It was half past twelve on a Wednesday in late May. That's where it all began, I suppose.

I was sitting in my Beetle; picking the peanuts out of a Snickers, sucking them clean and dropping the hateful things out of the window into the torrent of water flowing in the gutter below.

It was raining. The incessant soul-crushing downpour that shrouds the length and breadth of the British Isles. Raining is not the most accurate term to describe the great swathes of droplets teeming from the leaden sky. They rattled the metal roof of my car and showed no sign of abating. I had been sitting there for two and a half hours, watching beads of water race each other down my windscreen.

I got so desperate for entertainment that I started placing bets on the winner of the water races. I currently owed myself fifteen quid and had no way to pay. I'd most likely have to sell something to raise the cash before I sent the boys round to rough myself up.

Like I said, it had been two and a half hours and the guy I was waiting for had still not shown his face. He had been off work at the Chow Down dog food packing plant in Dudley for three months. His sick note read lower back pain and his boss reckoned he was faking it; pulling an elaborate and months-long sickie.

I think that if I did eight hours a day -- plus overtime -- packing and labelling heavy crates of tins, shifting those bastards around I'd have lower back pain, upper back pain, and all kinds of other pain.

In point of fact, his boss struck me as a nasty piece of work; the kind who polishes his name plate daily and gives that little brunette from Accounts a habitual squeeze on the arse that makes her feel sick.

It seemed to me that he wanted to be rid of an employee for some reason, probably to keep the sick pay in his sweaty fist or to defray the rise in the company insurance premiums. Whatever, I was his instrument; a Damoclean sword hovering outside the poor sod's house in a jet-black Beetle. I was to be the avenging thrust of the spear of industrial justice.

Bollocks.

I get all the shitty jobs at the firm. My life seemed to have devolved into a non-stop succession of cases that involve sitting, excavating my sinuses with the blunt end of a biro and being amused at the potency of my own gas. Still, here I was on the cutting edge of private detection, existing in the shadowy world of potential employment fraud.

My partners in the firm, the Yeoman brothers, wanted me out. Their latest wheeze was to leverage their new-found majority stake to hold an Annual General Meeting at which, they delighted in telling me, there would be a vote on changing the means of allocating jobs between us.

We operated a first-come, first-served policy. That gave each of us a roughly equal serving of shite, and a statistically similar chance of landing the job featuring the smouldering jilted bombshell in the sheath dress, with a blood-red pout and a nutcracker cleavage.

If, as the Yeomans wanted, we moved to a system where clients could choose one of us individually then we would need to provide them with a means of determining that choice. We would need metrics, they said. Time taken to resolve case, favourable outcome percentage, pets found alive and well, that kind of thing.

Suffice it to say, my metrics were shit.

All of which meant that I really needed a result on this dog food skiver business. Happy clients was very much the name of the game.

On that particular Wednesday, I'd spent a good long time just watching the street. People were coming and going, heads down, just getting by, the way we all do.

A young mother turned into the road, dragging her three- or four-year-old son behind her. She carried two full-to-bursting shopping bags in one hand and with her other she was tugging the child along behind her through the rain.

She made a forlorn sight. Her hair was plastered across her face and makeup was running in dark rivers fed by the downpour. The young boy was straining against the woman's grasp like a recalcitrant dog, desperate to be free to either sniff or cock its leg against something.

The woman paid no heed to the boy's squirming and wriggling, she just wanted to be home as soon as possible and get out of the rain. Presumably she would sling the food into cupboards and the child in front of the TV. She would put the kettle on and change out of her wet clothes.

My mind dallied briefly on that final thought, but I swiftly kicked it into touch. I turned up the heater in my car, scratched my nose and shifted my weight from one buttock to the other for the thousandth time.

The guy's house looked OK. It was a nice little mid-terrace, two bedrooms. It was double-glazed and there was fresh paint on the door. There was no dog shit on the path or crisp packets stuck in the neatly-trimmed privet hedge topping the wall in front of the house.

It wasn't a stately home, but it was certainly well looked after and I wondered whether all the work was done by him. Sudden images flirted around in my head of the guy from the dog food factory shinning up a ladder like a rat up a drainpipe while I hid behind a lamp post and snapped away with my Pentax.

