A Question of Trust
A.J Kirby
The faded sign on the door read ‘Groves & Son Detective Agency’, and judging from the peeling paint on the walls and the badly worn carpet, they’d seen better days. But I couldn’t complain, could I? The place seemed somehow fitting for a business transaction as sordid as I was going to make. I slunk though the door and sat opposite the fat man that was clearly Groves – surely nobody in their right mind would claim to be this man’s son.
“What first made you suspect her?” asked the fat man across the desk. He was absent-mindedly picking at his ears with a pen lid, looked bored. He’d obviously spent too much time on stake-outs, or rather steak-outs, in his time and now looked as though he was part-burger; grease poured from every pore
and his flesh had a rather overcooked quality. He had big sausage-fingers and agaping, cavernous mouth. He looked as though he devoured misery like mine forbreakfast.
“I think… The website,” I stammered, sounding unbearably weak, unfeasibly pathetic; sounding like the kind of man that would just stand back while his wife made him a cuckold. “‘Social networking’ they call it.”
“In my day they called it adultery.” snorted the fat man.
I stared at the Olympian ring marks of a thousand coffee cups on his desk. The private detective had me just where he wanted me.
“She didn’t know that I knew that she even went on the site so often, but I always check the Internet history after she’s been on my laptop,” I said, struggling to stop the tremor of fear and anger from creeping into my voice.
“We’re seeing more and more cases like this,” barked the fat man, as though he had a right to speak for the entire population of the country. “You know the score; the woman’s fed up with the grown-up world, can’t stop thinking what if? What if I’d have gone off with my childhood sweetheart?”
“And what happens?” I asked, not wanting to hear the inevitable consequence.
“Sometimes nothing happens, sometimes something happens. But look, Mr. Jackson, I’ll tell it to you straight - in my view, there’s no smoke without fire.”
“You’ve looked at the site?”
"Twilight.com? First place I always look these days. Saves a lot of unnecessary leg-work. It’s amazing how people are so gullible on the internet. They think they have some sort of invisible force-field around them.”
“I know!” I interrupted, suddenly on safer ground. “It’s in the public domain, for God’s sake; even her boss could take a look if he wanted to.”
Fat man– maybe I’d better stop calling him that, but it’s the only thing I have over him – fixed me with piggy eyes.
“Maybe she’s not au fait with the etiquette and conventions of sites such as this; maybe she doesn’t realise that there are lots of hidden eyes watching her. We’re not all computer programmers like you, Mr. Jackson.”
And then I knew it beyond any shadow of a doubt. The man absolutely detested me.
“Maybe not,” I stammered (again), trying desperately to defend myself from this angry bear. “But surely everyone knows that you can delete your internet history and your cookies after every use in order to put off any unwanted prying. I always do.”
“Wouldn’t want her to see what you look at on there?” sneered the fat detective.
“I’m not saying that…”
Fat man slapped his hand down onto the desk. I almost jumped out of my seat.
“Enough. I don’t care what sick website you look at. I only care about that if your wife comes in here with the money… Do you want me to take your case, or do you want to carry on sitting there and letting her get away with what she’s doing? Believe me when I say that if the shoe was on the other foot, she’d be asking me to get all the evidence I could before she stung you for your fortune in court.”
“I know,” I whined. And I did know, or I thought I knew, what Lucy would do if she found out about the depths I’d sink to when I surfed the internet; the depravity which played out before my eyes. Of course, I also knew what she’d do if she discovered that I’d hired a private detective to snoop on her. I could almost hear her reciting that poem on our wedding day; you know, the one about trust being all that there is, and once the trust is gone, nothing remains.
“Well?”
Feeling too sick to answer, I reached for the brown paper bag which was stuffed with money and I handed it over.
*
And now I’m watching the detective watch her. I’ve caught him twice already, sleeping on the job. He just lets his thick head slump forward a little, and his great belly is propped up by the steering wheel. I keep expecting him to inadvertently press the horn, alerting the whole neighbourhood to his strangely incompetent presence. Somehow I hate him more than I hate her. He’s the one that actually voiced my unspoken fears, and once he’d said it, there was no going back.
If I’d not have hired him, I would have been blissfully ignorant about Lucy’s plans for the evening. I would never have questioned, or probably even noticed, that she’d caked on the make-up that morning, and selected her most flattering skirt. Maybe I would have been glad when she’d phoned to say that she was working late and for me to not wait up for her. I certainly wouldn’t have suspected that she was sneaking off to this seedy bar, tottering provocatively on those too-high heels that she never wears when she’s with me.
