HE BUCKLE GOT TO THE OFFICE BEFORE I DID, WHICH GAVE Shelley something to puzzle over. I arrived to find her using it as a paperweight. "Okay," she said. "I give in."

I don't often find myself one up on Shelley, so I decided to drag it out a bit. "If you can guess, I'll buy lunch," I said.

"What makes you think you're going to have time for lunch?" she asked sweetly. "Besides, I told you yesterday, I don't do imagination. You want me to learn how, you're going to have to pay me a lot more."

I should know better. The woman is the mother of two teenagers. What chance do I have? "It's a replica of an Anglo-Saxon ceremonial belt buckle," I said. "Also known as a honey pot." Mustering what was left of my dignity, I scooped up the buckle and marched through to my office.

This time Dennis's mobile was switched on. "I want you to set up a meet for me with your man," I said. "Tell him you'll vouch for me, and that I've got something really special for him."

"I'm not sure if he'll go for it," Dennis tried. "Like I told you, we have to wait for a yes or a no before we lift stuff. He's very picky, and he likes to be in control."

"Tell him there's only two in the world. I've got one and the British Museum's got the other one. Tell him it's from the col­lection at High Hammer-ton Hall. And it's gold. He should be able to work it out himself from that. Believe me, Dennis, he'll want this."

"All right," he said grudgingly. "But I'm coming with you on the meet."

"No you're not," I told him firmly. "You're in enough trou­ble as it is. This is not going to be heavy, Dennis. I can handle one man in a car park. You should know, you train me."

"I still think you're crazy, chasing this," he said. "Your client's going to be better off with the insurance company's readies in his bank account than he is with a poxy picture on the wall."

"Call it professional pride."

"Call it pigheadedness," he said. "I'll get back to you."

I went through to Bill's office and opened the cupboard where we keep our stock of technological wizardry. I found what I was looking for in a cardboard box at the back of the top shelf. It's not something we use very often, reeking as it does of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., but given that Dennis's fence seemed to be an aficionado of James Bond, it seemed en­tirely appropriate to use a directional bug. If that conjures up images of chunky metal boxes stuck to the bottom of cars, for­get it. Thanks to modern miniaturization technology, the bugs we've got are about the size of an indigestion tablet. The trans­mission batteries last about a week, and allow the bug to send a signal to a base unit. The range is about fifteen kilometers, provided large mountains don't get in the way, and the screen gives a readout of direction and distance. Perfect for tracking the buckle back to source, so long as that the fence was going to get rid of it sharpish.

Next stop Clive Abercrombie, with a brief detour via the ter­raced streets of Whalley Range to stuff Gizmo's used tenners through his letter box. When I got to the shop, Clive was hovering behind a counter, ostentatiously leaving the waiting on to the lesser mortals he employs to be polite to the rich. When I walked in, he shot forward and had me through the door to the back of the shop so fast my feet didn't even leave tracks in the shag pile. Obviously, he doesn't want proles like me hang­ing around making the place look like Ratners. "In a hurry, Clive?" I asked innocently.

"I thought you would be. You usually are," he replied acidly. "Now, what was it you wanted?"

I took the buckle out of my handbag. In spite of himself, Clive drew his breath in sharply. "Where did you get that?" he demanded, extending one finger to point dramatically at the twinkling gold lump.

"Don't worry, my life of crime runs to solving it, not com­mitting it," I soothed. "It's not the real thing. It's a copy."

If anything, he looked even more disturbed. "Why are you walking around with it in your handbagl" he demanded, giv­ing Lady Bracknell a run for her money.

Knowing Clive's weakness for anything reeking of snobbery, I said, "I'm doing a job for the Nottingham Group."

"Should I know the name?" he asked snottily.

"Probably not, Clive. It's a consortium of the landed gentry, headed by Lord Ballantrae of Dumdivie. Art thefts. Very hush-hush. I'm very close to Mr. Big, and this is a ploy to smoke him out." I pulled the bug out of my pocket. "What I need is for one of your craftsmen to incorporate this in the piece. Preferably on the outside. I'd thought under one of the stones." I handed the bug and the buckle to Clive, who already had his loupe out.

He took a few minutes to scrutinize the buckle, heavy enough to make a useful weapon, especially if it was attached to a belt. "Nice piece of work," he commented. "If you hadn't told me it was a fake, I'd have had my work cut out to spot it." Praise in­deed, coming from Clive. He unscrewed the loupe from his eye socket and said, "It'll take a few hours. And it will cost."

"Now, there's a surprise," I said. "Just send us an invoice. Give me a bell when it's ready." I turned to go back through the shop, but Clive gripped my elbow and steered me farther into the nether regions.

