“I had ideals,” Wickes said. “Don’t get me wrong.” He was talking about his own career. Putting me in the picture.
Confession is good for the soul, right?
I was curious what he had to confess.
Ideals.
I got into this gig so I could lose myself in other people’s lives. But maybe I was deluding myself when I talked about making the world a better place, providing some kind of truth.
Ideals.
They’re what people expect you to have. What you use to excuse your real motivations.
Wickes’s ideals were sound, maybe even a tad more romantic than I’d expect from the burly man who sat across the other side of the table. He got into the investigation business to help people.
I couldn’t sense guile or deceit, and he met my gaze straight on. Did I believe him? It was hard not to.
“Truly,” he said, and gestured, “Hand on heart.” He straightened his back, closed his eyes, held the pose melodramatically for a moment before relaxing. “Sounds like a bad joke, right enough. But we were all young and principled once. Right?”
That last word made me flinch, maybe even look away. Did he catch that? See past my composure for a moment? I would have, I knew it.
What Wickes found, the deeper he got into the business, was that he had a talent for finding people. He started working with another investigator in Glasgow, learned in a kind of unofficial apprenticeship. “A lot of security work. I’ve never been the wee man, you can probably tell. Guess I looked like a goon, whatever. He had me work the rackets. The kind of jobs I guess someone like you wouldn’t even consider.” He smiled at me. Vaguely condescending. Did he mean it to be? I wasn’t sure.
“These days, you lads are minted and trained and shaped and moulded. Told right and wrong, what you can and cannot do. Back in my day…we had no national organisation. We weren’t monitored by bastards like the Security Industry Authority. No, we learned the trade on the streets. Christ, why would you even think about organising a business like ours? Once it becomes respectable, the services people require are impossible to provide.”
There was a strange air of nostalgia to his voice. A pining for days long lost. Not for the innocence, but for a power and influence that had eluded Wickes in later years.
His early work was in enforcement. His word, not mine. He didn’t seem to shy away from it or try and disguise the work as anything other than it was. He dissuaded abusive husbands, confronted philanderers, made straight up calls for debts that needed collection. As time went on, he started to demonstrate an aptitude for tracing the disappeared.
“I went into business for myself somewhere around 1997,” he said. “Wickes Investigations. Above board. Got myself registered with the local police. Didn’t join the Association, but that was laziness more than anything, you know? I specialised in trace and debt collection.” He smiled. “And other jobs, off the record.”
Deborah came to him through a recommendation. He didn’t give me the specifics, and honestly, I didn’t ask. His past was his past.
Did it matter? Not for what I wanted to know.
We all have our sins. Our mistakes. Not all of them reach out to the present.