The fat detective is like my Iago; an ever present reminder of Lucy’s infidelity. And I’m sure that he absolutely loves his job. He seems excited whenever he calls me with news; the sorry words rush out of his mouth as though he can hardly wait to twist the knife in further. I hear him say it over and over again. ‘There’s no smoke without fire.’ And I believe him. Lucy was right; once the trust is gone, then you’re left with nothing.
I press my hand to my forehead to try to stop the boiling rage in my brain. The ex-boyfriend has just arrived and he’s everything that I’m not. He’s tall, classically good-looking and he walks into the bar as though he owns the place. Even if I wanted to leap from my car and confront him in the street, I know what the outcome will be. The man is a semi-pro kick-boxer; it says so on his Twilight profile. He’d most likely swat at the buzzing remainder of my masculinity as though it were a particularly annoying insect, and then he’d laugh in my face. And so, I watch, helpless as they embrace in the window – in full view of the watching street. It’s a lovers’embrace and no mistake; note how he strokes her hair. He touches her as though she’s one of his possessions. I can’t remember the last time I touched her like that – she always seemed too wilful to subject herself to such patronising displays.
But she’s let herself be held now. She’s let this blast from the past right back into her life, and together they radiate laughter. They are laughing at me; me and my pathetic computer obsessions, my software code, my gadgets and my glasses. Fat detective has a phallic-looking telephoto lens pointing right out of his car window; so obvious and yet they don’t even notice. They are lost in their own rose-tinted little world, and I’m stuck outside it like some hopeless voyeur in my car.
My mobile phone breaks the silence, chirruping annoyingly, demanding to be answered. It’s the detective, and he sounds overjoyed.
“Got them!” he chortles. “It’s over.”
I press the off button, not even caring to answer the man. But then I notice something strange; fat man staggers out from the car and walks toward the bar himself, pausing to give Lucy and her ex-boyfriend a friendly wave. And I notice something else; he’s holding the brown paper bag aloft as though it’s some kind of trophy. He enters the bar and hands it over to the ex-boyfriend who greedily unwraps it. There is a father’s pride in the way that fat Mr.Groves watches his son count their ill-gotten gains. All three of them are laughing now, and I realise that this is really what Lucy meant when she spoke about what was left after the trust was gone. I have absolutely nothing. Twilight sets in and it feels as though it will be dark forever now.
The faded sign on the door read ‘Groves & Son Detective Agency’, and judging from the peeling paint on the walls and the badly worn carpet, they’d seen better days. But I couldn’t complain, could I? The place seemed somehow fitting for a business transaction as sordid as I was going to make. I slunk though the door and sat opposite the fat man that was clearly Groves – surely nobody in their right mind would claim to be this man’s son.
“What first made you suspect her?” asked the fat man across the desk. He was absent-mindedly picking at his ears with a pen lid, looked bored. He’d obviously spent too much time on stake-outs, or rather steak-outs, in his time and now looked as though he was part-burger; grease poured from every pore
and his flesh had a rather overcooked quality. He had big sausage-fingers and agaping, cavernous mouth. He looked as though he devoured misery like mine forbreakfast.
“I think… The website,” I stammered, sounding unbearably weak, unfeasibly pathetic; sounding like the kind of man that would just stand back while his wife made him a cuckold. “‘Social networking’ they call it.”
“In my day they called it adultery.” snorted the fat man.
I stared at the Olympian ring marks of a thousand coffee cups on his desk. The private detective had me just where he wanted me.
“She didn’t know that I knew that she even went on the site so often, but I always check the Internet history after she’s been on my laptop,” I said, struggling to stop the tremor of fear and anger from creeping into my voice.
“We’re seeing more and more cases like this,” barked the fat man, as though he had a right to speak for the entire population of the country. “You know the score; the woman’s fed up with the grown-up world, can’t stop thinking what if? What if I’d have gone off with my childhood sweetheart?”
“And what happens?” I asked, not wanting to hear the inevitable consequence.
“Sometimes nothing happens, sometimes something happens. But look, Mr. Jackson, I’ll tell it to you straight - in my view, there’s no smoke without fire.”
“You’ve looked at the site?”
"Twilight.com? First place I always look these days. Saves a lot of unnecessary leg-work. It’s amazing how people are so gullible on the internet. They think they have some sort of invisible force-field around them.”
“I know!” I interrupted, suddenly on safer ground. “It’s in the public domain, for God’s sake; even her boss could take a look if he wanted to.”
Fat man– maybe I’d better stop calling him that, but it’s the only thing I have over him – fixed me with piggy eyes.