"Easier if you pop out the back door," he said. Half a minute later, I was in the street. I reckoned I deserved a cap­puccino made by someone other than me, so I decided to take the scenic route back to the office. For a brief moment, I toyed with the idea of ringing Michael Haroun and suggesting he play truant for half an hour, but I told myself severely that it wouldn't help my pursuit of the art thieves to involve the in­surers at this stage. They'd only start muttering about doing things by the book and informing the police. I smacked my hormones firmly on the wrist and drove the length of Deans-gate to the Atlas Cafe, where they claim to make the best cof­fee outside Italy. I wasn't going to argue. I dumped the car on a yellow line down by the canal basin and walked back up to the chic glass-and-wood interior. I sat by the window, sipping the kind of cappuccino that acts like intravenous caffeine and pulled the Kerrchem papers out of my bag. Time for a file re­view.

I didn't know exactly what I was looking for. All I knew was that I wanted to find something, anything that would legiti­mately allow me to postpone or short-circuit the tedious process of doing background checks into all of the redundant staff that I hadn't been able to eliminate on the phone. On the second read-through, I found exactly what I was looking for.

Joey Morton's supply of KerrSter came from the local branch of a national chain of trade wholesalers, Filbert Brown. His wife couldn't remember which of them had actu­ally made the trip to the cash-and-carry when the fatal drum of KerrSter had been bought, but there was no doubt that that was the original source of the tainted cleanser.

It wasn't much to go on, but it was a place to start. One of the dozens of pieces of normally useless information cluttering up my dustbin brain was the fact that Filbert Brown were a Manchester-based company. I knew this because I passed their head office and flagship cash-and-carry every time I drove from my house to North Manchester. Suddenly energized, I abandoned the hedonism of the Atlas and trotted back down the steps to the car.

It didn't take long to skirt the city center. It took longer to get through to the customers' car park at Filbert Brown. They occupied an old factory building just off Great Ancoats Street. The area was in the middle of that chaotic upheaval known as urban renewal. East Manchester is supposedly coming up in the world; home of the new Commonwealth Games stadium, spiffy new housing developments and sports facilities. Oh, and roads, of course. Lots of them. Virgin territory for the traffic cones and temporary traffic lights that have become an epi­demic on the roads of the North West. My political friends reckon it's the government's revenge because most of us up here didn't vote for them.

Considering it was the middle of the morning, when all of us small business people are supposed to have our noses firmly to the grindstone, Filbert Brown was surprisingly busy. I walked in without challenge and found myself in a glorified ware­house. It reminded me of those cheap and cheerless back-to-basics supermarkets that we've imported from Europe in recent years. Anyone who did their shopping in Netto or Aldi would have been right at home in Filbert Brown. Me, I always find it incredibly cheap to shop there-they never stock any­thing I'd want to buy. The same went for Filbert Brown. I know Richard thinks I have an unhealthy obsession with cleanliness, but even I couldn't get turned on by cases of dish­washer powder, drums of worktop bactericide and cartons of paper towels. I was clearly in a minority, judging by the num­ber of people who were happily filling up their trolleys.

I wandered up and down the aisles for a few minutes, get­ting a feel for the place. One of the things that struck me was how prominent KerrSter was among the cleansers. It occupied the whole width of a shelf at eye level, the key position in shift­ing merchandise. Compared with the other Kerrchem prod­ucts, which seemed to be doing just about okay compared with their competitors, KerrSter was king of the castle.

What I needed now was a pretext. Thoughtfully, I wandered back to the car. I always keep a fold-over clipboard in the boot for those occasions when I need to pretend to be a market re­searcher. You'd be amazed at what people will tell you if you've got a clipboard. I gave my clothes the once-over. I was wearing tan jodhpur-style leggings, a cream linen collarless shirt and a chocolate brown jacket with a mandarin collar. The jacket was too smart for the pitch, so I folded it up and left it in the boot. In the shirt and leggings, I could just about pass. Freeze, maybe, but pass.

I walked briskly into Filbert Brown and strode up to the customer service counter. I say counter, but it was more of a hole in the wall. Customers here clearly weren't encouraged to complain. The woman behind the counter looked as if she'd been hired because of her resemblance to a bulldog. "Yes?" she demanded, jowls quivering.

"I'm sorry to trouble you," I said brightly. "I'm doing an M.B.A. at Manchester Business School and I'm doing some research into sales and marketing. I wonder if I could perhaps have a word with your stock controller?" "You got an appointment?" "I'm afraid not."

She looked triumphant. "You'd need an appointment." I looked disappointed. "It's a bit of an emergency. I had arranged to see someone at one of the big do-it-yourself stores, but she's come down with a bug and she had to cancel and I re­ally need to get the initial research done this week. It won't take more than half an hour. Can't you just ring through and see if it would be possible for me to see someone?"

"We're a bit busy just now," she said. "We" was inaccurate; "they" would have been nearer the mark, judging by the queues at the tills.

"Please?" I tried for the about-to-burst-into-tears look.

She cast her eyes heavenwards. "It's a waste of time, you know."

"If they're busy, I could make an appointment for later," I said firmly.

