The Salmon of Doubt

In the morning, things suddenly seemed wonderfully clear and simple. He didn’t know the answer to anything, but he knew what to do about it. A few phone calls to the bank had established that tracing the money back to its origins was going to be hideously difficult, partly because it was an inherently complicated business anyway, partly because it quickly became clear that whoever had been paying the money to him had taken some trouble to cover his or her tracks, but mostly because the man on the foreign desk at his bank had a cleft palate. Life was too short, the weather too fine, and the world too full of interesting and exciting pitfalls. Dirk would go sailing.

Life, he was fond of telling himself, was like an ocean. You can either grind your way across it like a motorboat or you can follow the winds and the currents—in other words, go sailing. He had the wind: he was being paid by someone. Presumably that someone was paying him to do something, but what he had omitted to say. Well, that was a client’s privilege. But Dirk felt that he should respond to this generous urge to pay him, that he should do something. But what? Well, he was a private detective, and what private detectives did when they were being paid was mostly to follow people.

So that was simple. Dirk would follow someone.

Which meant that now he had to find a good current: someone to follow. Well, there was his office window, with a whole world surging by outside it—or a few people at least. He would pick one. He began to tingle with excitement that his investigation was finally under way, or would be as soon as the next person—no, not the next person, the ... fifth next person walked around the corner that he could see on the other side of the road.

He was immediately glad that he had decided to build in a brief period of mental preparation. Almost immediately number one, a large duvet of a woman, came around the corner with numbers two and three being dragged unwillingly along with her—her children, whom she nagged and scolded with every step.

Dirk breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t going to be her.

He stood by the side of his window, quiet with anticipation. For a few minutes no one further came round the corner. Dirk watched as the large woman bullied her two children into the newsagent opposite, despite their wails that they wanted to go home and watch TV. A minute or two later she bullied them back out into the sunshine again despite the their wails that they wanted an ice cream and a Judge Dredd comic.

She yanked them away up the road, and the scene fell quiet. The scene was a triangular-shaped one, because of the angle at which two roads collided with each other. Dirk had recently moved to this new office—new to him, that was; the actual building was old and dilapidated and remained standing more out of habit than from any inherent structural integrity—and much preferred it to his previous one, which was miles from anywhere. In his old one he could have waited all week for five people to walk around a corner.

Number four appeared.

Number four was a postman with a pushcart. A small bead of perspiration appeared on Dirk’s forehead as he began to realise how badly wrong his plan could go. And here was number five.

Number six was a different proposition altogether: a rather delicious-looking woman in jeans, with short, thick black hair. Dirk swore to himself and wondered if he hadn’t secretly meant six instead of five. But no. An undertaking was an undertaking, and he was being paid a lot of money. He owed it to whoever was paying the money to stick to whatever agreement it was that they hadn’t actually got. Number five was still standing there dithering on the street corner, and Dirk hurried quickly downstairs to take up the chase.

As he opened the cracked front door he was met by number four, the postman with the pushcart, who handed him a small bundle of letters. Dirk pocketed them and hurried out into the street and the spring sunshine.