he day Richard's death announcement appeared in the Manchester Evening Chronicle, I knew I couldn't postpone clearing up the mess any longer. But there was something I had to do first. I stood in the doorway of the living room of the man who'd been my lover for three years, Polaroid in hand, surveying the chaos. Slowly, I swept the camera lens around the room, carefully record¬ing every detail of the shambles, section by section. This was one time I wasn't prepared to rely on memory. Richard might be gone, but that didn't mean I was going to take any unnecessary risks. Private eyes who do that seldom make it to membership in the Gray Panthers.

Once I had a complete chronicle of exactly how things had been left in the room that was a mirror image of my own bungalow next door, I started my mammoth task. First, I sorted things into piles; books, magazines, CDs, tapes, promo videos, the detritus of a rock journalist's life. Then I arranged them. Books, alphabetically, on the shelf unit. CDs ditto. The tapes I stacked in the storage unit Richard had bought for the purpose one Sunday when I'd managed to drag him round Ikea, the 19905 equivalent of buying an engagement ring. I'd even put the cabinet together for him, but he'd never got into the habit of using it, preferring the haphazard stacks and heaps strewn all over the floor. I buried the surge of emotion that came with the memory and carried on doggedly. The maga¬zines I stacked out of sight in the conservatory that runs along the back of both our houses, linking them together more firmly than we'd ever been prepared to do in any formal sense with our lives.

I leaned against the wall and looked around the room. When people say, "It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it," how come we never really believe we'll be the ones left clutching the sticky end? I sighed and forced myself on. I emptied ashtrays of the roaches left from Richard's joints, gathered together pens and pencils and stuffed them into the sawn-off Sapporo beer can he'd used for the purpose for as long as I'd known him. I picked up the assorted notepads, sheets of scrap paper, and envelopes where he'd scribbled down vital phone numbers and quotes, careful not to render them any more disordered than they were already, and took them through to the room he used as his office when it wasn't occupied by his nine-year-old son Davy on one of his regular visits. I dumped them on the desk on top of a remarkably similar looking pile already there.

Back in the living room, I was amazed by the effect. It almost looked like a room I could sit comfortably in. Cleared of the usual junk, it was possible to see the pat¬tern on the elderly Moroccan rug that covered most of the floor and the sofas could for once accommodate the five people they were designed for. I realized for the first time that the coffee table had a central panel of glass. I'd been trying for ages to get him to put the room into something approaching a civilized state, but he'd always resisted me. Even though I'd finally got my own way, I can't say it made me happy. But then, I couldn't get out of my mind the reason behind what I was doing here, and what lay ahead. The announcement of Richard's death was only the beginning of a chain of events that would be a hell of a lot more testing than tidying a room.

I thought about brushing the rug, but I figured that was probably gilding the lily, the kind of activity that peo¬ple found a little bizarre after the death of a lover. And bizarre was not the impression I wanted to give. I went back through to my house and changed from the sweat pants and tee shirt I'd worn to do the cleaning into some¬thing more appropriate for a grieving relict: a charcoal wool wraparound skirt from the French Connection sale and a black lambswool turtleneck I'd chosen for the one and only reason that it made me look like death. There are times in a private eye's working life when looking like she's about to keel over is an image preferable to that of Wonder Woman on whizz.

I was about to close the conservatory door behind me as I returned to Richard's house when his doorbell belted out an inappropriate blast of the guitar riff from Eric Clapton's "Layla." "Shit," I muttered. No matter how careful you are, there's always something you forget. I couldn't remember what the other choices were on Richard's "Twenty Great Rock Riffs" doorbell, but I was sure there must be something more fitting than Clapton's wailing guitar. Maybe something from The Smiths, I thought vaguely as I tried to compose my face into a suit¬able expression for a woman who's just lost her partner.

Just how was I supposed to look, I found a second to won¬der. What's the well-bereft woman wearing on her face this season? You can't even go for the mascara tracks down the cheeks in these days of lash tints.

I took a deep breath, hoped for the best, and opened the door. The crime correspondent of the Manchester Evening Chronicle stood on the step, her black hair even more like an explosion in a wig factory than usual. "Kate," my best friend Alexis said, stepping forward and pulling me into a hug. "I can't believe it," she added, a catch in her voice. She moved back to look at me, tears in her eyes. So much for the hard-bitten newshound. "Why didn't you call us? When I saw it in the paper... Kate, what the hell happened?"

I looked past her. All quiet in the street outside. I put my arm around her shoulders and firmly drew her inside, closing the door behind her. "Nothing. Richard's fine," I said, leading the way down the hall.

"Do what?" Alexis demanded, stopping and frowning at me. "If he's fine, how come I just read he's dead in tonight's paper? And if he's fine, how come you're doing the 'Baby's in Black' number when you know that's the one color that makes you look like the Bride of Frankenstein?"

"If you let me get a word in edgewise, I'll explain," I said, going through to the living room. "Take my word for it, Richard is absolutely okay."

Alexis stopped dead on the threshold, taking in the pristine tidiness of the room. "Oh no, he's not," she said, suspicion running through her heavy Liverpool accent like the stripe in the toothpaste. "He's not fine if he's left his living room looking like this. At the very least, he's having a nervous breakdown. What the hell's going on here, KB?"