With a deep sigh, she picked up the phone, consulted a list taped to the wall of her booth and dialed a number. "Sandra? It's Maureen at customer services. There's a student says she here wants to talk to you... Some project or other..." She looked me up and down disparagingly. Then her eyebrows shot up. "You will?" she said incredulously. "All right, I'll tell her." She dropped the phone as if it had bitten her and said, "Miss Bates will be with you in a moment."

I leaned against the wall and waited. A couple of minutes passed, then a woman approached through the checkouts. Her outfit was in the same colors as the rest of the staff, but where they wore red-and-cream overalls, she wore a red skirt and a blouse in the red-and-cream material. She smiled as she ap­proached, which explained why she'd never get the job in cus­tomer services. "I'm Sandra Bates," she greeted me. "How can I help you?"

I gave her the same spiel. "What I need is a few minutes of your time so you can run through your shelf-allocation princi­ples," I finished.

She nodded. "No problem. Come through to my office, I'll take you through it."

I fell into step beside her. "I really appreciate this," I said. "I know how busy you must be."

"You're not kidding," she said. "But this business needs more women who can give the boys a run for their money. When I was doing my business-studies degree at the Poly, it was al­most impossible to get any of them to spare any of their pre­cious time," she added grimly. Thank God for the sisterhood.

She ushered me into an office that was marginally bigger than the room off my office that doubles as a darkroom and the ladies' loo. Most of the floor space was take up by a desk dominated by a PC. The desk surface and the floor around it was stacked with files and papers. Sandra Bates picked her way through the piles and sat in her chair. "Give me a second," she said, staring at the monitor.

I used the time to give her the once-over. She looked in her late twenties, about my height, her jaw-length light brown hair expertly highlighted with blond streaks. She was attractive in a china doll sort of way, pink-and-white complexion, unexcep­tional blue eyes and a slightly uptilted nose. Her determined mouth was the only contrasting feature, indicating an inner strength that might just give the boys a run for their money in the promotion stakes.

"Right," she said, looking up and grinning at me. "What do you want to know?"

"How you decide what goes where on the shelves," I said. I don't know why I wanted to know that, but it seemed a good place to start if I wanted to get round to KerrSter.

"The general order of the products in the aisles is ordained from above, based on market research and psychological analysis, would you believe," she said. "It's the same way that supermarkets decide you get the fruit and veg first and the booze last. I mean, those of us who actually do the shopping know that your grapes get crushed by the six-packs of lager, but I suppose they work on the principle that by the time you've cruised the aisles, you feel like you need a drink."

My turn to grin. "So what decisions do you actually make on the shop floor?"

"What we decide is what goes where within each section. The received wisdom is that items placed at eye level sell bet­ter than those you have to reach up for or bend down to. Now, all the checkouts are computerized, and I can access all the product figures from this terminal here. That way, I can see

what stock is moving fast, and make sure we reorder at the right time so that we neither run out nor end up with huge stockpiles. When a particular line starts to outstrip rival prod­ucts, it automatically goes into the best shelf position so that those sales are maintained or increased. With me so far?"

I nodded. It was all terribly logical. "Are there any excep­tions?"

Sandra nodded approvingly. "Oh yes. Lots. For example, when a company brings out a new product, they will often arrange to pay us a premium in turn for our displaying it in the most advantageous shelf position. Or if a company's prod­uct has been ousted from its top-selling position by a rival, they'll offer us a loss-leader price on the product for a limited period in exchange for them getting their old shelf site back so they can try to reestablish their old supremacy."

"Is that what Kerrchem have done with KerrSter?" I asked.

Sandra blinked. "I'm sorry?" she asked, sounding startled.

"I was having a browse round before I asked to see you, and I couldn't help noticing how prominent the KerrSter was. And with that guy dying after he opened it, I'd have thought sales would have gone through the floor," I said innocently.

"Yes, well, it's always been a popular seller, KerrSter," San­dra gabbled. "I suppose our customers haven't seen the sto­ries."

"I'd have thought Kerrchem would have recalled it," I went on. For some reason, talk of KerrSter was making Sandra Bates twitchy. Rule number one of interrogation: When you've got them on the run, keep chasing.

"They recalled one batch," she said, regaining her compo­sure.

"Still, I wouldn't buy it," I said. "I'm surprised one of their competitors hasn't tried to exploit the situation. In fact, I'm surprised a small company like them outsells the opposition so comprehensively."

"Yes, well, there's no accounting for customer preferences.

Now, if there's nothing more you'd like to know about the shelf stacking, I have got a lot on my plate," Sandra said, getting to her feet and waving vaguely at the paperwork on her desk.

I was back on the street inside a minute. Being hustled twice in one morning was bad for the ego. Olive Abercrombie I could understand. But the mere mention of KerrSter had shifted Sandra Bates from cooperative sisterhood to the verge of hostility. Something was going on that I didn't understand. And if there's one thing I hate, it's things I don't understand.