The Atas Work Experiment

I make a decent living out of other folk’s misery. It’s nothing personal. I’m a professional and I’m cheap— fifty-quid-an-hour and expenses. That’s what I tell clients. Anyone with a bit of street savvy can get me down to a twenty-quid-an-hour and no expenses. I’d go even lower than that, but I’ve an office to pay for, Council Rates and an office girl. Minimum wage, of course, and she’s under eighteen so that I get paid an Enterprise Training Allowance. None of this sexist stuff. I’m gender neutral, but it helps that Jacqueline has got long legs. It’s a lot of work spinning the swivel chair in the office.  Being presentable and long blonde hair helps her blend in, after all it’s Campsie Road, Bearsden, we’re talking about. Colour coordination is a big thing with any modern employer.  A short dark-green tartan dress, pristine white tunic and black shoes with flat heels.  Women looking through the plate-glass window do a double-take. One or two wander in confusing us with Grace’s hairdressers from the shop next door, thinking we’re some kind of booking section for perms or beehives or whatever the modern equivalent is. Others confuse us with the large Glenbrae veterinary practice through the wall.  It’s usually middle-aged men looking a bit lost,  traipsing in, trailing a great Dane on a lead, or carrying a pug of a Pekinese, master and pet stirring the office air and edging closer to sniffing Jacqueline’s fanny. I can’t say I blame them. We’re in the glamour business. Whatever kind of reptile the man is,  or brings with him, I tell Jacqueline not to make a fuss, but alway to make sure they leave with my business card. Women are a different kind of fish. I tell our staff to use another angle, to wait them out, let them ask before answering questions about what kind of establishment we are.  A detective agency that is so discrete that no one need know that their husband or partner is being investigated. It’s often such a relief to find out that that nagging suspicion about the woman he works with in accounts and the late nights auditing at work is just work—for me.

I’m not proud.  Dogs are like members of a person’s family and the police, well, for them it’s low priority. I reassure my customers that it’s my first priority. I’ve got a leather-bound portfolio I can show customers.   There was that recent case where the grey-haired women that lived in that house in Ralston Road, whose Jack Russell, Hamish,  had gone missing. She was the superior type.  I was almost tempted to suggest we hire fifty work-shy residents of the Drumchapel estate a few miles away to beat the grass and rhododendon bushes in her garden in our search for poor, lost, Hamish. The hours and weeks and months of work racked up, worrying day and night about our Hamish,  might have seduced some chancers into holing such pampered mutts up in a junkie’s squat in Easterhouse before finally finding them and returning them to their beholden owners. I’ve even been talked into working for nothing unless a man’s best friend is reunited with its mistress. A glossy picture in a portfolio of dog and dog lover reunited is worth a thousand words. A few thousand quid in the bank is also useful.   

I’m a good employer. I’ve got a framed certificate on the wall that says so.  But weeks can go by and there’s no employment. Then there’s two or three jobs stacked up on the same day.  It doesn’t really matter. The secret is always to look busy, but be willing to squeeze somebody else in—I do favours. The grunt work is spying. Everybody likes a bit of drama in their lives. I let them imagine I’m dogging their beloved’s every step, hiding behind bushes and swapping cars to follow them to some out-of-the-way assignation. A top surgeon, for example, had me spying on his young wife and her best friend, who was as gay as a Sao Paulo Pride Parade. He lived with his boyfriend in a third floor tenement flat above the motorbike shop on Byres Road. The client that’s hiring you tells you that in the first five minutes. I get access to computers and phones and possible passwords. The job is practically done for me. But the longer it goes on the more complex it gets. Photoshopping photographs so that the surgeon’s wife and her gay boyfriend are leaning across the table, heads almost touching as they lean across the table, sharing an intimate meal in Le Bistro in Hope Street are junior league. Nobody can say for sure it didn’t happen that way. I alway like to stress to the man or woman that’s paying me there’s always an innocent explanation. If clients really press me I’d say we need to know a bit more, make things a bit clearer, hang off jumping to conclusions.    

I’ve alway worked alone,  but being next door to a vets with animals howling day and night and dying on the job may have dulled my senses and made alone seem relative. I get a call from Jacqueline; there’s a man at the office wanting to meet me. It takes me about half-an-hour to get from my house. I tell her to make an appointment, tell him I’d be in soonish, and in the meantime, to get his contact details.

He’s  waiting for me, standing out of the smirry rain underneath  the wooden awning of our office, watching the parade of dogs doing a shit on the scrap of grass outside Glenbrae. His hand shot out to shake my hand.

‘I’m Harry Ballantye,’ he says.

His accent is difficult to place. The  remarkable thing about Harry Ballantye is his unremarkableness.  He’s a gangly six-footer, but with head hunched into his black overcoat, grey flannel suit and blue tie, a boy in a manly disguise. Dull receding black hair and no chin, and a face long as a coffin. He could have been an undertaker and he kept ahold of my hand a tad too long.  ‘I know everything about you,’ he says. His dark eyes met mine and my heart is pumping like Lance Armstrongs at a blood doping trial.

 ‘You better come in.’ I push open the office door, hold my arm out, usher Harry inside.

Next door a dog howls. I know how it feels.