He let go of the wire, picked up my glass of wine from the table and downed its contents in one. He stared me dead in the eye for a short while and then sucked the last dregs from the glass.

‘Fuck it,’ he declared. ‘Tell the wife I’m sorry,’ and he marched out of the bar. I slipped back down into my chair, retrieved the box and rearranged my blouse. The barman came over and asked me if I was okay.

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Could I have a look at the cocktail menu?’

Not long after, Tommy returned to find me sipping on my drink, the camera sat on the table in front of me.

‘Hi, babe, how come he’s gone? Did you get the footage?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, it’s all on there. Job done I reckon. He asked us to say he was sorry to his wife.’

‘I’ll put it in the report. Doubt it will make any difference.’

‘It might,’ I replied, not really believing that it would. As we left the bar Tommy placed the glass from which The Chump had drunk into my handbag. It was something he was always told to do when on a surveillance job, collect something that the ‘subject’ had handled.

Tommy hardly spoke to me for the next three days. Just seeing me sat with another man had turned him sour. Just leave, I kept saying to myself, but the thought eventually faded and hid itself under the carpet for a year or so. It came back with a bang last week, though, when I was doing a surveillance job for Tommy. This was one of those jobs where I get told nothing and I ask no questions. The subject of the job was a workmate of Tommy’s at Cityside Investigations. His name was Brendan. All I had to do was watch him closely during a meeting he was having with someone at the Grove Tavern pub in Camberwell. My job was to identify the person he was meeting and more specifically watch to see if Brendan handed any documents, or in fact anything at all, over to that person. Tommy was not happy with me going there on my own, but his boss required him to be elsewhere.