Pleased with my powers of observation and deduction, I rolled back my seat a couple of notches and wiggled my toes to keep the blood flowing.

The drenched woman with the soaking wet child stopped outside the house I was watching. She put down her shopping and began delving through her pockets. The bags behaved true to type and flopped, allowing several tins to roll away and into the street.

The woman swore and gripped the boy's wrist a little tighter as he wriggled; trying to break free and run after the escaping goods. She produced a bunch of keys from her handbag, opened the door, then lifted the child bodily and just about slung him inside.

With the kid out of the rain, the woman turned to gather her tins and bags from the pavement. As she rose she caught my gaze, held it long enough to make me feel like a pervert, and then turned and went into the house.

She was not bad looking in a lived-in kind of way and I wondered if she was single. I had been so long without a woman that a baboon hitting my dick with a plank would get me off in a matter of seconds. It even seemed like a good idea.

I was just musing further on where I would find an obliging baboon, and whether I could afford the plank, when there was a tapping on my window. A little startled, I spun around. It was the woman, without the child, and she wasn't getting any drier. I wound down the glass; the very soul of anonymity.

"Can I help you?" I proffered.

"Don't you fuckers ever get tired of harassing us? You should be ashamed of yourself!" the woman shouted in a thin West Midlands whine.

"I'm sorry madam, I think you must have me confused with someone else," I said as calmly as I could. The woman bent down, sticking her dripping head right inside the car until her face was close to mine.

"You're not the first he's sent you know. You might as well come in and see Andy like all the others. Then you can fuck-off and tell him the same as they did. None of them sat in a car all fucking day either!" she shouted through the window.

"I really think you are mistaken," I vainly tried to clutch the tattered shreds of my story around me. "I am going to collect my wife. She has been visiting her sister..."

Shit, I cursed silently, that was the wrong cover. That was last week's job.

"Yeah? Well, when you get tired of waiting, come in and see Andy then you can leave us alone," the woman snapped, pushing thick clumped strands of wet hair up and out of her face before marching back across the street and into the house.

Odd, I thought. The woman had pretty much identified me as an investigator, which meant that either I was a lot worse than I thought I was or, and this is my preferred option, she has some experience at spotting the likes of me. She also implied that I was not the first investigator to be given this job. The boss at Chow Down had not mentioned anything about having sent others before me.

I sat for a while; musing on how my simple stake-out had been blown and why I'd been spotted so easily. It wasn't the first time that my cover had crumbled. Perhaps I should just fix a large neon sign to the roof of my car and have done with it.

Whatever the truth of it, I stayed there for a good forty minutes ruminating on the obvious lack of anonymity that I possessed. Being able to go unseen is one of the central tenets of Private Investigation and the fact that I was so obviously deficient got me on a real downer.

It brought back into sharp relief the threat to my position at the firm which had been founded by my father and his close friend from their days on the police force. With both men having since passed away, the ownership of the company had passed to their children. Two Turners and two Yeomans had each been bequeathed quarter shares. No matter how poor I was as an investigator, I would carry on because maintaining the company and the link to my past meant everything to me.

Wallowing on the past allowed my mind to slip back to the loss of my girlfriend and my sister in an accident some eighteen months previously. I had done my grieving for them both, but every so often when things were glum my thoughts skipped back like a scratched LP.

The sound of their laughter rang in my ears as I imagined them approaching the crossroads. The light had been on green as they crossed the junction when a lorry thundered across from the left. It ignored the red light and made no attempt to stop until it was too late.

The lorry swerved across the junction and sideswiped my sister's car flush into a corner shop, crushing the metalwork like an empty beer can.

I still remembered the smell of the room where I, as next of kin, had to identify my sister's remains. They'd tried their best, but the meat on that stainless-steel counter looked like a waxwork of Mary that had melted under the lights.

All of that thinking went to my head. I needed air and realized that I was getting no closer to a happy client while sitting there. I made my decision and got out of the car, stretched my legs a little and trotted through the rain to the house I had been watching.

