I sat there wondering if I’d made the right decision. The private inquiry business has changed radically over the past decade or so. Now it’s all search engines and databases and emails and very little knocking on doors. I’m told some people in the game charge by the hour, like lawyers. I was always one for getting out there, asking around, finding the pressure points and applying the force. Of course I did my share of bodyguarding and money minding, but there were security firms doing those jobs exclusively now. Process serving could provide a steady but minor income stream like credit checking. But credit checking in particular was completely computerised now. The question was, were there still human problems out there that needed the personal touch, the right question, the accumulated experience of more than twenty years? I was sure there must be.

The mortgage didn’t worry me too much. There it was, an extraction from a slender bank account every month with heavy penalties for failing to have enough money to cover it. I decided to see it as a stimulus. Until about eighteen months before, I’d enjoyed a period of affluence, courtesy of an inheritance from my partner, Lily Truscott. I hadn’t exactly enjoyed it; I felt guilty about it mostly, and it had all gone west in a financial scam of which I was the victim. It’d been a bad feeling and I’d done things about it. That had primed me for my new start. I was ready.

I kept busy renewing old contacts and trying to establish new ones. A few crackpots approached me-a psychic offering her services, a wannabe crime writer with twenty rejected manuscripts wanting me to read them and tell him where he went wrong, a defrocked minister wanting me to prove that the woman who had replaced him was an atheist. One matter I had to look at very seriously. It was a thinly veiled invitation to shoot a witness in a criminal trial. It had a peculiar smell to it and I concluded that it was a set-up, either by the police or some old enemy, designed to put me deep in the shit. Big bait, but I didn’t bite.