Sunday 27 February 2011

The Case of Mrs. Weldon - Day 3

I have spent the last two days walking around and have come to a conclusion. I am not being followed by an assassin. If I was, I would definitely be dead by now. I am still being followed by an extremely annoying police sergeant who by his own mistakes keeps managing to find me after I lose him.

I am still none the wiser as to exactly who is following me though. There are not that many possibilities left as to who it could be given the competency of their skills. The idea that I might not even be being followed has now been dismissed as only someone in a deep state of paranoia could possibly believe that they are being followed when they are in fact...not being, well excluding Fred Barlow.

On the plus side I have arranged to meet with Mrs. Weldon to ask her how much she is willing to pay me to lie to her husband about her adulterous activities. Generally this kind of activity is quite easy to blackmail people over and to get a nice bonus to go on top of my two week salary and expenses. However considering her veracious appetite when it came to her extra-curricula hobbies, I wasn't so sure that it would be as easy as it had been in the past. Hopefully the pay out will be worth it.

I got a call from Mr. Weldon as well wanting to know how the investigation was going. I do hate it when people require updates on how I'm spending their money. I get the feeling though that if I don't give him some form of information that he will go to the police and then Fred will just have to get involved...he seems to have this need to always interfere.

I also got a weird letter and phone call. If it wasn't for needing a phone to actually get work then I would take the line out – maybe I need to get an answering machine... When I answered the phone for the eighteenth time in the day there was a gravelly voice on the other end of the line telling me that I should stay in doors for the next for days if I knew what was good for me.

It wasn't long after this that a letter was pushed under my door which told me that if I knew what was good for me then I should stop what I am doing otherwise there would be consequences. I wonder what happened to the days of being able to earn a living by semi-honest means without receiving daily warnings and death threats. I can't remember my Dad ever receiving this many in his whole career.

It's a good job I'm not easily intimidated...

Sunday 20 February 2011

The Case of Mrs. Weldon - Day 2

So having had an unexpected start to what should have been a rather dull two weeks of detection I spent most of the night awake trying to decide what to do. I wasn't trying to decide what to do in regards to Mrs. Weldon, that was obvious but there was no point in going to see her for at least a week yet – no need for me to do myself out of a weeks wages. I had other detective work to do and since I couldn't pay myself for it, well Henry A. Weldon could instead.

I had two options in finding out who was following me 1) Go to a very annoy sergeant and ask for help or 2)Go out into the wider world and let the dangerous competent tailer follow me until either I found out who it was and what they wanted or they killed me. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out which option I went for...unfortunately before I could even leave my office in a race against death, a very annoying police sergeant opened the door.

Newly promoted police sergeant, Frederick Barlow, or Fred as he continually asked me to call him; has this nasty habit of appearing just when I don't want him to.
This was one of those occasions.

He spent twenty minutes asking me questions about what I was doing for Mr. Weldon, which prompted lots of questions from me about if he was bugging my phone in order to know so much about a job I was only given yesterday. This led to him mumbling something about somewhere else that he needed to be and he left me to it. Well he then decided to start following me – he isn't very competent when it comes to tailing somebody and because of that he is very easy to lose.

It was a full half an hour before I got the horrible feeling that I was being followed again – the horrible nagging suspicion that only a trained professionally can arouse in you when you second guess everything and everyone around you. Most people, I guess, never have to deal with that, but I had felt it twice before in my lifetime. Once was when a low life named Kevin Metis was following me and my family before he murdered my family. He would have murdered me too except for a very annoying police sergeant, then constable, interfering. 

The other occasion I can remember feeling like this was when I was being followed by an assassin. An extremely dangerous assassin named Ryuu Blade. A contract had been taken out on my life by a man named Derek Long which Ryuu Blade tried to fulfil and had only been thwarted when Fred had convinced Derek Long to cancel the contract.

Part of me suspected that she was back on my case but I really hoped that my suspicions were way off – the last thing I needed on such an easy case was dealing with a psychotic assassin that not even a high speed train could stop.

The other option of course was that I was being followed by some form of government agency but that would be just too far fetched...

