s my car rolled to a halt outside Debbie and Dennis's house on a modern suburban estate, the curtains started to twitch the length of the close. Before I could get out of the car and ring the bell, the front door was open and Debbie was coming down the drive of their detached suburban home with gleaming blond head held high for the benefit of the neighbors. She looked like a recently retired supermodel slumming it for the day. The dignified impression was only slightly diminished by the tiny stride imposed by the tightness of her skirt and the height of her heels. Debbie folded herself into the passenger seat of my car, her long legs gleaming with Lycra, and said, "Nosy so-and-sos. Did you see them nets? Up and down like a bride's nightie. Imagine having nothing better to do all day than spy on everybody else. That Neighborhood Watch scheme is just a license to poke your nose into other people's business, if you ask me. Sad bastards."

"How you doing, Debbie?" I asked in the first pause in the tirade.

She sighed. "You don't want to know, Kate."

She wasn't wrong. I'd had a brief taste of seeing the man I loved behind bars, and that had been enough for me to realize how hellish it must be to lose them to prison for months or years. "You know you can always talk to me, Debbie," I lied.

"I know, but it does my head in just thinking about it. Talking about it'd only make it worse." Debbie nicked open the cover of the car's ashtray with a manicured nail. Seeing it was clean and empty, she closed it again and breathed out heavily through her nose.

"It's okay to smoke if you don't mind having the win¬dow open," I told her.

She took a pack of Dunhills out of a handbag that I knew wasn't Chanel in spite of the distinctive gilt double C on the clasp. I knew it wasn't Chanel because I had an identical one in the same burgundy leather-look plastic. It had been a passing gift from Dennis about a year before, when he'd come by a vanload of counterfeit designer accessories. It had been good gear; Richard was still using the "Cerruti" wallet. She managed to light up without smudging her perfect lipstick, then said, "I flaming hate seeing him in there. I really appreciate you coming today. It'll do him good to see you. He always asks Christie if she's seen you and how you're doing."

From anyone other than Debbie, that would have been a deliberate crack, a sideswipe aimed at triggering a major guilt trip. But given that her IQ and her dress size are near neighbors, I knew she'd meant exactly what she said, no more and no less. It didn't make any difference to me; I still got the stab of guilt. In the seven weeks Dennis had been inside, I'd only got along to see him once so far, and that had been the week after he went down. Sure, I'd

been stretched at work, with Bill clearing his desk before Australia. But that was only half the story. Like Debbie, I hated seeing Dennis inside Strangeways. Unlike her, nobody was going to give me a bad time for not visiting him every week. Nobody except me.

"I'm sorry I've not managed more often," I said lamely.

"Don't worry about it, love," Debbie said. "If I didn't have to go, you wouldn't catch me within a hundred miles of the place."

I refrained from pointing out she lived only half a dozen miles from the red-brick prison walls; I like Debbie too much. "How's he doing?"

"Not so bad now. You know how he is about drugs? Well, they've just opened this drug-free unit where you can get away from all the junkies and the dealers and he's got on it. The deal is if you stay away from drugs you get unlimited access to the gym. And if you work out daily, you get extra rations. So he's spending a lot of time on the weights. Plus the other blokes on this drug-free wing are mostly older like him, so it's not like being stuck on a wing with a load of drugged-up idiots." Debbie sighed. "He just hates being banged up. You know he can't be doing with anybody keeping tabs on him."

I knew only too well. It was one of the things that united the two of us, superficially so different, but under¬neath disturbingly similar. "And time passes a lot faster on the outside than it does behind those walls," I said, half to myself.

"Don't you believe it," Debbie said bitterly.

In silence, I navigated my way through the city center, catching every red light on Deansgate before we passed the new Nynex arena. It's an impressive sight, towering over the substantial nineteenth-century edifice of Victoria Station. Unfortunately but predictably, it opened to a chorus of problems, the main one being that the seats are so steeply raked that people sitting in the top tiers have had to leave because they were suffering from vertigo.

