An Excerpt

I am, I was, a divorce detective. You, the wider public, would probably have called me a private detective - with all the bogus glamour bestowed by writers of fiction upon that shadowy profession. No Phillip Marlowe me.
      Nowadays solicitors call us 'enquiry agents'. Back then I called myself, in the phone book and legal directories, a security consultant. Which was the work I most preferred. Gadgets. What I was given mostly was divorce work.
      This was several lifetimes ago, in the mid-Seventies, when the law and attitudes to marriage were slightly different. Divorce then was just starting to become popular and the legal profession was rising to the occasion. Making the rules, as usual, as they went along. Law of Precedent, the legal profession reverentially refers to this. Jobs for the boys, print your own money, it's called by those who have to foot the bills.
      Before The Family Act the law for obtaining a divorce was, simply, this: if the marriage could be proved to have irretrievably broken down, which was generally taken as two years' officially living apart, then by mutual consent a divorce was granted.
      But mutual consent is sometimes pretty hard to come by. Passions are running high. There are often others involved - or suspected. The main players are sick of the sight of each other, but neither wants to admit defeat by sharing the blame.
      Sometimes an estranged husband and wife have set up home with new partners; extra-marital babies are on the way, houses have to be divided up, maintenance for offspring of the marriage is required ... thus a rapid resolution is desired and fault established.
      The quickest way of dissolving a marriage then was by proof of what the courts called 'habitual adultery'. Which is where I came in.
      Of course there were other grounds for divorce - mental and physical cruelty, gross behaviour, non-consummation, desertion. But none of those required my participation. Adultery did. Because, back in the Seventies, joint admissions of adultery weren't sufficient. Third party corroboration had to be obtained.
      I was the third party who went along to the address given and, initially unbeknownst to the adulterous couple, I established that they were living together 'as man and wife'.
      That objective achieved, I confronted the couple with my observations of their domestic habits and with luck and persuasion I got a signed confession from both.
      None of this meant that I had to climb trees or ladders, leave listening devices in bedrooms, or hide in wardrobes and leap out with flash camera at the moment of orgasm.
      Sufficient for the court, was to prove that they had spent the night together in the same house. I was more a functionary of the court, a professional witness, than a paid snooper.
      Most people owned cars then. Most people, if they had garages, didn't use them and parked their cars in the street outside. All courts accepted, as proof both parties had spent the night in the house together, a chalk mark drawn down the side of the tyre and out at right angles along the road. If the line was still unbroken in the morning it meant that the car had been there all night.
      (Try it yourself - chalk a mark, drive away, and then park with your tyre in exactly the same position as before. Near impossible even if you know what you're trying to do. Impossible if you don't. Nobody can get back to the mark perfectly).
      Nor is this practice unique to private detectives. American traffic wardens used to mark tyres this way to keep tabs on overstaying parked cars. Again, you could always see the imperfect join if someone had tried to move and park again.
      Of course there were exceptions to the general practice of tyre-chalking. I'd have to wait outside the house of a couple without a car the whole night, make notes of what time both entered, what time both left. Fortunately in my rural patch, Somerset, the bus services were and still are appalling, so most couples had to have at least one car between them. I did once though mark a fat man's bicycle.
      This story, I suppose, is all about marks.

Names have been changed to protect myself from libel writs. I'm a cautious man. (Nothing to stop you, though, being your own detectives and guessing which of these Somerset towns are which). I've called this one Woollaton.
      Woollaton was a small brick place of very few souls. Several thousand people, but very few souls.
      This adulterous couple lived on a newish open-plan estate on the edge of town, had newish cars. His was a gold-coloured Audi, four silver rings on the radiator, last year's registration. He parked it overnight in the road outside.
      Hers was an off-white Renault 14 of earlier vintage. She parked it in the short drive to the up-and-over garage door.
      That German car did not endear me to the subject under observation. What was wrong with buying British? Although I'd had a posting to Germany and, while there, had had no option but to buy German, back in Britain I did not buy German unless there was absolutely no alternative. I never bought Japanese.
      For the last three nights I'd marked the Audi's off-side rear tyre at or about midnight, had come back and checked it at six. Which meant, the drive home taking an hour, for the last three nights I'd had four hours sleep. I'd made it up in the daytimes and evenings, an hour here or there, but it's never the same as a good solid eight hours. Name of my chosen game though.
