I stared at the body. It was the first time I’d ever seen someone properly dead before. He lay, his eyes ridiculously wide, his mouth pulled into a silent scream. What little hair he had stood straight out. It was like something from a cartoon. I laughed accidentally and then the wave started to come towards me, my eyes getting heavier and heavier.

Fighting the urge to sleep I bent over, putting my hands on my knees and breathing deeply.

“First time you’ve seen one? Erm, I mean a dead body.”

I nodded and stared at the golf clubs scattered on top of him and all around, the discarded cigar butt on his chest but mostly the smoke rising from his hair. I could feel the sleep rolling away from me again. I stood upright. I had to do something, keep moving, keep focussed.

“So what’s this agency then?” I said, walked over to the golf bag and tried to lift it onto its three-wheeled transporter-thingy. It was heavy. Really heavy and inside there was some sort of electrical contraption. Home made. Like a bomb only not. “Have you seen this?”

It’s amazing how much information you can glean from an idiot with a personality bypass. Once he’d stopped me from trying to tidy up the scene of a murder he told me some quite interesting things that seemed, for a man of his limited creative means, impossible to make up. The Agency was just that – no adjective, just ‘Agency’. He was a detective, though God knows how. I also found out that it was extremely well paid, had high profile clients, often dealt with murders, that he was a senior investigator and that he once kissed a man called Kevin and never told his wife. Mitch’s wife, that is, I didn’t ask about Kevin.

As we talked several police men and women of varying ranks had begun to arrive. The closest one to Mitch and I was talking to a tubby middle aged man who turned to us for a second to blow a plume of cigar smoke before continuing whatever it was he was saying.

The policeman’s face contorted into a frown and he opened his mouth to speak, paused, looking like he might not bother and then decided to go for it anyway. “Are you with him?”