Agent Provocateur (2 page)

Her friendships have depleted; her lifestyle has made sure of that. She doesn’t have much normal social time because that is when she works. She found people either disapproved of her, or got bored of maintaining a friendship with someone they never saw. Grace regrets her lack of female friends, but can do nothing about it. She is resigned to her life the way it is, and the security it offers is a comfort to her.

Grace became a honey trapper when she met a private detective, Andrew Brooks, in a bar. At first, he was another bloke buying her white wine and trying to get into her knickers. Finally admitting defeat, he gave her his card, having learnt that she hated her job. She called him out of curiosity, and he introduced her to the art of infidelity testing. She was highly sceptical when he first suggested it.

‘I’ve only just met you and you’re offering me a job?’ she asked. She was more than suspicious; it was as if this was his new ploy to get into bed.

‘Yes, I am. Or at least a try at a job. What I do is far more specialised than anyone gives it credit for. I hire intelligent women, not bimbos; you need to use your head far more than your looks. Women who fear their relationships are being threatened call us and ask us to help.’

‘Help how?’

‘If they suspect their partners are being unfaithful they need proof. That’s where you come in. Or you would. You go out and you test the man. It’s quite simple.’ He smiled.

She studied his face. He was in his late forties, she guessed, and not unattractive, but worn. She remembered thinking he was smart, he looked intelligent, well-groomed, but not sleazy. For some reason she had a strong urge to trust him.

‘Why me?’ she asked.

‘I’m looking for intelligent, attractive girls to work for me.’

‘I don’t know ... it sounds like prostitution.’ She blushed as she said this.

‘Not at all, Grace. I am not asking you to sleep with men for money, I’m asking you to become a detective. And for that you need a huge amount of skill.’

So, she wanted him to tell her more. Although he said men usually capitulate to a ‘honey trappers’ charms, they wouldn’t if the honey trapper didn’t know how to play it. The woman has to use detective work to find him (with help sometimes), her looks to appeal to him (sometimes using disguises), her personality to woo him (with inside information about his character), and psychology to reel him in. An infidelity tester will be socially engineering situations whilst making it seem that the man is in charge. She needs to possess intelligence, the ability to listen, to flirt and to gauge a situation. She has to be pragmatic; the mistress of contingency. From the job description, Grace was hooked, intrigued and she wanted to give it a go.

Instead of jumping in feet first, Andrew took her to watch one of his girls in action. As they posed as a couple in the corner, Grace paid Andrew no attention, focusing only on the woman working at her job.

‘That was interesting,’ she said afterwards.

‘So, you’re in?’ Andrew asked.

Grace nodded her assent.

After working for the detective for a year, she was headhunted by Nicole. Nicole’s agency is more specialist, and Grace was offered the opportunity to earn more money and be more in control. She is allowed more autonomy, has an office set up at home, and she is given more independence over the way she works. The biggest advantage to Grace is working for a woman. She trusts women.

Nicole is an ex-policewoman, although she hates to talk about that. She left to set up her own detective agency specialising in infidelity because she had had enough of bureaucracy. The reality is that she earns a lot more money, and is her own boss, and the boss of others. Nicole, ironically (or so Grace thinks), has been happily married for twenty years. She is forty one and looks slightly masculine – perhaps reflecting the tough side of the business. Grace once told her (after a couple of glasses of wine) that she would make a rotten honey trapper, and luckily for her Nicole agreed.

Ever since she started working in her line of business, Grace has never been able to work out Nicole’s motives. She doesn’t know if she is in it for the money, or if she genuinely wants to help women whose marriages/relationships are in trouble. She believes it is a combination, but she hopes it is because she wants to help women.

Because, of course, Grace works only for women. She doesn’t just dart around trying to seduce men, then telling their partners on them. She is not a tart; she is a professional. She has her own rules and she does not sleep with any of the men she is testing, although she hears that some girls do. She won’t, that is her rule and she sticks to it.

