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natural heir of Marks and Spencer. Karl Marx, maybe, except that they’d have had radically different views of what constituted an appropriate redistribution of wealth. I folded the lease along its creases and said, “Looks fine to me.”
    Dennis virtually snatched it out of my hand and shoved it back in his pocket, looking far too shifty for a villain as experienced as him. “Thanks, love. I just wanted to be sure everything’s there that should be. That it looks right.”
    I recognized the key word right away. Us detectives, we never sleep. “Looks right?” I demanded. “Why? Who else is going to be giving it the once-over?”
    Dennis tried to look innocent. I’ve seen hunter-killer submarines give it a better shot. “Just the usual, you know? The leccy board, the water board. They need to see the lease before they’ll connect you to the utilities.”
    “What’s going on, Dennis? What’s really going on?”
    Richard pushed himself more or less upright and draped an arm over my shoulders. “You might as well tell her, Den. You know what they say—it’s better having her inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.”
    I let him get away with the anatomical impossibility and settled for a savage grin. “He’s not wrong,” I said.
    Dennis sighed and lit a cigarette. “All right. But I meant it when I said it’s not criminal.”
    I cast my eyes upwards and shook my head. “Dennis O’Brien, you know and I know that ‘not criminal’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘legal.’”
    “Too deep for me,” Richard complained, reaching for another bottle of beer.
    “Let’s hear it,” I said firmly.
    “You know how I hate waste,” Dennis began. I nodded cautiously. “There’s nothing more offensive to a man like me than premises
    “Shop-squatting,” I said flatly.
    “What?” Richard asked vaguely. “You going to live in a shop, Den? What happened to the house? Debbie thrown you out, has she?”
    “He’s not going to be living in the shop, dope-head,” I said sarcastically.
    “You keep smoking that draw, you’re going to have a mental age of three soon,” Dennis added sententiously. “Of course I’m not going to be living in the shop. I’m going to be selling things in the shop.”
    “Take me through it,” I said. Dennis’s latest idea was only new to him; he was far from the first in Manchester to give it a try. I remembered reading something in the
Evening Chronicle
about shop-squatting, but as usual with newspaper articles, it had told me none of the things I really wanted to know.
    “You want to know how it works?”
    Silly question to ask a woman whose first watch lasted only as long as it took me to work out how to get the back off. “Was Georgie Best?”
    “First off, you identify your premises. Find some empty shops and give the agents a ring. What you’re looking for is one where the agent says they’re not taking any offers because it’s already let as from a couple of months ahead.”
    “What?” Richard mumbled.
    Dennis and I shared the conspiratorial grin of those who are several drinks behind the mentally defective. “That way, you know it’s going to stay empty for long enough for you to get in and out and do the business in between,” he explained patiently.
    “Next thing you do is you get somebody to draw you up a moody contract. One that looks like you’ve bought a short-term lease in good faith, cash on the nail. All you gotta do then is get into the shop and Bob’s your uncle. Get the leccy and the water turned on, fill the place with crap, everything under a pound, which you can afford to do because you’ve got no overheads. And the
    “What about criminal damage?” I asked. “You have to bust the locks to get in.”
    Dennis winked. “If you pick the locks, you’ve not done any damage. And if you fit some new locks to give extra security, where’s the damage in that?”
    “Doesn’t the landlord try to close you down?” Richard asked. It was an