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.