As Ted laid the photos out on her desk, she heard a scrappy bark assert itself at Wags Away Canine Day Care. Ha! Ted felt a familiar rush of pride, but she kept her face immobile. Across the desk, Chantal was shifting in her chair. She looked worried sick, and Ted couldn’t help feeling sympathy. She focused and opened her report.
‘It’s good news. Andrew’s not cheating on you.’
‘He’s not?’
‘No.’
Chantal’s face lit up with relief, and Ted felt glad to be bearing good tidings for once. Overwhelmingly, the anxious spouses who employed her surveillance services had their worst fears confirmed. How many times had she sat here in her office at Edwina Bristol Investigations – or EBI, as she thought of it – and watched a client’s face crumble as they sifted through evidence they’d desperately sought but simultaneously dreaded?
Women who wanted to torture themselves with too many details, guys who couldn’t get out the door fast enough. You could never predict people’s reactions. Ted’s mind flew back to last week and a bloke whose weathered face was wet with tears he refused to acknowledge, even as she edged a box of tissues across the table at him. It was incontrovertible – infidelity sucked. Chantal was one of the lucky ones.
Ted watched her client pore over the surveillance pics of her husband, Andrew, visiting a Port Melbourne house for the past five Thursday nights. A woman with sleek dark hair appeared like clockwork and gave Andrew a visitor’s parking permit, but Ted had been forced to take her chances, and last week she’d scored a parking ticket – ninety bucks – an occupational hazard she couldn’t charge to Chantal.
‘The woman’s name is Eiko Asaka,’ she told Chantal. ‘She’s a cooking teacher.’
‘A cooking teacher?’
‘Yeah. At first, I wasn’t sure if that was relevant, but then I posed as a student and found out Andrew’s been having lessons.’
‘Oh, thank God. You’ve made my day. But why’s he been doing that in secret?’
‘To surprise you. He told Eiko you love Japanese food.’
‘I do!’
Ted was pretty partial to Japanese herself, with one notable exception. She remembered once being offered sea urchin – or ‘uni’ as the Japanese call it – at a tiny restaurant tucked behind the Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo, on a day so hot she thought her hair might fry. She didn’t know it was served live, and feeling the poor urchin wriggle around in her mouth had made her want to gag … but when in Rome, right?
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