I swung into the visitors' car park and stared up at another impressive sight-the new round-topped wall containing Her Majesty's Prison. The prisoners who destroyed half of Strangeways in a spectacular riot a few years ago ended up doing their successors a major favor. Instead of the horrors of the old Victorian prison-three men to a cramped cell without plumbing-they now have comfortable cells with latrines and basins. For once, the authorities listened to the people who have to run pris¬ons, who explained that the hardest prisoners to deal with are the ones on relatively short sentences. A lifer knows he's in there for a long time, and he wants to make sure that one day he sees the outside again. A man who's got a ten-year sentence knows he'll only serve five years if he keeps his nose clean, so he's got a real incentive to stay out of trouble. But to some toerag who's been handed down eighteen months, it's not the end of the world to lose remission and serve the whole sentence. The short-term prisoners also tend to be the younger lads, who don't have the maturity to get their heads down and get through it. They're angry because they're inside, and they don't know how to control their anger. When cell blocks explode into anarchy and violence, nine times out of ten, it's the short-term men who are behind it.

So Strangeways has got a gym, satellite TV, and a vari¬ety of other distractions. It's the kind of regime that has the rabid right-wingers foaming at the mouth about holi¬day camps for villains. Me, I've never been on a holiday where they lock you in your room at night, don't let you see your friends and family whenever you want to, and never let you go shopping. Whatever else Strangeways is, a holiday camp it ain't. Most of the loudmouths who complain would be screaming for their mothers within twenty-four hours of being banged up in there. Just visit¬ing is more than enough for me, even though one of the benefits of the rebuilding program is the Visitors' Center. In the bad old days, visitors were treated so inhumanely that they felt as if they were criminals too. It's no wonder that a lot of men told their wives not to bring the kids to visit. It was easier to deal with the pain of missing them than to put them through the experience.

Now, they actually treat visitors like members of the human race. Debbie and I arrived with ten minutes to spare, and there wasn't even a queue to check in. We found a couple of seats among the other visitors, mostly women and children. These days, a Visiting Order covers up to three adults, and small children don't count. With every prisoner entitled to a weekly visit, it doesn't take long for a crowd to build up. Nevertheless, we didn't have to hang around for long. Five minutes before our visit time, we were escorted into the prison proper, our bags were searched by a strapping blond woman prison officer who looked like a Valkyrie on her day off from Wagner's Ring Cycle. Then we were led through anonymous corri¬dors and upstairs to the Visitor's Hall, a large, clean room with views across the city from its long windows. With its off-white walls, vending machines, no smoking rule, tables laid out across the room, and tense atmosphere, it was like a church hall ready for a whist tournament.

We found Dennis sitting back in his chair, legs stretched in front of him. As we sat down, he smiled. "Great to see you both," he said. "Business must be slack for you to take the afternoon off, Kate."

"Christie's got a cross country trial," Debbie said.

"Kate didn't want me coming in here on my own." There was less bitterness in her voice than there would have been in mine in the same circumstances.

"I'm sorry, doll," Dennis said, shifting in his seat and leaning forward, elbows on the table, eyes fixed on Debbie with all the appeal of a puppy dog. But Debbie knew only too well what that cute pup had grown into, and she wasn't melting.

"Sorry doesn't make it to parents' night, does it?" Deb¬bie said.

Dennis looked away. "No. But you're better off than most of this lot," he added, gesturing around the room with his thumb. "Look at them. Scruffy kids, market stall wardrobes, you know they're living in shitholes. Half them are on the game or on drugs. At least I leave you with money in the bank."

Debbie shook her head, more in sorrow than in anger. "Haven't you got it through your thick head yet that me and the kids wouldn't mind going without as long as we'd got you in the house?"

Time for me not to be here. I stood up and took the orders for the vending machines. There were enough kids milling around for it to take me a good ten minutes to collect coffees and chocolate bars, more than long enough for Dennis and Debbie to rehash their grievances and move on. By the time I got back, they were discussing what A levels Christie was planning on taking. "She should be sticking with her sciences," Dennis insisted forcefully. "She wants to get herself qualified as a doctor or a vet or a dentist. People and animals are always going to get sick, that's the only thing that's guaranteed."

"But she wants to keep up with her sport," Debbie said. "Three science A levels is a lot of homework. It doesn't leave her a lot of time for herself. She could be a PE teacher no bother."

Dennis snorted. "A teacher? You've got to be joking! Have you seen the way other people's kids are today? You only go into teaching these days if you can't get anybody else to give you a job!"

"What does Christie want to do?" I cut in mildly as I dumped the coffees in front of us.

Dennis grinned. "What's that got to do with it?" He was only half-joking. "Anyway, never mind all this bol¬locks. No point us talking to each other when we've got entertainment on tap, is there, Debs? Tell us what you've been up to, Kate."

