‘Look,’ Dean said. ‘I don’t know what you fellas think you know.’ He thumbed at the house on the other side of the wall. ‘I’m just doing this place up.’

‘Yeah, we’ve heard,’ Trenchcoat said. ‘Your little retirement plan, isn’t it? You’ve been buying run-down houses all over the Northwest, doing them up till they’re spanking new and selling them on at considerable profit.’

‘Nothing illegal about that,’ Dean ventured.

‘Course not,’ Trenchcoat agreed. ‘But I’d like to bet that none of the houses you’ve officially bought so far are quite as run-down as this one, eh?’

‘I’ve officially bought this one.’

Trenchcoat half-smiled. ‘When I say “officially” … I mean, as in your lovely wife, Lydia, knowing about it. Oh, I’m sure she’s well aware and totally approves of this safety net you’re putting together for when your playing days are over. But the problem is, Lightning … she thinks it means houses round Knutsford, Didsbury and Altrincham, doesn’t she? I bet she’d be stunned to know you’ve got a new pad in the backstreets of Withington.’

‘Okay, it’s a shed.’ Dean shrugged. ‘But we’ll still make money when we’ve done it up.’

‘You’re a great footballer, Dean,’ the blond guy said, speaking for the first time; his accent was more Cheshire than Manchester. ‘But you’re not too smart if you seriously think we don’t know what’s going on here.’

‘You believe in quality, I’ll say that for you,’ Beard added. ‘That Clarissa bird. Bloody hell … you’d never know she was a bloke. And Raimunda! Some dong, that. John fucking Holmes in drag.’

‘John Holmes, Lightning,’ Trenchcoat said. ‘Remember him? No, course you don’t. Too young. There are similarities between you and him, nevertheless. For example …’ He drew a leather-gloved hand from his pocket; it contained an iPhone. ‘You’ve both been immortalised in naughty films.’

An MPEG began running. It had been shot from several different angles, all of which were most likely covert, but it was in full colour and painfully clear. It was also full of action, a ‘highlights reel’, snippets of different sessions involving either Dean and Raimunda, Dean and Clarissa, or more usually Dean and both of them, each sequence trimmed to the bare essentials and then edited together.

Fleetingly, the footballer was too numb to respond.

‘All right …’ he finally said. ‘All right, you’ve caught me. But I’m not sure this’ll be quite as damaging as you fellas seem to think. Raimunda and Clarissa are trans women. Yeah … so what? It’s not so shocking these days.’