The business is based on the premise that the customer is always right. They have to be adaptable; cater for different needs, although the clients have one thing in common: all the women want to be told that their partners are not cheaters. Unfortunately, not many are ever told that.

After working in the business for a year, Grace developed her own formula for honey trapping, like a step by step guide. She has kept this as a mental guide and it has always helped her through a job.

Step one: Nicole gathers information from the client. This information includes a photograph, a list of the man’s interests and his profession. Perhaps most importantly, they need to know if the man has a specific type of woman that he is partial to. When Nicole hired Grace, she told her it was partly because of her personality, partly because of her brains, but also because she would be most men’s type.

Step two: they need to know where they will find the man. This is the difficult part, because the men aren’t always where they say they’ll be. If the client is unsure, then Nicole will send someone to follow the subject from his office (if they are testing after work) to the bar, to which Grace will then be summoned. The same applies if he is going out from home.

Step three: having identified the location, Grace will turn up, buy a drink and wait for the right time. If she has to talk to him when he is in a group (men are very rarely on their own), she will ease herself into the group before focusing all her attention on the man she has been employed to test.

Step four: catching the man. If the man is in a large group, this can be tricky. Often men don’t mind being chatted up in front of their friends, but in order to take it further they want to be more discreet. (After all, if they are cheating, the fewer people who know, the better.) If this is the case, then sometimes Grace will give out a mobile number. She has pay as you go mobiles, which the client is billed for because they are discarded after each case.

Step five: getting the evidence for the client. Sometimes it is enough for the client if the man calls Grace, but not always. A client will sometimes push for a date to be arranged, and then for a proposition before believing him a true cheat. Some women are so desperate to be wrong about their partners that they need to hear them asking for sex before they will admit they are rats.

Nicole explains the seduction techniques to the client before they proceed. The women will wear clothes that are attractive but not overtly sexy, they will make eye contact with the man in question, they will laugh at his jokes and tease and tell jokes. They are not employing any new techniques; they go with the tried and tested. They go with what works.

The client will get a verbal report or a recorded one, depending on what she wants. Some women want just to hear the conversation; others go so far as to want to see their men in action. Grace has small cameras and tape recorders that she can easily hide. Whichever, she always reports to Nicole, who reports to her client with total honesty. This, Nicole admits, is the hardest part of the job, and Grace agrees – breaking hearts, because that’s how they see it. But Grace tells herself that she is working for the greater good, because no woman wants to be with a man who is so willing to cheat on her. She is breaking hearts but in the process she is saving hearts. And she really does believe that.

People might assume that a woman working at such a job hates men, but Grace doesn’t, she is really quite keen on them. And she cites Nicole as another example; she has been happily married for so long, she adores her husband, she certainly can’t be seen as a man hater. However, Grace has always believed in fidelity. She has never believed that men should be allowed to use weakness as an excuse for cheating, nor listened when told that men can’t help themselves. She has no respect for men who cheat, but she has even less respect for women who excuse them. Every man can resist and every man should. She would love to tell a woman that a man has resisted her. However, she has never been in that position.

She thinks that perhaps her job has taken on new proportions. She now takes it personally; she needs to find him. She needs to find the man who will be faithful, the man who, when approached by the beautiful and sexy Grace, will say, no, no, because he has someone he loves already.

She had many discussions with Nicole about it. She needed to put things into perspective and her boss helped her.

‘Why do you do this?’ Grace asked.

‘I’m a detective, and one thing you learn pretty quickly in my business is that most disputes are about relationships. I didn’t set out to specialise but God, the number of people that wanted their partners followed, or tested, was huge. Now, it’s pretty much all I do.’

‘But how does it make you feel?’

‘Grace, I’ll be honest with you. Sometimes it makes me feel shitty, and it’s not just about infidelity in men. I am also hired by a number of men who think their partners are cheating – not as many as women, but it’s growing. I see what other people do to each other and it makes me sick. No one deserves to be lied to, to be cheated on; no one deserves the inevitable broken heart. You can let it get to you, totally consume your being, or you can just get on with it and think that every time you save someone from a bad relationship you’re almost doing them a favour. They may not see it straight away but one day they will.’

