ALL THAT Paul Hawkes needs is a television script loosely based on a novel by Raymond Chandler and starring Dennis Waterman, and the picture would be complete. Hawkes has been a private investigator for 28 years.
He was based in Brixton, South London; now he uses a small terrace house in the hinterland that lies in the shadow of the Hammersmith Flyover. The only giveaway to his calling is the 20-point locking system on the door.
Hawkes even has a dog — a Tibetan terrier, with a certain way of skulking — and a gimmick: not chewing gum or lollipops, but porridge, which he keeps on his desk at all times. He insists that he likes it, although the sample in front of me has the consistency of defunct wallpaper paste. A porridge-eating, dog-owning detective was written into a novel, Being Committed, by Anna Maxted. Says Paul: “The book is set in Hound Dog Investigations and ‘I’ have the indignity of being called Greg.”
Private-detective work is unique, being at once down at heel and glamorous, and Paul’s agency rises magnificently to the challenge of that image. So, how do you become a gumshoe, I ask him, in the tiny office of Research Associates, where yellowing local takeaway menus provide the main interest on the walls.
“I was 18 and went to work in an industrial-tracing company,” he says. “You were given a phone and a directory, and you had to trace people who had defaulted on their HP or run off with a Granada rental TV. I was this teenage Jack the lad, able to say that I was a private investigator, even though I was pretty low down the food chain.
Advertisement
“In the 1980s I had the opportunity to buy out the company and we started developing worldwide asset-tracing techniques.”
Paul worked, under cover, on high-profile cases — such as finding where the miners’ money had been sent abroad during the miners’ strike, and the Brink’s Mat and Polly Peck cases. He also supplied background information to other detective agencies.
In this shadowy world, Paul didn’t (and still doesn’t) always know who’s employing him or even what they really want (“They send you into a blacked-out room and tell you to report back, but you don’t know whether you’re looking for money or the light switch.”) He’s pretty sure that he has worked indirectly for the Government a few times. “On one assignment, the way I read it was that we were trying to find Saddam’s money.”
Was he successful? “We found some of it,” he deadpans.
He’s contemptuous of the villains he has come across and names one well-known thug now doing life in jail. “The thing with thieves is that they are the ultimate low-lifes because they know that they can’t get what they want legitimately.”
Advertisement
His asset-finding detection business at one time employed 13 full-time investigators. “We were big players,” he says. “We made a lot of people rich.”
Nine years ago, Paul switched to general detective-agency work. Today he still deals with industrial espionage, theft and fraud, but also with missing people and matrimonial cases. He now has a staff of three, plus nine regular investigators and surveillance teams he can call on, recruited from the SAS.
Bugging and debugging are routine. “But I also deal in small stuff — people who have paid builders who then scarpered without doing the work,” he says. “We trace birth parents and work for men in a midlife crisis who want us to find old flames. And, yes, there are a lot of cheating husbands and wives. I’ve never been in the police or CID, but when people know I’ve been in the business for 28 years, that says everything.”
It’s a fascinating, if sometimes murky, world which 14 years ago drew in Tara Browne to be his PA. She says: “I was 17 and on a youth training scheme in a solicitors’ office. I saw the advertisement and went for the interview, but didn’t get it and when they said, ‘If our candidate doesn’t work out, we’ll be in touch’, I thought, ‘Oh, yeah’. A few weeks later, they got in touch and I’ve been here since. I’m part of the furniture.
“Sometimes I think we really live up to our image — but perhaps I watch too many episodes of The Bill.”
Advertisement
One of Tara’s challenges is that, unlike every other PA who has featured in this column, she doesn’t always know where her boss is. That’s the nature of the job. She has a busy life, with a long commute and responsibilities as a single mother of Lewis, 11 months.
She is obviously indispensable to the business and came back when her son was just seven weeks old. She confesses that her life is a juggling act, but she loves her job.
She adds: “I deal with the clients, do the admin, type reports and I enjoy knowing things before anyone else does, although obviously I am discreet.
“Everything here is strictly confidential. Paul is scatty, warm and loveable. He is very kind and we have a laugh. I enjoy being his sidekick.”