Sunday 13 February 2011

The Case of Mrs. Weldon - Day 1

Reasons why being a P.I is the worst job in the world :-
      1. You only get paid at the end of a job.
      2. You only get paid at the end of a job if your client is still alive to pay you.
      3. Jealous husbands are the worst tippers
      4. Indiscreet wives have a tendency to throw hissy fits when you try and extract money from them to compensate for their husband's miserly behaviour.
      5. Police Sergeants interfere way too much when you are trying to make money on the side in only slightly illegal ways.
Life's trivialities – earning money, eating, sleeping, drinking – all seem to be much harder to do in my life than I expect they are in most peoples. In order to eat and drink I need to be earning money. In order to be earning money I need people to be ringing me with work. Of course when people ring me with work there is always the difficult task of me getting paid at the end of it.

On this occasion it wasn't that I hadn't been called and given work – I had. A man named Henry A. Weldon had called me and asked me to spy on his wife. This of course is the bread and butter of most private investigators; I, however, am not most private investigators. Despite that I am not one to turn down work.
From what I could gather from his rather blustery manner, was that he suspected his wife was cheating on him with no less than twenty four other men. I did have to stop myself from laughing down the phone at him – unlike men, most women don't need an army of lovers to keep them satisfied – in fact I'm not even sure most men do. Twenty four did seem extremely far fetched, six maybe but not twenty four.

So having a ridiculous figure in mind as to how many men I was going to be watching out for, I gleaned a rough idea of Mrs. Weldon's schedule and agreed to start watching her first thing in the morning.

Two things would have made this a very simple, and some might argue, a routine case to conduct and get paid out of it. 1) Had Mr. Weldon been right about the number of men and 2) Had one incredibly annoying Frederick Barlow – newly prompted Sergeant – not been taping my phone.

Wherever I went the next day I had the distinct impression that I was being not only watch but followed. At the hairdressers (where Mrs. Weldon stopped for an hour and a half and came out with no difference to her hair), at the spa (where she apparently had a weekly massage appointment, but when I checked the booking sheets for the last six months her name appeared only once) and at the golf club (where she wore stilettos, didn't take golf clubs or stop in the restaurant).

Something was most definitely up – and I'm not talking about the three very obvious trysts with two different men and possibly one woman (and this was just her Tuesday).

I decided to investigate whether I was being investigated having discovered pretty early on that Henry A. Weldon was correct in his assumptions about his wife, but possibly very wrong about the numbers involved – sadly underestimating just how many people it was taking to satisfy his wife. Does make me wonder if she went home every night and complained about a headache though.

So I spent the whole afternoon formulating a plan on how to check whether I was being followed and watched. Surely that couldn't have been that difficult, I hear you cry, when you have been trained by The Arthur Mace and The Danny MacDonald; arguably the greatest (or worst depending on how you look at it) P.I's of all time (that's not including the fictional ones as I would have preferred having Philip Marlowe as my father's best friend rather than Danny MacDonald). Well technically it wasn't.

What made it more complicated was that I only suspected someone was following me. Most people that engage in such an underhand and arguably nefarious activity, are normally completely incompetent and therefore easily discovered. This meant that if I was being followed, whoever was following me was adept and ergo actually dangerous.

Life is so much harder when dangerous people interfere with my work. Harmless people are so much easier to deal with, they run away from guns, especially if you can manage to plant a bullet or two in an unsuspecting undesirable who thinks it makes them tough standing in a street asking if you want to fight. Dangerous people are problematic because they seem to lack this fear that makes everyone else so malleable, so predictable and well fun to torture with gunfire.

Dangerous people have low profile careers where they can perfect their tracking skills, and no I don't mean like car mechanics. I mean like hunters, assassins (I hate assassins), politicians...well maybe not politicians but they tend to be underhand and dangerous because they fight with paper not with guns.

Guns are fun, paper definitely isn't, papercuts for example.
Dangerous people are people that enjoy causing pain and suffering to those around them, and not even for money. They interfere and try and stop hard-working, admirable members of society from carrying out their diligent duties.

Dangerous people mean I don't get paid.

Dangerous people are people like...well people like me...

On second thought dangerous people are amazing as long as they aren't following me.