      I dozed behind the wheel this morning in the car.
      My car was a British Leyland dark brown Maxi. Which then was the perfect car for my job. A bit heavy on petrol, but with mileage going against expenses that didn't matter; and it had a good powerful engine, 1750. Also, importantly, it had plenty of space inside.
      I'm six foot one. On those jobs where I had to wait outside a whole night I put the back of the passenger seat down flat and lowered the whole of the backseat. That gave me enough room, wrapped in a couple of blankets, to stretch out. (I kept an alarm clock in the car, took a Thermos and pee-jar when I knew I'd be overstaying).
      This morning I sat upright, dozing.
      I've often thought, with my face and body, I was born to be a policeman. Imagine me younger, big-boned with a flat Military Policeman's cap pulled down over my eyes, round chin jutting. I don't wear a cap now, favour anoraks and slacks for working, got a dark grey suit for court appearances, jumpers and cords for country walks and country pubs. Molly, my girlfriend of three years, kept trying to get me into jeans and tight shirts. But I knew what I was, and I wasn't going to be made ridiculous by fashion.
      By this time, though, Molly had given up trying to change me. My clothes had become a public grumble, a public joke.
      That was the outside of me. Inside?
      Inside I was then, as I am now, my history. And my history is what this book is going to tell you.
      Sufficient for now the form-filling facts of my existence - name: George Hawkins; age: thirty-four; status: orphan. So far as I then knew.
      When I was sixteen my father died and I joined the Army and became a M.P. I was twenty-five when my time in the Army was up, and I left to join an old friend who'd set up a security consultancy. After four years he moved North after a woman, and the practice entire became mine.
      This was the anxiously self-employed man who sat this morning, nodding into and out of dreams, parked around the corner, slightly uphill, with a view through glistening shrubs across the corner to the gold-coloured Audi.

The morning was clear and dry, clouds making shapes along the dark horizon. There'd been a couple of showers during the night, and now all was bright and fresh. Every time the car windows misted up I put on the cold air fan, opened my window, and closed it again as soon as the glass was clear.
      The housing estate, latest to be built, was on the side of a hill on the edge of town. Like most of Somerset the hill sloped down to a comparatively long level bit which led, eventually, to some more hills.
      I was parked on the edge of the estate. To my right a woman in floppy blue trousers, baggy blue sweatshirt and white hair, was walking across a field. A fit fifty in wet-shined wellies, she had a brown and white dog, a spaniel cross, that went down the field ahead of her, diving in and out of the hedge.
      The reason I was hanging on this morning - I'd already checked the chalk mark, noted times - was that I felt I had neglected this job, couldn't readily put a face to the case even though I'd been supplied with photographs. (Always at least one of those photographs is a wedding photograph. Bitterness itself).
      Most divorces though are not about revenge, but rights to property, both moral and legal. And, in divorce, children are property too. Not that there were any children in this case.
      I'd already had one look at both Michael Alexander Probyn and Anne Marie Blatts, had watched them both arrive home from work, he a good hour and a half after her. And she'd been rushing around late.
      If asked before that morning I would have described them as a young professional couple, mid-twenties, he with dark hair, she light-to-blonde. But I couldn't with any conviction have picked them out of a line-up.
      Mentally, I was still caught up in my last job.
      I'd had to work undercover in a cattle food factory. This was in the days before new-fangled BSE disease scares, so you can imagine the offal stink. In that respect I, Molly too, was very glad it was all over; but I'd enjoyed the challenge. I'd already fingered the three responsible, and they'd all been suspended pending enquiries. Which enquiries, already made, were simply awaiting my dates and times report.
      The job had given me some satisfaction. Neither management nor auditors had been able to locate the fiddle. This was no surprise as the three had kept it tightly to themselves; and one had been a manager. Nor had I got anywhere near sussing it; not until I'd looked at the factory's sickness records for the four years of the 'discrepancy'.
      In those four years only five men in the whole factory, musty and smelly as it was, had never had a day off sick. Two of those were cretinously old codgers. Of the other three one was a driver, one worked in the loading bay, and one was a manager. The link man, Mr Loading Bay, had even come to work with a broken ankle.
      After that it had just been a matter of tracking through Mr Loading Bay's paperwork. Turned out to be a simple carbon paper fraud that had needed a co-operative driver and a manager to redirect the excess funds.
