Rebecca Jane - The Real Lady Detective Agency - A True Story

One day James announced he was moving out of our home. I was seven months pregnant with our daughter, and we’d been married for two months. It made no sense.

‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked.

‘I don’t like the house any more.’ That was his sole explanation.

What did he expect me to do?

‘You stay here, and I’ll move back in with you when you find somewhere else to live. In the meantime, I’m moving in with Martin.’

So I found myself living alone in a three-bedroom detached farmhouse, totally isolated. I was miles from the village, and the nights were cold, dark and very lonely. It felt as if I had nothing but silence for company. I could have moved back home to my parents’, but did I really want to do that? I was married, had a child on the way, I had bills and a house of my own. Why would I just up sticks and move back in with them?

The rumours around the village got worse. Now that my husband had moved out, I questioned everything. Was he really at his friend Martin’s? Had he moved out because of me? Did he want someone else? No one moves out simply because they don’t like their house; there must be another reason. My paranoia became so great I couldn’t function. I went to sleep every night with questions swirling around my head, like a song on repeat.

James and I were still talking, and had no intention of splitting up, but I was hitting rock bottom without even realising it. I’d ring his phone on a Friday after work to see what we were doing that weekend, and it would be off. First time I’d let it slide; second, I’d start to worry; and after an hour I knew what the score was. He’d done it again – vanished. Where he had gone was anyone’s guess. I’d crash to the floor, sobbing my heart out.

I was seven months pregnant. I couldn’t cope any more. I needed to do something about my paranoia and find out what he was up to. I dived into the Yellow Pages . Scared and nervous, I picked up the phone and rang some private investigators. I’d tell them the situation, explain why I had suspicions and say that I wanted my husband followed for a period of time.

I telephoned three altogether, and felt far worse than I had before I’d spoken to them. They were the classic investigators, cold and hard. They didn’t care whether my suspicions were valid. They didn’t care how traumatised I was, or give any thought to my feelings. They all had the same attitude: they wanted to sting me for a ridiculous fee and get me off the phone as soon as possible. Some would only work for me if I hired them for a minimum of a day, some the minimum of a week. Either way, when they were charging close to £100 per hour, it was looking like a costly exercise. There were no guarantees I would get any information. I might even decide to have him watched on one of the days he came straight home. I felt more paranoid than ever, but I wasn’t stupid. I wasn’t going to throw nearly £1,000 down the drain with no guarantee of a result.

In desperation I called one of my best friends, Jess. We’d known each other for six years at that time, and had been through a lot together. When we met, I was working in my first job out of college as a marketing coordinator for the local nightclub, and I saw Jess there almost every night because she loved to party. Then one Sunday when I walked in to work, Jess was sitting on a sofa. As always, I was happy to see her friendly face, but the light in her eyes had gone. I said hello in my best cheery voice and asked how she was, but Jess shook her head. I sat down next to her.

‘My mum’s dying,’ she said.

I honestly thought it was a weird joke. ‘Yeah, right!’ I replied.

‘No, seriously. She went in for a little operation two days ago, and there’ve been complications. Me and Adrian [her brother] have just been at the hospital. They’ve said we need to turn off her life support.’

Jess’s mum was a wonderful woman. She made me laugh and her house was always open to any of Jess’s friends. Her father wasn’t around and the whole time I’d known her, it was just Jess and her mum. They were inseparable and best friends. She was only in her forties and Jess was only eighteen, so her sudden illness was very shocking.

The next day Jess and Adrian went to the hospital to say goodbye to their mother and turn off the machine. A week before she’d been fighting fit and well, zooming around the house with the vacuum. Now, she was gone.

Next came the funeral, and every part of the aftermath. There was no one left to take care of Jess. She was on her own except for her brother, who was married. One thing was certain: a bond formed between us during that period that won’t ever be broken.

Anyway, back to my call to Jess.

‘I need your help. Where are you?’ I asked. She’d been roughly kept in the picture about my marriage for the past few months, but she didn’t know the full extent of it.

‘I’m at a football match. It’s brilliant! We’re winning 2–0!’ She was clearly inebriated, but I couldn’t have cared less.

‘I’m coming to get you – now,’ I said.

Jess was confused but after a short debate, she was told I wasn’t taking no for an answer, and one way or the other she was leaving the match early.

Fifteen minutes later I was parked up outside the football ground in my black Range Rover, which was my pride and joy. In my wing mirror I could see her running as fast as she could down the pavement. She threw herself into the car, asked what was wrong, and the whole sorry tale came bursting out. What I wanted to do was go to the pub where I suspected James was, and find out what he was up to.

‘Let’s go catch the bastard then,’ she agreed.

Jess was always there for me, and there would be plenty more times like this to come. In the following weeks we often sat outside pubs, peering through the windows to see if James was there. Our first attempts were totally unsuccessful, though. It was time to raise our game.

Jess wasn’t the only person roped in to help with the DIY detection plan. Stephanie and long-time friend Helen were also thrown in at the deep end. Stephanie and I met when I was a student, aged seventeen. We both worked a part-time job together at a call centre. The girl’s beauty makes me sick! I’ve seen her at her worst and still she looks perfect: a total natural beauty with long blonde hair and blue eyes. Very small, and slim too! Lots of girls know they’re good-looking, and use it. Steph doesn’t. There’s no part of her appearance that’s fake. She even refuses to wear fake tan on her face (which I simply don’t understand!). Men swoon over her. There aren’t many natural beauties around any more and they lap it up.

Helen is a couple of years younger than me. She’s a cross between a sassy type of cool-looking girl and a traditional lass. When we met some seven years ago she was working in a call centre. If you had to sum up Helen in one word, it would be ‘complex’. Although definitely young at heart, she loves to entertain and behind closed doors she morphs into something else. In a former life, she was Delia Smith – I kid you not! The woman is a total home-maker, which is not what you would expect from her appearance. Helen lives on her own and has done since she was eighteen. There’s no real reason for it; she’s just highly independent.

Over the next few weeks we girls got up to lots of things we shouldn’t. Nights were spent outside pubs in Barrowford with the car’s DVD replaying episodes of Friends , bags of Doritos on hand, and the obligatory pair of binoculars. Six times out of ten we found James. We would watch him snuggling up to girls at the bar, putting his arms around them, whispering in their ears – and when he kissed one in front of us I flipped.