‘Do you think all men are cheats?’ Grace still held some hope of romance in the days when she started working for Nicole. She wanted to think that men weren’t all bad.

‘I wouldn’t be married if I thought that, Grace. No, not all men are cheats, but most of them are. I sometimes wonder if Paul is faithful because he knows that I’d be able to catch him. I wonder if he thinks I have tested him or will test him so he’s terrified of talking to another woman, but at the end of the day I think he loves me enough. Also he sees what I do and the hurt that can occur, and he’s just a decent man. And if there is one decent man, then there will be more. It’s just a case of finding them.’

At that moment, Nicole took a maternal interest in Grace, which she still has now.

When she wakes the following morning, Grace goes straight to her fish. She smiles and chats to them while they wait for breakfast, and once they’re fed she goes to make coffee. She stares blankly at her percolator and only when she is satisfied that it is filling properly does she go to the shower. By the time she has pulled on a tracksuit (her working-from-home uniform), her coffee pot is full and ready. She pours a cup of black coffee into her large round breakfast cup, and takes it to the study. She isn’t wearing any make-up.

She sits at her desk and looks at her notepad with messages from her machine last night. She switches on her computer, and while she waits for it to whirr away through the bits she doesn’t understand, she makes her first call of the day. It’s nine o’clock.

‘Oliver Williams, please,’ she asks the receptionist, and she types her password into her computer as she waits to be put through.

‘Oliver.’ He sounds so self-assured, but she knows he is not.

‘It’s me.’ She stares at her screen as she waits for him to say something. He always pauses whenever she calls him, as if he needs time to think about what he is going to say next. He never has that problem when he calls her. She finds it endearing and annoying at the same time.

Grace met Oliver just over a year ago, while she was actually working. When the man she was testing went to the loo, Oliver came over and gave Grace his card. He didn’t say anything and Grace decided that she liked his style. She liked his cheek. And he was really quite sexy. She has been seeing him, casually, ever since.

Oliver – or ‘Occasional Oliver’, as she calls him – has a busy lifestyle that should prevent him from making too many demands, although he still does. But because he isn’t the busy, businessman with a neglected wife and an indulged mistress cliché, Grace sees him whenever they both have time. It isn’t as often as he’d like. Oliver bizarrely wants to turn Grace into the neglected wife cliché, but she refuses. She likes Oliver; she likes that he likes her enough to want to neglect her on a permanent basis, although, of course, she will never agree to it.

He works in the music business, but Grace couldn’t describe his job. They are lovers but only in the way that Grace will allow. When they first met, she told him all about her job, and he tried to make her quit, which is when she told him that if they were going to continue they would do it on her terms, not on his. Which is why she continues to see Eddie, her other lover. She does not have to answer a charge of-infidelity because she is totally honest. They both know about their non-exclusive status and even if they don’t like it, they accept it. They are her men who cannot cheat.

Eddie, like Oliver, accepts the situation because he believes he is in love with Grace, and is convinced that one day she will wake up next to him and realise that he is the love of her life. Then she will quit her job. Neither of them is married, but Grace believes they see other women. She needs to believe this. There is nothing underhand about the arrangement: it suits her and, according to the men, it suits them as well. No one can cheat on her because she won’t put herself in that position. It’s as simple as that.

Eddie is the man who has been in Grace’s life the longest. Eddie is a fashion buyer. She used to be his assistant, but they didn’t sleep together until she had long given up her job and started in her current role. He is single, in his early fifties, and is too much of a confirmed bachelor to settle down. He never pressures Grace because he enjoys his life and their arrangement too much. He thinks he might be in love with her, but he is in love with his freedom more. They don’t see each other very often. With Grace having little social time anyway, and with two men to entertain, she neglects Eddie for long periods.