      Auditors and owners were pleased with my work - I'd saved them forty grand that year alone - that's how greedy those fiddlers three had been. We didn't, however, have enough outright evidence to carry through a criminal prosecution. What we did have was enough evidence to sack all three and then hope that one of them sued for unfair dismissal. In which case, case unproven, he'd bring a police investigation for fraud down upon himself and his accomplices.
      It is, however, one thing to know the ins and outs of something, and quite another to accurately describe it. Words, layout of that report, were in my head as I became aware of the man approaching his Audi.

Small wonder I hadn't been able to place him. Nil distinguishing features, slim, clipped hair, suit and tie - looked like a million others his age, race and income.
      Key already in his hand, he didn't notice my dark green chalk line on his rear tyre, threw his square briefcase across to the passenger seat and got in. Engine started first go.
      He had to reverse a bit to get into the road. Using his wipers to clear his windscreen he went down the hill on the edge of the estate. Brake lights came on before the bend.
      I've been over and over what happened next and, to be fair, he wasn't going fast.
      His worst crime up to that point was that he hadn't been fully awake and wasn't paying sufficient attention to his driving. It was what he did afterwards - if then he'd acted liked a normal human being this whole story would be different.
      That long bend from the new estate into the old country road with its high hedges, was blind.
      As the Audi's brake lights came on at the bottom of the estate hill the white-haired woman was getting down off the gate at the bottom of the field and trying to grab hold of her dog. She missed. The dog ran into the road. The slight twist toward the sound said that the woman could hear the car coming.
      The gold Audi had disappeared between the hedges.
      The woman ran into the road after the dog. The driver braked. But, with the road being so narrow, and with her being bang in the middle of it, he had no chance.
      She was still chasing the dog. The offside wing caught her left leg and upended her. Her head hit the ground beside the driver's door, by which time the car had come to a stop. No skid marks. The car, as I said, hadn't been going fast.
      An accident, a mischance, misfortune. It was what happened next that had the alarm bells ringing.
      First the driver, Michael Alexander Probyn, wound down his window and took a moment to study the vital signs of the woman lying in the road. When he looked up from her I could see that he was listening.
      I sat deeper back in the car so that my white face wouldn't be seen.
      Michael Alexander Probyn let the car roll forward just far enough past the prostrate woman so that when he got out he wouldn't step on her. Once out of the car, from a standing position, he examined the woman again. Then he went to the front of the Audi, bent over and looked for damage.
      The dog was running off along the road. Heading for home I guessed.
      Standing upright, the driver took his time - I could almost hear him instructing himself to think. And something else I saw - the bearing of a professional, of a person used to acting in emergencies, to making decisions. So did Michael Alexander Probyn stand over the body of that well-kept, middle-aged woman, estimating the chances of his having been seen.
      Nothing was coming towards him from where the dog had gone. Only half a mile that way was the junction.
      Nothing was coming from the estate, nor along the old road which joined the estate road at the bottom of the hill. The estate houses were all blind-end on to him, had been built facing one another across the hill. Only me in the line of parked cars could see him. And I, inside the brown dark of my brown car, was holding my breath.
      Believing the accident unwitnessed, Michael Alexander Probyn stepped over the woman and swung back into his car, engine still running and, not skidding, he drove off. I let out my breath.
      A blue Cortina came out from the old road junction at the bottom of the hill, stalled noisily to a halt just short of the woman.
      This driver's reactions were different. He ran stumbling to the body, stared at it, at his car, backwards around the road for help, and then took off on foot back up the road. As he ran he yelled, "Help! Help me! Accident! There's been an accident!"
      Still shouting, he banged on the door of the first house at the bottom of the hill.
      An older man was just leaving for work. His wife came out and went quickly in again. The two men marched back to the old woman. A white Escort came down from the estate, came up behind the two men at the Cortina. The Cortina driver and the man from the estate knelt beside the old woman. The woman from the estate left the house with a folded blanket. Nurse? Ambulance called?
      I looked across to Michael Probyn's house. His cohabitee, Anne Marie Blatts, had just got into her off-white Renault. She reversed it out of the short drive and back up the road, came around the corner below me with her long hair done up in a sort of bun. At the bottom of the hill she braked and signalled left, went back along the old road unaware that anything untoward had happened.