Debbie sighed. She'd been married to Dennis too long to be bothered arguing, but it was clear that Christie's future was occupying all of her spare synapses. As Dennis turned the headlamp glare of his sparkling eyes on me, I could sense her going off the air and retreating into herself. Suited me, heartless bastard that I am. I didn't mind that Debbie was out of the conversation. That way I could get to the point without having to explain every second sen¬tence. So I gave Dennis a blow-by-blow account of my aborted attempt to nail the gravestone scammers as a warm-up to asking for his help.

He loved the tale, I could tell. Especially the bit where Richard walked through the door with the takeaway and the Celtic cartoon characters. It was a short step from there to outlining Dan Druff's problems with the sabo¬teurs. Dennis sat back again, linking his hands behind his chair with the expansive air of a man who knows his sup¬plicant has come to the right place.

"Fly-posting, isn't it?" he said as if delivering a pro¬found pronouncement.

"Well, yeah, that's one of the problems they've been having," I said, wondering if his spell behind bars was blunting Dennis's edge. I had already explained that the Scabby Heided Bairns' posters had been covered up by other people's.

"No, that's what it's all about," he said impatiently. "This whole thing is about staking out territory in the fly-posting game."

"You're going to have to give me a tutorial in this one, Dennis," I said. Ain't too proud to beg, and there are times when that's what it takes.

Happy that he'd established his superiority despite his temporary absence from the streets, Dennis filled me in. "Illegal fly-posting is mega business in Manchester. Think about it. Everywhere you go in the city, you see fly posters for bands and events. The city council just don't bother prosecuting, so it's a serious business. The way it works is that people stake out their own territory and then they do exclusive deals with particular clubs and bands. The really clever ones set up their own printing businesses and do deals with ticket promoters as well. They'll do a deal with a club whereby they'll book bands for them, arrange the publicity, and organize the ticket sales at other outlets. So for a band to get on and nail down a record contract, best thing they can do is get tied in with one of the boss operators. That way, they'll get gigs at the best venues, plenty of poster coverage on prime sites, and their tickets get sold by all the key players."

"Which costs what?"

Dennis shrugged. "A big slice, obviously. But it's worth it to get noticed."

"And you think what's going on here is something to do with that?"

"Must be, stands to reason. Looks like your lads have picked the wrong punter to do business with. They'll have chosen him because he's cheap, silly bastards. He's probably some kid trying to break into the market and your band's getting his kicking."

I made the circular gesture with my hand that you do in charades when you're asking the audience to expand on their guesses. "Gimme more, Dennis, I'm not seeing day¬light yet," I said.

"He'll have been papering somebody else's sites. If the person whose site he's been nicking doesn't know who's behind the pirate fly-posting, he'll go for the band or the venues that are being promoted. So your band are getting picked on as a way of warning off their cowboy promoter that he's treading on somebody else's ground."

I understood. "So if they want to get out from under, they need to get themselves a new promoter?"

He nodded. "And they want to do it fast, before some¬body gets seriously hurt."

I gave a sardonic smile. "There's no need to go over the top, Dennis. We're talking a bit of illegal fly-posting here, not the ice-cream wars."

His genial mask slipped and he was staring straight into my eyes in full chill mode, reminding me why his enemies call him Dennis the Menace. "You're not understanding, Kate," he said softly. "We're talking heavy-duty damage here. The live music business in Manchester is worth a lot of cash. If you've got a proper flyposting business up and running with a finger in the ticket sales pie, then you're talking a couple of grand a week tax free for doing not a lot except keeping your foot soldiers in line. That kind of money makes for serious enforcement."

"And that's what my clients have been getting. Skin heads on super lager breaking up their gigs, their van set¬ting on fire," I reminded him. "I'm not taking this lightly."

"You've still not got it, Kate. You remember Terry Spotto?"

I frowned. The name rang vague bells, but I couldn't put a face to it.

"Little runty guy, lived in one of the Hulme crescents? Strawberry mark down his right cheek?"

I shook my head. "I don't know who you mean."

"Sure you do. They found him lying on the bridge over the Medlock, just down from your office. Somebody had removed his strawberry mark with a sawn-off shotgun."

