the current value of the house. I wandered across to the phone-booth and dialled Josh. Luckily I got straight through.

'Just a quickie,' I said. 'How do I find out the amount outstanding on a mortgage?'

'You can't,' he said.

I was overcome with the desire to kick someone.

'Oh shit,' I moaned.

'But I probably can,' he added smugly.

Then I knew I wanted to kick someone, only he wasn't within range.

'As a finance broker I can ring up the charge holder and tell them I have a client who's looking to make a second loan against his property, can they tell me how much their outstanding charge is so that I can check whether there's enough equity left in the property. Is this to do with your conservatory scam?'

'Yes. It's slowly beginning to make sense,' I told him.

'I'll ask Julia to do it this afternoon,' he said.

I decided not to kick him after all. 'She's already got the names and addresses, hasn't she?'

I arranged to call back in the afternoon. I was still cross and frustrated because I didn't fully understand how the con was working. But I did have one thing going for me. Rachel Lieberman had given me the addresses of three other properties that fitted the bill. Looking at the dates on the previous sales that had turned into missing conservatories, the scammers seemed to work a production-line system. They were getting the loans through at the rate of about one a month, so, given that it can take up to three months for the money to come through from finance companies, they must have been working three properties at any given time, each at various stages of the operation. Dear God! They really were serious about this!

It was three weeks since the last one had gone down, so by my reckoning, we were due for another any day now. I had a good idea where, a rough idea when. And I had an excellent idea how to discover exactly what was going on. All it should take was a phone call.

14

I sat in the back of a bright yellow van, headphones clamped to my ears. My friend Dennis sat next to me, looking for inspiration in the pages of an Elmore Leonard. To anyone wandering along this Stockport cul-de-sac, it looked like a British Telecom van. The inside would have completely confounded them. Instead of racks of tools, spare parts and cable, there were a couple of leather car seats, the kind you get in top-of-the-range Volvos or Mercs, and a table, all bolted to the floor. There was a portable colour TV and a video fixed to the top of a fridge. There was also a hatch in the floor. The van belongs to Sammy, one of Dennis's mates. I don't want to know what he uses it for on a regular basis. I know for sure it isn't anything to do with telecommunications.

Dennis O'Brien and I have been friends now for years. I know he's a criminal, and he knows I put criminals out of business. But in spite of, or maybe because of, that we've each got a lot of respect for the other. I respect him because in his own way he's a highly skilled craftsman who sticks rigidly to his own rules and values. They might not be the same as mine, but who's to say mine are any better? After all, this society that puts burglars behind bars is the same society that helps the really big bandits like Robert Maxwell thrive.