I muttered childish curses under my breath as I made my way through to my bedroom and quickly peeled off my nondescript duvet jacket and jogging suit. “I hope his rabbits die and all his matches get wet. And I hope he can’t get the lid off the mayo after he’s made the chicken sandwich,” I swore as I headed for the bathroom and stepped gratefully under a hot shower.

That’s when the self-pitying tears slowly squeezed themselves under my defenses and down my cheeks. In the shower no one can see you weep. I offer that up as one of the great twentieth-century aphorisms, right up there alongside “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” Mostly, my tears were sheer exhaustion. For the last two weeks I’d been working on a case that had involved driving from one end of the country to the other on an almost daily basis, staking out houses and warehouses from the hours before dawn till past midnight, and living on snatched sandwiches from motorway service stations and greasy spoons my mother would have phoned the environmental health inspectors about.

If that sort of routine had been the normal stock in trade of Mortensen and Brannigan it might not have seemed so bloody awful. But our cases usually involve nothing more taxing than sitting in front of a computer screen drinking coffee and making phone calls. This time, though, my senior partner Bill Mortensen and I had been hired by a consortium of prestigious watch manufacturers to track down the source of high-quality copies of their merchandise which had been flooding the market from somewhere in the Greater Manchester area. Surprise, surprise, I’d ended up with the sticky end while Bill sat in the office moodily staring into his computer screens.

Matters had come to a head when Garnetts, the city’s biggest independent jewelers’, had been broken into. The thieves had ignored the safe and the alarmed display cases, and had simply stolen the contents of a cupboard in the manager’s office. What they had walked away with were the green leather wallets that are presented free to purchasers of genuine Rolex watches, the luxury