"I can't believe you read the death notices," I said, throwing myself down on the nearest sofa.

"I don't normally," Alexis admitted, subsiding on the sofa opposite me. "I was at the police station waiting for a statement from the duty inspector about a little bit of aggravation involving an Uzi and a dead Rottweiler, and they were taking so long about it I'd read everything else in the paper except the ads for the dinner dances. And it's just as well I did. What's going on? If he's not dead, who's he upset enough to get heavy metal hassle like this?" She stabbed the paper she carried with a nicotine-stained index finger.

"It was me who put the announcement in," I said.

"That's one way of telling him it's over," Alexis inter¬rupted before I could continue. "I thought you two had got things sorted?"

"We have," I said through clenched teeth. Ironing out the problems in my relationship with Richard would have taken the entire staff of an industrial laundry a month. It had taken us rather longer.

"So what's going on?" Alexis demanded belligerently. "What's so important that you have to give everybody a heart attack thinking me laddo's popped his clogs?"

"Can't you resist the journalistic exaggeration for once?" I sighed. "You know and I know that nobody under sixty routinely reads the deaths column. I had to use a real name and address, and I figured with Richard out of town till the end of the week, nobody's going to be any the wiser if I used his," I explained. "And he won't be, unless you tell him."

"That depends on whether you tell me what this is all in aid of," Alexis said cunningly, her outrage at having wasted her sympathy a distant memory now she had the scent of a possible story in her nostrils. "I mean, I think he's going to notice something's going on," she added, sweeping an eloquent arm though the air. "I don't think he knows that carpet has a pattern."

"I took Polaroids before I started," I told her. "When I'm finished, I'll put it back the way it was before. He won't notice a thing."

"He will when I show him the cutting," Alexis coun¬tered. "Spill, KB. What're you playing at? What's with the grieving widow number?" She leaned back and lit a cigarette. So much for my clean ashtrays.

"Can't tell you," I said sweetly. "Client confidentiality."

"Bollocks," Alexis scoffed. "It's me you're talking to, KB, not the cops. Come on, give. Or else the first thing Richard sees when he comes home is ..."

I closed my eyes and muttered an old Gypsy curse under my breath. It's not that I speak Romany; it's just that I've refused to buy lucky white heather once too often. Believe me, I know exactly what those old Gypsies say. I weighed up my options. I could always call her bluff and hope she wouldn't tell Richard, on the basis that the two of them maintain this pretense of despising each other's area of professional expertise and extend that into the personal arena at every possible opportunity. On the other hand, the prospect of explaining to Richard that I was responsible for the report of his death didn't appeal either. I gave in. "It's got to be off the record, then," I said ungraciously.

"Why?" Alexis demanded.

"Because with a bit of luck it will be sub judice in a day or two. And if you blow it before then, the bad guys will be out of town on the next train and we'll never nail them."

"Anybody ever tell you you've got melodramatic ten¬dencies, KB?" Alexis asked with a grin.

"A bit rich, coming from a woman who started today's story with, 'Undercover police swooped on a top drug dealer's love nest in a dawn raid this morning,' when we both know that all that happened was a couple of guys from the Drugs Squad turned over some two-bit dealer's girlfriend's bed-sit," I commented.

"Yeah, well, you gotta give it a bit of topspin or the adrenaline junkies on the news desk kill it. But that's not what we're talking about. I want to know why Richard's supposed to be dead."

"It's a long and complicated story," I started in a last attempt to lose her interest.

Alexis grinned and blew a long stream of smoke down her nostrils. Puff the Magic Dragon would have signed up for a training course on the spot. "Great," she enthused. "My favorite kind of story."

"The client's a firm of monumental masons," I said. "They're the biggest provider of stone memorials in South Manchester. They came to us because they've been getting a string of complaints from people saying they've paid for gravestones that haven't turned up."

"Somebody's been nicking gravestones?"

"Worse than that," I said, meaning it. Far as I was con¬cerned, I was dealing with total scumbags on this one. "My clients are the incidental victims of a really nasty scam. From what I've managed to find out so far, there are at least two people involved, a man and a woman. They turn up on the doorsteps of the recently bereaved and claim to be representing my client's firm. They pro¬duce these business cards which have the name of my clients, complete with address and phone number, all absolutely kosher. The only thing wrong with them is that the names on the cards are completely unknown to my client. They're not using the names of his staff. But this pair is smart. They always come in the evening, out of business hours, so anyone who's a bit suspicious can't ring my client's office and check up on them. And they come single-handed. Nothing heavy. Where it's a woman who's died, it's the woman who shows up. Where it's a man, it's the bloke."

"So what's the pitch?" Alexis asked.

