I should have known better. It had all started so inauspiciously. I’d been tailing a young systems engineer whose employer suspected him of selling information to a rival. I’d followed him to the Hacienda Club, breeding ground for so many of the bands that have turned Manchester into the creative center of the nineties music industry. I’d only been there a couple of times previously because being jammed shoulder to shoulder with a sweating mass of bodies in a room where conversation is impossible and the simple act of breathing gets you stoned isn’t my idea of the perfect way to spend what little free time I get. I have to confess I’m much happier playing interactive adventure games with my computer.

Anyway, I was trying to look unobtrusive in the Hassy—not an easy task when you’re that crucial five years older than most of the clientele—when this guy appeared at my shoulder and tried to buy me a drink. I liked the look of him. For a start, he was old enough to have started shaving. He had twinkling hazel eyes behind a pair of large tortoiseshell-framed glasses and a very cute smile, but I was working and I couldn’t afford to take my eyes off my little systems man in case he made his contact right before my eyes. But The Cute Smile didn’t want to take no for an answer, so it was something of a relief when my target headed for the exit.

I had no time for good byes. I shot off after him, squeezing through the press of bodies like a sweaty eel. By the time I made it on to the street, I could see his taillights glowing red as he started his car. I cursed aloud as I ran round the corner to where I’d parked and leapt behind the wheel. I slammed the car into gear and shot out of my parking place. As I tore round the corner, a customized Volkswagen Beetle convertible reversed out of a side alley. I had nowhere to go except into the nearside door. There was

It was all over in seconds. I climbed out of the car, furious with this dickhead who hadn’t bothered to check before he reversed out into a main street. Whoever he was, he’d not only lost me my surveillance target but had also wrecked my car. I strode round to the driver’s door of the Beetle in a towering rage, ready to drag the pillock out on to the street and send him home with his nuts in a paper bag. I mean, driving like that, it had to be a man, didn’t it?