Catching a cheat

A private investigator once said, about catching a cheat, "You need to get solid evidence, which leaves no room for excuses or alibis". What alternative will there be for anyone, when presented with those findings? Apart from the obvious "OOPS!" I caught my cheat when I went visiting randomly. So Autumn 1992, for me, is a legend!

I had my suspicions for some time about everything not being as it was presented to me. Indeed, partner was one of those people, always keen to meet up. But, some implausible excuse always prevented it by popping up at the eleventh hour. "Reliably unreliable" is the more grammatically succinct phrase one friend always uses. In fact you wonder if such people arrange their diary so far in advance, it is inevitable they will have time to think up a semi-implausible excuse or hope something inexcusable does not clash when the time comes.

I used to work in recruitment. My forever cry was "Once you have accepted a booking, we expect you to honour it and do the work". Then, in the style of one favourite teacher, I would add "It's not that we're unsympathetic if you have a car-crash, or your parents die unexpectedly or your granny gets kidnapped. It's just that for some people, those types of event do seem to happen with extreme regularity". In other words, draw your own conclusions on the outcome if you start developing a reputation for being unreliable! But I digress...

I was inclined to say, after a few "let-down" incidences, "well, when you've arranged to do something don't arrange to do something else on the same day". Simple really isn't it, or it should be? Unless, there is someone else in the frame. Someone you cannot excuse yourself from, because they do not know about your infidelity... or maybe they do? So a few months before this D-Day, the first of a few checks was going to the records office. I had a look at the voter's roll, something I swore I would never do for anybody I was having a relationship with. But back then, I was not as clued up as I am now. These days, my modus operandi is, I do not trust people until they prove to be trustworthy. But on this occasion knowing who else lived in the property, when there was supposed to be none, I knew what I was prepared to find out. Then a colleague suggested "Have you checked the Land Registry?" which had not occurred to me, but I soon found out it was easy to do.

Arrival, and invitation inside, all led to me seeing a reporter's notepad, a calculator, a pen, a of pair reading glasses and stacks of utility bills under scrutiny, on a coffee table. I made a few cryptic comments beforehand, one of them being about the proposed landscape gardening project. "You're very good doing all this for your landlord". Puzzled bewilderment faced me in response to that statement. I could still have been mistaken about some detail, which could easily be explained away. Until, I caught sight of the utility bills close-up.

"So, tell me something" I asked. "If it's your house, why aren't the bills in your name?" Partner got over that hurdle quite well. "I have an arrangement. My lodger pays the standing charges on the bills, because I'm always away". "Always away?" Now that was a work of fiction by itself. In making a retrospective recall of this story, a girl called Nikki said to me "Doesn't matter! If it's your house, of course the bills are in your name".

So continuing the story... "That's a clever idea" I said. "So, is that the reason why he's also the registered landowner and got a current mortgage on the property as well then?" The words from a well-known television commercial should come to mind: "and he wasn't prepared for that".

Obviously, what it also told my cheat was that I had been checking up on them. For them, I hope their lasting thought was "ouch!" As another author said in a novel, describing someone that perpetually told fibs, in this case I would be the one who looked "one shade on the safe side of innocent". While my ex - if they ever were anything to begin with - was well into the danger zone of having told whoppers.

Author note: Details have been misidentified to protect the guilty from identification. "But you know who you are".