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If anyone had asked how business was going, I could have summed it up like this: currently, a very large man with a very bald head was waving a very heavy tyre iron around our office in a very threatening manner. And, our office being too small to swing the proverbial cat (and trust me, that better be proverbial. Cats do not take kindly to such treatment), he had already cracked the back of the rickety chair on his side of the desk, smashed one of our three remaining overhead fluorescent lights, and had come alarmingly close to my ears where I crouched on top of the rusty old filing cabinet. I bared my teeth at him, but he ignored me. Most of our clients do. All his attention was on Callum.
“I want my money back!” Our visitor had gone a quite startling shade of red, and it occurred to me that we might be saved any further trouble if he just keeled over of an aneurysm right here. But our luck was never that good. And then there was the fact that dead bodies can be kind of tricky to explain, so it was probably better if we got rid of him in a rather less final manner.
“We did the job you asked for,” Callum said again, his voice calm. He was still sitting in the slightly less rickety chair on his side of the desk, hands folded in front of him as if this were a perfectly normal client meeting – and, to be fair, it wasn’t that unusual for us. There was a reason we only had three lights left. Well, two, now.
I could have told Callum not to bother though, that the cool collected approach wasn’t going to work. Baldy wasn’t the sort of person who listened to reason. Baldy was the sort of person you bopped on the nose then fled while he was still confused. Of course, that was a bit hard when he was between us and the door, waving a tyre iron around like he had places he wanted to insert it. Actually, given the conversation of the last few minutes, that was exactly what he wanted.
“This wasn’t what I asked for!” the man bellowed. “You were meant to find out where the money was going!”
“Well, we did—” Callum started, which was evidently not what our delightful client wanted to hear.
An inarticulate roar ripped out of the big man’s throat, filled with all the pain and fury of an injured animal, and he brought the tyre iron down on the desk so hard I thought the wood was going to shatter. It would have, if it had been one of those flimsy modern desks. As it happened, our desk was an ancient artefact Callum had found in a charity shop, and the floor probably would’ve given way before it did. All that happened were a few more scars joined the rest on its surface and Callum finally jumped out of his chair, shoving it into the wall behind him.
“I want my money back!” the man bawled.
Problem was, even if we’d wanted to give it back, we couldn’t. We had this thing called rent, plus every now and then we liked to eat.
Callum put his hands out to the man like a lion-tamer. “Sir, I’m sorry this wasn’t what you wanted to hear. But the problem with private investigations is that we rarely turn up things people do want to hear.”
The man roared again and flailed at the desk with the tyre iron, scattering pens, old paperbacks, a mug of tea and the folder of photographs to the floor while Callum watched with a resigned look on his face. I peered down at the photos. I was particularly proud of the one that showed the man’s business partner stripped naked except for a cap of leaves and flowers – well, two caps, but let’s not get into details – and being painted green by two older women in wellington boots and gardening gloves. Everything had actually been shot in video on one of those little action cameras, but I’d managed to hold position on the windowsill at the perfect angle to avoid reflection and catch the business partner’s rather blissful face. Apparently being rendered moss-green, adorned with daisies and walked on as if you were a lawn was both delightful and (given the vanishing funds) a pricey business. Humans.
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