I remembered now. It had happened about a year ago. I'd arrived at work one Tuesday morning to see yellow police tapes shutting off part of the street. Alexis had chased the story for a couple of days, but hadn't got any further than the official line that Terry Spotto had been a small-time drug dealer. "That was about fly-posting?" I asked.

"Terry was dealing crack but he decided he wanted a second profit center," Dennis said, reminding me how expertly today's intelligent villains have assimilated the language of business. "He started fly-posting, only he didn't have the sense to stay off other people's patches or the muscle to take territory off them. He got warned a couple of times, but he paid no never mind to it. Since he wouldn't take a telling, or a bit of a seeing to, somebody decided it was time to make an example. I don't think anybody's seriously tried to cut in since then. But it sounds like your lads have made the mistake of linking up with somebody who's too new on the block to remember Terry Spotto."

I took a deep breath. "Hell of a way of seeing off the com¬petition. Dennis, I need to talk to somebody about this. Get the boys off the hook before this gets silly. Gimme a name."

"Denzel Williams," Dennis said. "Garibaldi's. Mention my name."

"Thanks." I hadn't been to Garibaldi's, but I'd heard plenty about it. If I'd had to guess where to find someone I could talk to about so dodgy a game, that's probably the place I'd have gone for.

"Anything else?"

I shook my head. "Not in the way of business. Not unless you know somebody with a wad of cash to invest in a private eye business."

Dennis's eyebrows lowered. "What's Bill up to?"

I told him. Debbie tuned back in to the conversation and the subject kept us going for the remainder of the visit. By the time I'd dropped Debbie back at the house, I had a list of a dozen or so names that Dennis reckoned had the kind of money to hand that they could invest in the business. Somehow, I didn't think I'd be following any of them up. I'm unpopular enough with the police as it is without becoming a money laundry for the Manchester Mafia.

Come five o'clock, I was parked down the street from Sell Phones. All I needed was a name and address on this pair of con merchants and I could hand the case over to the police as I'd already agreed with my clients. We had the names and addresses of nearly a dozen complainants, some of whom would be bound to be capable of picking Will Alien or his female sidekick out of a lineup. I looked forward to handing the whole package over to Detective Chief Inspector Delia Prentice, head honcho of the Regional Crime Squad's Fraud Task Force. It wasn't exactly her bailiwick, but Delia's one of the tight-knit group of women I call friends, and I trusted her not to screw it up. There are coppers who hate private enter¬prise so much they'd let a villain walk rather than let a PI take an ounce of credit for a collar. Delia isn't one of them. But before I could have the pleasure of nailing these cheap crooks, I had to attach names and addresses to them. And I was damned if they were going to defeat me two nights running.

This time I was ready for them. When Alien swung left down the hill, I was right behind him. I stayed in close touch as we threaded through backstreets flanked by decaying mills half-filled with struggling small businesses and vacant lots turned into car parks, across the Rochdale Road and the Oldham Road, emerging on Great Ancoats Street just south of the black glass facade of the old Daily Express building. I slipped into the heavy traffic with just one car separating me from the silver Mazda, and stayed like that right across town, past the mail-order ware¬houses and through the council estates.

In Hathersage Road, the car pulled up outside a gen¬eral store opposite the old Turkish Baths, closed down by the council on the grounds that it cost too much to main¬tain the only leisure facility within walking distance for the thousands of local inner-city residents. As one of those locals, it made me fizz with fury every time I paid an installment of my council tax. So much for New Labour. I carried on past the parked car as the woman jumped out and headed into the shop. I pulled into a parking space further down the street, hastily adjusting my rearview mirror so I could see what was going on. A few minutes later, she emerged carrying a copy of the Chronicle and a packet of cigarettes.

As the Mazda passed me and headed for the traffic lights, I hung back. The lights were on red, and I wasn't going to emerge till they changed. On green, the Mazda swung left into Anson Road, the overhanging trees turn¬ing daylight to dusk like a dimmer switch. It turned off almost immediately into a quiet street lined with large Victorian houses. About halfway down on the left, the red brick gave way to modern concrete. Filling a space equiv¬alent to a couple of the sprawling Victorians was a four-story block of flats in a squared-off U. The Mazda turned into the block's car park and stopped. I cruised past, then accelerated, swung the car around at the next junction, and drove back in time to see Alien and the woman from Sell Phones disappear through the block's entrance door. Even from this distance, I could see the entryphone. There must have been close on fifty flats in the block.