“Maybe she’s not au fait with the etiquette and conventions of sites such as this; maybe she doesn’t realise that there are lots of hidden eyes watching her. We’re not all computer programmers like you, Mr. Jackson.”
And then I knew it beyond any shadow of a doubt. The man absolutely detested me.
“Maybe not,” I stammered (again), trying desperately to defend myself from this angry bear. “But surely everyone knows that you can delete your internet history and your cookies after every use in order to put off any unwanted prying. I always do.”
“Wouldn’t want her to see what you look at on there?” sneered the fat detective.
“I’m not saying that…”
Fat man slapped his hand down onto the desk. I almost jumped out of my seat.
“Enough. I don’t care what sick website you look at. I only care about that if your wife comes in here with the money… Do you want me to take your case, or do you want to carry on sitting there and letting her get away with what she’s doing? Believe me when I say that if the shoe was on the other foot, she’d be asking me to get all the evidence I could before she stung you for your fortune in court.”
“I know,” I whined. And I did know, or I thought I knew, what Lucy would do if she found out about the depths I’d sink to when I surfed the internet; the depravity which played out before my eyes. Of course, I also knew what she’d do if she discovered that I’d hired a private detective to snoop on her. I could almost hear her reciting that poem on our wedding day; you know, the one about trust being all that there is, and once the trust is gone, nothing remains.
“Well?”
Feeling too sick to answer, I reached for the brown paper bag which was stuffed with money and I handed it over.
*
And now I’m watching the detective watch her. I’ve caught him twice already, sleeping on the job. He just lets his thick head slump forward a little, and his great belly is propped up by the steering wheel. I keep expecting him to inadvertently press the horn, alerting the whole neighbourhood to his strangely incompetent presence. Somehow I hate him more than I hate her. He’s the one that actually voiced my unspoken fears, and once he’d said it, there was no going back.
If I’d not have hired him, I would have been blissfully ignorant about Lucy’s plans for the evening. I would never have questioned, or probably even noticed, that she’d caked on the make-up that morning, and selected her most flattering skirt. Maybe I would have been glad when she’d phoned to say that she was working late and for me to not wait up for her. I certainly wouldn’t have suspected that she was sneaking off to this seedy bar, tottering provocatively on those too-high heels that she never wears when she’s with me.
The fat detective is like my Iago; an ever present reminder of Lucy’s infidelity. And I’m sure that he absolutely loves his job. He seems excited whenever he calls me with news; the sorry words rush out of his mouth as though he can hardly wait to twist the knife in further. I hear him say it over and over again. ‘There’s no smoke without fire.’ And I believe him. Lucy was right; once the trust is gone, then you’re left with nothing.
I press my hand to my forehead to try to stop the boiling rage in my brain. The ex-boyfriend has just arrived and he’s everything that I’m not. He’s tall, classically good-looking and he walks into the bar as though he owns the place. Even if I wanted to leap from my car and confront him in the street, I know what the outcome will be. The man is a semi-pro kick-boxer; it says so on his Twilight profile. He’d most likely swat at the buzzing remainder of my masculinity as though it were a particularly annoying insect, and then he’d laugh in my face. And so, I watch, helpless as they embrace in the window – in full view of the watching street. It’s a lovers’embrace and no mistake; note how he strokes her hair. He touches her as though she’s one of his possessions. I can’t remember the last time I touched her like that – she always seemed too wilful to subject herself to such patronising displays.
But she’s let herself be held now. She’s let this blast from the past right back into her life, and together they radiate laughter. They are laughing at me; me and my pathetic computer obsessions, my software code, my gadgets and my glasses. Fat detective has a phallic-looking telephoto lens pointing right out of his car window; so obvious and yet they don’t even notice. They are lost in their own rose-tinted little world, and I’m stuck outside it like some hopeless voyeur in my car.
My mobile phone breaks the silence, chirruping annoyingly, demanding to be answered. It’s the detective, and he sounds overjoyed.
“Got them!” he chortles. “It’s over.”
I press the off button, not even caring to answer the man. But then I notice something strange; fat man staggers out from the car and walks toward the bar himself, pausing to give Lucy and her ex-boyfriend a friendly wave. And I notice something else; he’s holding the brown paper bag aloft as though it’s some kind of trophy. He enters the bar and hands it over to the ex-boyfriend who greedily unwraps it. There is a father’s pride in the way that fat Mr.Groves watches his son count their ill-gotten gains. All three of them are laughing now, and I realise that this is really what Lucy meant when she spoke about what was left after the trust was gone. I have absolutely nothing. Twilight sets in and it feels as though it will be dark forever now.