hey say the Victorian era was the age of the gifted amateur. All I've got to say is that I'm glad I wasn't a private investigator then. I mean, if there's one thing worse than amateurs who insist on offering you the kind of help that completely screws up an investigation, it's the ones who are more on the ball than you. The way Alexis was operating in this case, I was soon going to have to start paying her, rather than the other way round.

What I'd heard when I went into a huddle with my telephone in Prudhoe's office wasn't the kind of news to gladden the heart. 'He's going to skip the country," Alexis started the conversation.

'Mr. Harris, you mean?' I said cautiously. I was trying to keep my end as short and uninformative as I could. After all, I'd suddenly become the rather embarrassing centre of attention. I wasn't bothered about Ted or Prudhoe, but the presence of police officers induces a paranoia in private eyes that makes Woody Allen look well-balanced by comparison.

'Of course, Harris, Lomax, whatever! Who else? He's going to do a runner.'

'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?

While I'd been doing my sums, the last of the light had faded. I began to feel pretty exposed, which in turn made me feel deeply uncomfortable. I couldn't help remembering that less than a week ago someone had wanted to warn me off something so badly they'd taken the risk of killing me. If they were still around, I made a hell of a target, sitting all by myself in a car.

The answer to my fear was just behind me. I was parked on the opposite side of the street to Brian Lomax's house, about thirty yards further up the hill, outside a substantial Victorian pile with a Bed and Breakfast sign swinging slightly in the chilly wind. I collected a small overnight holdall from the boot, stuffed the law books into it and walked up the short drive.

I'd have taken the landlady on as an investigator any day. By the time I'd paid for a night in advance and she'd left me alone in my spotless little room, I felt like I'd had a bright light shining in my eyes for days. Never mind grace under pressure; there should be a private investigators' Oscar for lies under pressure. At least I was in a suit, which made it easier to be convincing about my imaginary role as a commercial solicitor acting for a local client who was interested in buying property in Manchester to expand his business. She'd gone for the lie, agog at my close-lipped refusal to breach client confidentiality. I was half-convinced that come the morning, she'd be tailing me just for the hell of picking up some juicy local gossip.

My room was, as requested, at the front of the house, and on the second floor, which gave me a better view of Brian Lomax's house than I'd had from the car. Glad to get out of tights and heels, I changed into the leggings, sweatshirt and Reeboks that had been relegated to the emergency overnight kit and settled down in the dark to keep watch. I passed the time dictating my client reports for PharmAce and Ted Barlow. That would take Shelley's mind off romance for a couple of hours.

Nell arrived home about half past six, parking her GTi in the garage. It was gone nine before I saw some more action. Lomax appeared round the side of the house, walking along his drive. He turned right and started towards town. I was out of the room and down the stairs a hell of a lot more quickly than I'd have been able to manage just a couple of days before. If Mortensen and Brannigan ever take on an assistant, I think we're going to have to stipulate 'must be quick healer' on the job description.

He was still in sight as I ran out of the guest house, trying to look like a jogger nipping out for her evening run. At the traffic lights, he turned left, walking up the hill towards the market place. I reached the corner in time to see him entering a pub. Wonderful. I didn't even have a jacket on, and I couldn't follow him into the pub because he knew only too well who I was. Furious, I walked right up to the pub and peered through the stained-glass door. Through a blue haze, I saw Lomax at the bar, talking and laughing with a group of other men, all around the same age. By the looks of it, he was having his regular Thursday night down his local with the lads, rather than meeting a business contact. That much was a relief. I stepped back and had a look round. Across the street, on the opposite corner, there was a fish and chip shop that advertised an upstairs dining room. I had nothing left to lose.

It's amazing how long I can take to work my way through steak pudding, chips, mushy peas, gravy, a pot of tea and a plate of bread and butter. Oddly enough, I actually enjoyed it, especially since I'd missed lunch. Best of all was the spotted dick and custard that tasted better than anything my mother used to make. I managed to make the whole lot string out until half past ten, then it was back out into the cold. Of course, it started to rain as soon as I emerged from the chippy. I crossed to the pub and had another look through the glass. The scene hadn't changed much, except that the pub had got busier. Lomax was still standing at the bar with his cronies, a pint pot in his fist. I couldn't see any point in getting soaked while he got pissed, so I jogged back to the guest house, my dinner sitting in my stomach like a concrete block.