I rang the bell and waited. Several moments later I heard footsteps, then the rattle and clack of the chain and bolt, the door swung inward and the woman stood there with one hand on her hip and the other clutching the door halfway up, poised to slam. She had changed out of her wet clothes into jeans and a dirty T-shirt several sizes too large, her hair wrapped in a beige towel that failed to restrain a few straggling strands.

"Come in then," was all she said.

I brushed past her down a narrow hall which had been newly painted, the tang of fumes still hung in the air. I turned around and gave her my best inquiring look.

"Upstairs," she nodded, and I climbed.

The man called Andy was lying in a bed, propped up on a voluminous pile of pillows and watching some flickering daytime talk show on a small TV in the corner of the room. He looked to be short and stocky with wiry dark hair and bushy eyebrows that ran amok across his forehead. His face was pale, and his hands lay limply at his sides.

"Hi," he greeted me. I could tell that curt and pithy statements were the norm in this house.

"Good afternoon, I suppose you know why I'm here," I began tentatively, feeling a little uneasy about this unusual shift in my detection techniques. I definitely preferred hiding in bushes.

"Yeah, you're hoping to catch me running a marathon," Andy smiled and I warmed to him.

"Not necessarily. You assume that I am hostile. I am neutral. Obviously if I had seen you tossing the caber that would give the lie to your illness, but I'm here to find the truth, not what your boss wants to hear," I said. The words rang hollow even to me. I had an increasingly vested interest in finding that Andy was a fraud.

"How noble," he said dryly.

"It pays the bills," I countered, not knowing who I was fooling least; him or me. It paid some of the bills would be a more accurate assessment.

"Well, here I am. Take a seat, we can sort this out..."

"... Again," the woman chimed from the doorway.

"Mandy, why don't you get Mister..."

"Turner, Satchmo Turner," I helped him out.

"Get Mr. Turner a drink," Andy asked. The woman sighed and stomped down the stairs.

"You have an unusual name Mr. Turner," Andy smiled again, the corners of his mouth lifting almost imperceptibly.

"My parents had a love of jazz and a sense of the absurd. I've learned to live with it," I said, returning the smile.

I was sitting on a strange elevated chair fashioned from metal tubing with a container instead of a cushion and examined the room in more detail. It was neat and tidy and smelled vaguely of air freshener. Mandy's influence, I imagined.

"I suppose I should explain," I began.

"No need, all the medical stuff is in the folder," he pointed at the small bedside table.

I picked up the buff folder and leafed through the contents: X-rays, doctor's referral letter and orthopaedic specialist consultation letter, copies of med3 and med5 sick note forms and so on.

"I've shown that to everyone he's sent, and he has a copy himself. It makes no difference; new faces just keep coming," Andy sighed, shifting his weight in the bed to relieve some discomfort.

"Well, I've seen enough," I muttered, imagining the prospect of a happy client with a job resolved to his satisfaction galloping off into the distance.

"Excuse me," Andy shifted his gaze away from me. "I have to go to the bathroom."

"Don't mind me," I helpfully replied.

"No, you're sitting on it. That's my chamber pot," he said, flicking the sheets off his legs. "Can you just give me a hand?"

I was beginning to feel like the objects I was sitting on.

I swung his legs off the bed and helped him upright with a hand under the crook of his arm. Upright is not quite the word. He was hunched over like an old man with his spine curled at the base like a wilted flower. Using a walking stick, he shuffled across the room.

"I hope you'll excuse me, I don't perform well to an audience," he said.

"OK, I'm sorry to have bothered you," I said and beat a hasty and shame-faced retreat down the stairs and out through the rain to my car.

Andy was not likely to be moonlighting, unless it was on all fours as a coffee table. His boss was a bastard who would undoubtedly be discontented and send another where I had been.

My metrics would clearly be taking another downwards turn.

Somewhere between leaving university and that moment I had lost my sense of drive.

I'd had something eighteen months ago; it was a girlfriend who loved me, a sister with whom I shared everything and a family business that I was proud to help run.

There were thoughts of marriage, children and mortgages; all of which had been crushed against the brickwork of Mushak's Minimart.

Now I could feel the few desultory remaining shreds of it all slipping away, one dissatisfied and vindictive dog food magnate at a time.