Quid Pro Quo

Chapter One

It was half past twelve on a Wednesday in late May. That's where it all began, I suppose.

I was sitting in my Beetle; picking the peanuts out of a Snickers, sucking them clean and dropping the hateful things out of the window into the torrent of water flowing in the gutter below.

It was raining. The incessant soul-crushing downpour that shrouds the length and breadth of the British Isles. Raining is not the most accurate term to describe the great swathes of droplets teeming from the leaden sky. They rattled the metal roof of my car and showed no sign of abating. I had been sitting there for two and a half hours, watching beads of water race each other down my windscreen.

I got so desperate for entertainment that I started placing bets on the winner of the water races. I currently owed myself fifteen quid and had no way to pay. I'd most likely have to sell something to raise the cash before I sent the boys round to rough myself up.

Like I said, it had been two and a half hours and the guy I was waiting for had still not shown his face. He had been off work at the Chow Down dog food packing plant in Dudley for three months. His sick note read lower back pain and his boss reckoned he was faking it; pulling an elaborate and months-long sickie.

I think that if I did eight hours a day -- plus overtime -- packing and labelling heavy crates of tins, shifting those bastards around I'd have lower back pain, upper back pain, and all kinds of other pain.

In point of fact, his boss struck me as a nasty piece of work; the kind who polishes his name plate daily and gives that little brunette from Accounts a habitual squeeze on the arse that makes her feel sick.

It seemed to me that he wanted to be rid of an employee for some reason, probably to keep the sick pay in his sweaty fist or to defray the rise in the company insurance premiums. Whatever, I was his instrument; a Damoclean sword hovering outside the poor sod's house in a jet-black Beetle. I was to be the avenging thrust of the spear of industrial justice.

Bollocks.

I get all the shitty jobs at the firm. My life seemed to have devolved into a non-stop succession of cases that involve sitting, excavating my sinuses with the blunt end of a biro and being amused at the potency of my own gas. Still, here I was on the cutting edge of private detection, existing in the shadowy world of potential employment fraud.

My partners in the firm, the Yeoman brothers, wanted me out. Their latest wheeze was to leverage their new-found majority stake to hold an Annual General Meeting at which, they delighted in telling me, there would be a vote on changing the means of allocating jobs between us.

We operated a first-come, first-served policy. That gave each of us a roughly equal serving of shite, and a statistically similar chance of landing the job featuring the smouldering jilted bombshell in the sheath dress, with a blood-red pout and a nutcracker cleavage.

If, as the Yeomans wanted, we moved to a system where clients could choose one of us individually then we would need to provide them with a means of determining that choice. We would need metrics, they said. Time taken to resolve case, favourable outcome percentage, pets found alive and well, that kind of thing.

Suffice it to say, my metrics were shit.

All of which meant that I really needed a result on this dog food skiver business. Happy clients was very much the name of the game.

On that particular Wednesday, I'd spent a good long time just watching the street. People were coming and going, heads down, just getting by, the way we all do.

A young mother turned into the road, dragging her three- or four-year-old son behind her. She carried two full-to-bursting shopping bags in one hand and with her other she was tugging the child along behind her through the rain.