He came back, alone, just on half past eleven. Five minutes later, a light went on in an upstairs room and he appeared at the window to close the curtains. Ten minutes after that, another light went on and Nell did the same thing in her room. I didn't bother waiting for their lights to go out. I bet I was asleep before they were.

I bet I was up before them too. I'd set my alarm for six, and I was out of the shower by quarter past. Lomax's curtains opened at a quarter to seven, and my heart sank. My landlady didn't start serving breakfast till eight, and it looked like he'd be out of the house by then. I consoled myself with the individually wrapped digestive biscuits supplied with the tea- and coffee-making facilities. (Fine if you like sterilized milk, tea bags filled with house dust and powdered instant coffee that tastes like I imagine strychnine does.)

Wearily, I packed my bag and returned to the car. I was beginning to wonder if there was any point to this surveillance. I sometimes think my boredom threshold's too low for this job. Twenty minutes later, the nose of a white E-type appeared in his gateway. I'd seen the Jag sitting next to Nell's GTi in the garage the night I'd spotted the T.R. Harris signboard. The classic car's long bonnet emerged cautiously, until I could see Lomax himself was at the wheel. He drove past me without so much as a glance. I watched him round the bend in my rear-view mirror, then quickly reversed out of the guest house drive and sped after him.

I'd thought the road from Manchester had been bad enough.

The one we took out of Buxton was that nightmare you wake up from in a clammy sweat. The road corkscrewed up through a series of tight bends with sheer drops on the other side, just like in the Alps. Then it became a narrow bucking switchback that made me grateful for missing breakfast. The visibility was appalling. I couldn't decide if it was fog or cloud I was driving through, but either way I was glad there weren't too many side turnings for the E-type to disappear into. What left me gasping with disbelief was the amount of traffic on this track from hell. Lorries, vans, cars by the dozen, all bucketing along as if they were in the fast lane of the M6.

Eventually, we left the grey-green moors behind and dropped into the red brick of Macclesfield. I felt like an explorer emerging from the jungle after a close encounter with the cannibals. These were proper roads, with traffic lights, roundabouts, and white lines up the middle. Through Macclesfield, we emerged into the country again, but this was more my idea of what countryside should be. None of those dreadful moors, heather stretching to infinity, dilapidated dry-stone walls with holes in where someone failed to make the bend, grim pubs stranded in the middle of nowhere and trees that grow at an angle of forty-five degrees to the prevailing wind. No, this was much more like it. Neat fields, pretty farmhouses, Little Chefs and garden centres, notices nailed to trees announcing craft fairs and car boot sales. The kind of country you might just be tempted to take a little run out to in the car.

We roared down the slip road of the M6 at 8:14, according to my dashboard clock. I began to feel excited. Whatever Lomax was up to, it was more interesting than repairing guttering. As the speedo hit ninety, I really began to miss my Nova. It may not have looked much, but it was a car that only really ever seemed to get into its stride over eighty. Unlike the Fiesta, which had an interesting shake in the steering wheel between eighty-two and eighty-eight. As we changed lanes to head west down the M62,I remembered the phone call from Alexis that had started this latest phase of the operation. A passport application form.

To obtain a full British passport, you have to fill in a complicated form, have your photographic identity attested by a supposedly reputable member of the community who's known you for at least two years, and send it off to the passport office. Then you sit back and wait for a few weeks while the wheels of bureaucracy grind exceeding slow. If you're in a hurry, you take yourself off to one of the five passport offices on the UK mainland - London, Liverpool, Newport, Peterborough or Glasgow. I remember the performance well. Richard and I booked a fortnight's holiday in July driving round California in a Winnebago. Two days before we were due to leave, he materialized in my office mid-morning to announce his passport was out of date. Of course, he was too busy to sort it out himself, could I possibly...?

If you get there on the stroke of nine, they deign to take your paperwork off you and tell you to come back in four hours' time. If you're late, you have to wait in the queue and pray they get round to you before closing time. If that was where Brian Lomax was headed, he was clearly determined to avoid queuing all day.

He headed straight for the centre of Liverpool, and parked his car in the multi-storey nearest the passport office at ten to nine. I stayed in my car and watched him through the door of India Buildings. He might well have been headed for any of the offices on any floor except the fifth, but I doubted it. He was out within twenty minutes but, instead of going straight back to his car, he headed off towards the city centre. I swore steadily under my breath as I tried to keep him in sight. As long as he didn't turn into a pedestrian precinct, I might just be OK.

I was and I wasn't. About a mile from the passport office, Brian Lomax marched purposefully into a travel agency.