"They do the tea and sympathy routine, then they explain that they're adopting a new approach of visiting people in their homes because it's a more personal approach to choosing an appropriate memorial. Then they go into a special offer routine, just like they were selling double glazing or something. You know the sort of thing - unique opportunity, special shipment of Italian marble or Aberdeen granite, you could be one of the people we use for testimonial purposes, limited period offer."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Alexis groaned. "And if they don't sign up tonight, they've lost the opportunity, am I right, or am I right? "

"You're right. So these poor sods whose lives are already in bits because they've just lost their partner or husband or wife, or mother or father, or son or daughter, get done up like a kipper just so some smart bastard can go out and buy another designer suit or a mobile bloody phone," I said angrily. I know all the rules about never letting yourself get emotionally involved with the jobs, but there are times when staying cool and disinterested would be the mark of inhumanity rather than good sense. This was one of them.

Alexis lit another cigarette, shaking her head. "Pure scumbags," she said in disgust. "Twenty- four-karat shysters. So they take the cash and disappear into the night, leaving your clients to pick up the pieces when the head¬stone remains a ghostly presence?"

"Something like that. They really are a pair of unscru¬pulous bastards. I've been interviewing some of the people who have been had over, and a couple of them have told me the woman has actually driven them to ATMs to get money for a cash deposit." I shook my head, remembering the faces of the victims again. They showed a procession of emotions, each more painful to watch than the last. There was grief revisited in the set-ting of the scene for me, then anger as they recalled how they'd been stung, then a mixture of shame and resent¬ment that they'd fallen for it. "And there's no point in me telling them that in their shoes, even a street-wise old cynic like me would probably have fallen for it. Because I probably would have done, that's the worst of it," I added bitterly.

"Grief gets you like that," Alexis agreed. "The last thing you're expecting is to be taken for a ride. Look at how many families end up not speaking to each other for years because someone has done something outrageous in the immediate aftermath of death, when everyone's staggering around feeling like their brain's in the food processor along with their emotions. After my uncle Jos's second wife Theresa wore my gran's fur coat to the old dear's funeral, she might as well have been dead too. My dad wouldn't even let my mum send them a Christmas card for about ten years. Until Uncle Jos got cancer himself, poor sod."

"Yeah, well, us knowing these people haven't been par¬ticularly gullible doesn't make it any easier for them. The only thing that might help them would be for me to nail the bastards responsible."

"What about the cops? Haven't they reported it to them?"

I shrugged. "Only one or two of them. Most of them left it at phoning my client. It's pride, isn't it? People don't want everybody thinking they can't cope just because they've lost somebody. Especially if they're get¬ting on a bit. So all Officer Dibble has to go on is a few isolated incidents." I didn't need to tell a crime corre¬spondent that it wasn't something that was going to assume a high priority for a police force struggling to deal with an epidemic of crack and guns that seemed to claim fresh victims every week in spite of an alleged truce among the gangs.

Alexis gave a cynical smile. "Not exactly the kind of glamorous case the CID's glory boys are dying to take on, either. The only way they'd have started to take proper notice would have been if some journo like me had stum¬bled across the story and given it some headlines. Then they'd have had to get their finger out."

"Too late for that now," I said firmly.

"Slimeballs," Alexis said. "So you've put Richard's death notice in to try and flush them out?"

"Seemed like the only way to get a fix on them," I said. "It's clear from what the victims have said that they oper¬ate by using the deaths column. Richard's out of town on the road with some band, so I thought I'd get it done and dusted while he's not around to object to having his name taken in vain. If everything goes according to plan, some¬one should be here within the next half hour."

"Nice thinking," Alexis said approvingly. "Hope it works. So why didn't you use Bill's name and address? He's still in Australia, isn't he?"

I shook my head. "I would have done, except he was flying in this afternoon." Bill Mortensen, the senior part¬ner of Mortensen and Brannigan, Private Investigators and Security Consultants, had been in Australia for the last three weeks, his second trip Down Under in the past six months, an occurrence that was starting to feel a lot like double trouble to me. "He'll be using his house as a jet lag recovery zone. So that left Richard. Sorry you had a wasted journey of condolence. And I'm sorry if it upset you," I added.

"You're all right. I don't think I really believed he was dead, you know? I figured it must be some sick puppy's idea of a joke, on account of I couldn't work out how come you hadn't told me he'd kicked it. If you see what I mean. Anyway, it wasn't a wasted journey. I was coming around anyway. There's something I wanted to tell you."

For some reason, Alexis had suddenly stopped meeting my eye. She was looking vaguely around the room, as if Richard's walls were the source of all inspiration. Then she dragged her eyes away from the no longer brilliant white emulsion and started rooting around in a handbag so vast it makes mine look like an evening purse. "So tell me," I said impatiently after a silence long enough for Alexis to unearth a fresh packet of cigarettes, unwrap them, and light one.

"It's Chris," she exhaled ominously. More silence. Chris, Alexis's partner, is an architect in a community practice. It feels as if they've been together longer than Mickey and Minnie. The pair of them had just finished building their dream home beyond the borders of civi-lization as we know it, part of a self-build scheme. And now Alexis was using the tone of voice that BBC announcers adopt when a member of the royal family has died or sep-arated from a spouse.

"What about Chris?" I asked nervously.

Alexis ran a hand through her hair then looked up at me from under her eyebrows. "She's pregnant."

Before I could say anything, the doorbell blasted out the riff from "Layla" again.