In our continuing series in which 'Irish Times'writers consider their alternative careers, ARMINTA WALLACEwonders how she would have got on as a private investigator
ONCE UPON A TIME I attended a career-change course, purely in the interests of research. I had been assigned to write a feature about it. Personally, I had no desire for a career change. Apart from journalism the only other jobs I’ve done are private piano teaching, which was hugely demanding and often exasperating, and which had a kind of built-in glass ceiling, because you could only fit in so many children in a week; and substitute teaching in secondary schools. Which gave me migraines.
But the final session of that career-change course gave me pause for thought. We got into groups, evaluated each other’s strengths and weaknesses and suggested alternative careers for everyone. When it came to my turn I was told I’d make a good private detective. I thought they were taking the mickey. They weren’t. In all seriousness they told me that as I enjoyed finding things out and presenting the information in an accessible way, private investigation would suit me down to the ground.
I had never even met a private detective. I knew a lot about them, or so I thought, from crime fiction, a genre populated by large numbers of feisty PIs of the female persuasion. On closer inspection, however, none of the latter seemed to be quite me.
The mother of all the female sleuths is Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, but though I’m pretty grumpy and can, if pressed, knit, there’s no way I could identify with a woman who, at least as played by the wonderful Joan Hickson on television, reminds me so forcefully of my paternal granny.
At the other extreme from Miss Marple on the chilly-cuddly spectrum is Mma Ramotse, from Alexander McCall Smith’s The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. She consumes great quantities of cake and hates having to change her car, which is all fine by me, but she’s from Botswana, for goodness’ sake. I’ve always had a soft spot for Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, who, despite being based in ultraglam California, lives in a garage and eats peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwiches. I could do that.
But she’s also fit and tough and good at talking her way out of life-threatening situations. So maybe not.
Step one, therefore, is to find some real-life PIs and talk to them about their job. I get out the Golden Pages and go through the list. The first number I call no longer exists. The next rings out. The third produces a hostile and inexplicably angry individual who subjects me to an interrogation that would make a cold-war spymaster quail. The fourth is a chatty man who says he has been in the business for 20 years and that since the recession it has all but collapsed. He says he’ll call me back. He doesn’t. Clearly, tracking down people who don’t want to be found isn’t going to be one of my strong points.
Then, out of the blue, I discover that one of my daughter’s friends, a mother of four whom I’ve known for years, holds a gun licence and worked as a PI in Australia before she moved to Dublin.
Feeling like Kinsey Millhone when she arranges her clues on little pieces of card and suddenly finds that two of them fit, I give Leesa McCann a call.
“I’m not surprised they wouldn’t talk to you,” she says. “It’s a very close-knit industry here.” When she arrived in Ireland she sent her investigational CV to all the agencies in the phone book. There were just six of them at the time. Nobody would talk to her, either.
How did she get into private investigation? “My marriage had broken up; I was working at a gym; the guy I was working with suggested I go into partnership with him, and I hadn’t got the money. He suggested I get a part-time job. His brother was a PI, and he said they were looking for agents all the time.”
Her first task was to acquire her PI licence. “It’s in two stages. You’ve got to get your gun licence, and you’ve got to learn how to use all the surveillance equipment.”
The money was good, the work was varied and the hours, if you organised yourself properly, were suitable for a working mother. “You could be a honey bee. That’s where women who think their husbands are cheating on them hire a PI to chat them up at a bar or wherever. I never did that. It was mostly night work, anyway. Other jobs might involve sitting at a checkout in a big supermarket to check up on an employee – a checkout-chick PI. Then there were jobs where a child might have got in with a bad crowd and a parent would want some footage of whatever was going on.”
If I’d thought about it at all I’d always visualised real-life PIs as big square male ex-guards, not as attractive, creative women with an interest in child psychology like Leesa McCann. But then, as she points out, PI agencies need to hire all shapes, sizes and ethnicities if they’re to do undercover work convincingly.
This tallies with my observation that one or two of the online ads for agencies in Ireland boast of their employees’ expertise in Russian, Polish, Latvian and other Slavic languages.
Can she describe the sort of thing I’d be doing if I were a PI? “I usually worked with a male partner,” she says. “There was one job where this guy was claiming 150,000 Australian dollars [€100,000] from various accidents that he said had left him physically disabled.
“He owned a BB in a really pretty part of Sydney, on the Central Coast. So me and my partner went and stayed there, pretending to be a couple, chatting to the guy at breakfast and so on. We’d ask him questions about his life, and at one point I dropped something and asked him to bend down and pick it up for me – which he did.
“The surveillance I was wearing was called a buttonhole. I had it wired up to my chest, just coming through the shirt that I had on, and my partner had the same. You need really concrete evidence. It can’t be just one photo, because when the case comes to court they can say, ‘Oh, I was having a really good day that day,’ or get a quack doctor to say they were on a lot of medication that day.
“We got footage of the guy hosing his garden, pushing doors open, bending down to serve breakfast, carrying bags, all sorts. We really got him.”
I like the idea of unmasking fraudsters. I really do. But I can’t imagine being in charge of a buttonhole camera, let alone a gun.
What I’ve learned from my investigation into private investigators is that the world is safer and more secure if I stick to words and leave widgets alone. Now, where did I put that new Arlene Hunt novel?
