‘Trail my wife and get me evidence of hanky-panky. That way I can divorce the bitch cheaply.’ The guy, Ben Blaidd, had mean eyes that might have been filched from a rat. Then he hissed, ‘I want dirt, I want grubby.’
I’m Johnny Gumboot, private detective. Grubbiness, you could say, is engrained in my calling. Blaidd added that his missus was seeing an audiologist whom he referred to as Huw Jeers. Was that the man’s name or his affliction?
Blaidd slithered from his chair, and vanished from my office like piss down a urinal. I didn’t like him and I didn’t want his lousy money, but I had debts and no choice about turning him down. That empty feeling was upon me again.
From the window of my cramped office I saw him get into a BMW. In the passenger seat was a woman half his age. He kissed her like he was slurping a bowl of trifle. I liked him even less now. Johnny Mug was to help him divorce on grounds of infidelity, terrain where he himself resided.
Soon I was staking out the lovers’ nest in Mumbles, watching from a mean eatery. An elderly, whey-faced waiter kept crossing my line of vision with breakfast plates that shook in his hands. If he’d been any greyer he could have served himself up as a plate of porridge.
I saw a woman go into a flat above a shop. She was attractive, confident; then a man of similar age entered. I took photos of both. Three hours later they exited together, and I had snaps of them petting, as enraptured with each other as Donald Trump is with a mirror.
The man walked away, she crossed the road to the eatery. She ordered a coffee, sitting near me. I hid in a newspaper to avoid recognition. I needed to get a lot more photographic evidence of her affair.
‘Hi Johnny,’ she said.
It was Stella Groves. We’d been romantically involved as teenagers, until I went to one college to study criminology and she went to another to do meteorology.
‘Didn’t recognise you with red hair,’ I said. ‘Way back you were…’
‘Mousey-brown? Red makes me feel better about myself, y’know? Working?’
‘Yup.’
Then I had an idea. Twenty years ago Stella was quality. Hey, she still was! What a beautiful dame. To hell with it. I gave her a summary of Blaidd’s task.
‘How about I hire you?’ she replied. ‘Change the target? You spy on Wolfie Blaidd?’
Take that nasty rat to the cleaners and kind of make it up with a woman I should have stayed with?
The next couple of days I was on the rat’s tail, got photos of passion in the BMW, ditto in Blaidd’s own apartment d’amour, a long lens trained inside the bedroom window. The upshot? Stella got an opulent divorce settlement, I got my fee. The sense of emptiness kind of abated too: a change of weather due to a meteorologist.
