Terry Prone: My pal's stint as a private eye didn’t last long

I knew this guy from when he was doing something completely different — and was gobsmacked when he told me he had trained to work as a private detective

'You going to be tracing unfaithful spouses?' I asked. 'Sitting in your car in the dark and peeing into a water bottle?' Picture: iStock

You might think that it’s a bit late in life for me to be hiring a private detective, but my take is that it’s never too late to embark on new adventures. Or so say the experts in growing old, who are mostly younger than the people they’re lecturing, but we older folk have to rise above that along with so much else, and we do. 

In my case, this included hiring a private detective and no, I will not share his name.

I knew this guy from when he was doing something completely different and was gobsmacked when, over coffee, he introduced me to his new qualifications and told me how they were going to change his life.

“You going to be tracing unfaithful spouses?” I asked. “Sitting in your car in the dark and peeing into a water bottle?”

His reaction to the prospect of the water bottle was so shocked, I told him I had doubts about his mettle, before realising my doubts were in the ha’penny place compared to his own, particularly in relation to probing the daily lives of individuals who might be straying past the marital boundaries.

He confessed that this was where he had started, because he had a memory of PIs in the US or Britain capturing on their camera the unfaithful working hard at infidelity in a hotel room. The pictures would then be used in the divorce pleading. In most cases, although blackmail seemed to have been another option not to be sneezed at, back in the day when tabloids would pay you for revealing that the vicar was not a man of pure sexual restraint.

My pal the PI went off the business of tracking the unfaithful pretty quickly, for a cascade of reasons, starting with the photographs (putative) being of no use whatever in an Irish divorce court. This led to the second bit of the cascade: Because infidelity does not serve in no-fault divorces, this provides a client selection mechanism which made him quickly wary.

“Explain?” I instructed, never one to be ashamed of being thick as a plank.

Well, he said, if the person who suspects their spouse of having it off with a third party or parties can’t use the information in a divorce, why would they want their suspicions confirmed?

“Maybe to get out of living in cloud cuckoo land?” I ventured.

He accepted that as a possibility before going on to describe the majority of suspicious spouses as being paranoid pains in the ass who, once they have commissioned a private eye to spy on their best beloved, want reports every five minutes and get furious when the investigator presents the supposedly errant spouse as living a life of phenomenal virtue. 

He had gradually realised that a) the non-errant spouses he was mandated to spy on were saints who should be unfaithful to their awful partners, b) half the awful partners needed a medical seeing to, c) life was too short to hang around such a disgusting area.

On the other hand, he confessed, he wasn’t high-tech enough to be comfortable trying to hack into the devices of people to reveal industrial secrets.

In the previous year, he sadly confirmed, he could claim only one success, which was finding someone who hadn’t been heard of by their family for 20 years. Although even that was a bit of a stinker, because the guy who had disappeared had done so for the good reason that he couldn’t stick his family, and so a huggy reunion wasn’t going to happen. The reappeared bloke was furious with him for blowing his secret, and the client family was just as furious with him for the reappeared bloke wanting no part of them.

“I’ll hire you,” I told him at this point in the conversation.

“Why?” he asked, looking at me with newly suspicious eyes.

“I’ll hire you to find out if a woman is dead. If she’s dead, I can write about her in the Examiner and be the most-read writer that week. If she’s not dead, I can’t write about her at all because of libel.”

I gave him all the details I had about this woman, starting with her age, which I figure is early 80s. He wrote it down in a little notebook but had the grace not to take a pencil from behind his ear.

“If she’s avoided The Green Ripper, I’d still like to know where she is now,” I said. When he corrected my description to “Grim Reaper”, I began to have serious doubts about him. Any detective of his age who hasn’t read John D MacDonald is not going to be stellar at the job.

He started to tell me the official documents he would go through, but I sent him a killer glance. Outcomes, I suggested. End results, I added, although my literary agent always cuts the “end” off that word combo, saying results are results.

My friend claimed only one success — finding a man whose family hadn’t heard from him for 20 years. It turned out the guy who had disappeared did so for the good reason that he couldn’t stick his family, so a huggy reunion wasn’t going to happen. Picture: Getty Images

I did not torment my PI by ringing him, partly because I didn’t want to know anything more about official records and partly because I figured I was in for the long haul on this, having heard from friends of a similar search that took years. The couple involved wanted to marry, but her husband had left her 20 years earlier and getting married if the former hubby was still in the picture might just lead to bigamy charges. They spent a fortune and never found the previous husband, although their efforts helped when it came to having him legally declared dead.

So I was surprised when my investigator rang me three weeks later. Now, he was as fascinated with my target as I was, albeit for different reasons.

I’m enthralled by her as the definitive bad egg. He’s enthralled by her untraceability. At a time when every poster in every supermarket promises you that every egg can be traced back to the individual hen that laid it, this bad egg left no traces anywhere, whether financial or DNA or electronic or physical address. Poof. Gone. Evaporated.

“The only thing I can confidently confirm,” my PI told me, “Is that she didn’t die in the Republic of Ireland in the last 10 years.”

But did this mean she is still alive and kicking? Who knows? She might have done tourist mortality — gone someplace else to pop her clogs. Or she might be living just up the road from me. Seeing as how I haven’t laid eyes on her in 45 years, I mightn’t recognise her if I encountered her locally.

My PI then surprised me by telling me he wouldn’t bill for the job, because, he said, he owed me.

“You owe me? How?”

“You’ve taught me I’m not cut out for private investigation. I achieve nothing and get bored.” What he’ll do next is anybody’s guess.

As is the location of the woman I want to write about but can’t.