'How do we know this?'

There was a momentary pause while Alexis decided how to play it. 'After you'd explained how busy you were today, I managed to swap my days off. I thought if I kept an eye on him, at least we wouldn't have missed anything. And I was right,' she added defiantly.

I felt a guilt trip coming on. Somehow, I just knew that I wasn't going to be spending my evening as Emperor Brannigan of the Zulus, civilizing the known universe. 'What's happened?' I asked.

'He's got a passport application form,” Alexis announced triumphantly. 'I followed him to the Post Office. He's obviously planning to leave the country.'

It was a reasonable deduction. What it didn't tell us was whether he planned to take off to the Costa del Crime with his ill-gotten gains as soon as air traffic control would let him or whether he was simply planning ahead for his winter skiing holiday. 'Where are you?' I said.

'In the phone box just down the road from his yard. I can see the entrance from here. He hasn't moved since he came back from the Post Office.'

I gave in. 'I'll be there as soon as I can,' I said. After all, I'd given Ted and Prudhoe enough to keep them gossiping for hours. I ended the call and smiled sweetly at my fascinated audience. 'I'm very sorry about this, but something rather urgent has come up. No doubt the three of you have a lot to discuss, so if you'll forgive me, I'll leave you to it. Ted, I'll let you have a full written report as soon as possible, but certainly by Monday at the latest.' I got to my feet. 'I'd just like to say it's been a pleasure, Mr. Prudhoe,' I added, reaching over his desk and seizing his hand in a firm grip. Poor sod, he still looked like he'd been hit by a half-brick. I seem to have this effect on men. Worrying, isn't it?

Delia Prentice followed me into the corridor. 'Hell of a tale, Kate. You've done a great job. We'll need a formal statement, of course,' she said. 'When can we do the business?'

I glanced at my watch. It was getting on for three. 'I don't know, Delia, I can't see me being able to sit down with you until the weekend, at the very earliest. Surely you've got enough to get a search warrant on the addresses they're using for the scam?' I opened my bag and took out my notebook, and copied down the addresses as I spoke. 'Look, talk to Rachel Lieberman at DKL Estates. The woman you're after is called Liz Lawrence and she works part-time in their Warrington office. And Ted can tell you all he knows about Jack McCafferty. I don't mean to be difficult, but I'm really up against it.'

'OK. I can see you've got problems. Let me know when you've got the time to sit down and put it all together. And give me your mobile number so I can reach you if I need some background,” she said. I added my number to the sheet of paper and thrust it at her as I rushed off. I know that technically there was no desperate hurry for me to link up with Alexis, but if I hadn't got my adrenalin going, I might never have managed to drag myself back down the traffic-choked A6 and across that switchback road over the hills to Buxton. The locals must have amazing wrists.

I was back behind the wheel of the Fiesta. I'd got a taxi to drop me off there that morning, since there was no need to keep up my surveillance now. I swung round via the office to pick up the laptop with Cheetham's files, and a couple of my legal textbooks. I still hadn't had the chance to plough through the files, so I had no idea what twisted little schemes the dead lawyer had been up to. But I had a shrewd suspicion that they might need a bit more knowledge of the ins and outs of conveyancing than I had in my head. Better to have it at my fingertips instead.

It was nearly five by the time I overtook the last quarry wagon and dropped down the hill into Buxton. I cruised past Lomax's yard and clocked Alexis in her car. I had to admit I couldn't have picked a better spot myself. She was tucked in between two parked cars, with an uninterrupted view through the windows of the car in front to Lomax's yard. I parked round the corner and walked back.

I climbed into the Peugeot, shoving a pile of newspapers and sandwich wrappers on to the floor. 'Better be careful the bin men don't come round and claim you,' I said. 'Any action?'

Alexis shook her head. There are two vans. The one that Lomax drives and an identical one. The other one's been in and out a couple of times, but he hasn't shifted.'

“Unless of course he's lying in the back of the other van disguised as a bag of cement,' I pointed out. Alexis looked crestfallen. Oh great, now I felt even more guilty. 'Don't worry, it's not likely. He doesn't know anyone's watching him. Cheetham's death has been written off as an accident. As far as he knows, he's perfectly safe. Now, you can sod off home and let me earn a living instead of taking the bread out of my mouth,” I added.

'Don't you want me to hang on? In case he makes a run for it?' she asked, almost wistfully.

'Go home, have a cuddle with Chris. If he was planning to disappear over a distant horizon tonight, he wouldn't be sitting around in his yard. He'd be twitching in the queue at the passport office,' I said sensibly. Judging by the scowl on Alexis's face, she likes sensible about as much as I do.

She sighed, one of those straight-from-the-heart jobs. 'OK,' she said. 'But I don't want this guy to get away.'

I opened the car door. 'Don't forget, there's the small matter of proof,' I said. 'Now Cheetham's dead, Lomax can claim he did nothing dishonest. T.R. Harris is a business name, no more, no less. He just showed prospective buyers the land. He had no idea who bought it or when. Now, you and I know different, but I'd like to be in a position to prove it.'

Alexis groaned. 'All I want is a lever to get our money back, Kate. I don't care if he comes out of it all smelling of roses.'

'I hear and obey, oh lord,' I said, getting out of the car. “Now shift this wheelie bin and let the dog see the rabbit.'

She waved as she drove away and I slipped the Fiesta into the space she'd left. I flipped open the laptop and accessed the WORK.L directory. The files were sorted into two directories. One was called DUPLICAT, the other RV. The files in RV each related to a house purchase. In some cases, the house had been sold about five months later, always at a substantial profit. I was about to check out the addresses in my A-Z when a white Transit van appeared in the gateway of Lomax's yard. My target was at the wheel. Fast as I could, I closed the laptop and dumped it on the passenger seat.

Don't let anyone tell you being a private eye is a glamorous way to earn a living. I followed Lomax from his yard to his house. Then I sat in the car for two hours, plodding wearily through Martin Cheetham's files. The houses in RV were all in the seedier areas south and east of Manchester city centre -Gorton, Longsight, Levenshulme. The kind of terraced streets where you can buy run-down property cheap, tart it up and make a modest killing. Or at least, you could do until the bottom started to drop out of the North West property market a few months ago. Looking at these files, it seemed that Lomax and Cheetham had been doing this on a pretty substantial scale. I did a quick mental calculation and reckoned they'd turned over getting on for two million quid in the previous year. Since my mental arithmetic is on a par with my quantum mechanics, I decided I'd got it wrong and scribbled the sums out in my notebook. I got the same answer.

Suddenly we were in a whole new ball game. I wasn't looking at a pair of small time operators chiselling a few grand on a dodgy land deal. I was looking at big money. They could have cleared as much as three-quarters of a million in the last year. But they must have had a substantial pot to buy the houses in the first place. Where the hell had the seed money come from to generate that kind of business?