On the Trail for Private Eyes!

They get up to all sorts of things, and as David Randall discovers, mobile phones help private investigators get results

The very words ‘Private Investigator’ conjure up the images of cool, Sam Spade types in macs and fedoras, getting the better of the bad guys and putting the world to rights before sloping off to a bar to meet a gorgeous blonde.

Of course, in the real world, it’s not quite as glamorous as that, but as we discovered when we took a closer look at the private eye, their work is interesting and challenging, and technology, including mobile communications technology, plays its part in helping private eyes get results

Watching the detectives

Peter Heims, who runs his own private investigation business in Leatherhead in Surrey, almost gave up on the idea of becoming a private eye, until he found himself in the right place at the right time.

“I served my time in the paras and when I can out, I wanted to go into the police,” says Peter. “Trouble was, I was five foot seven tall and they wouldn’t have me. A friend suggested private investigation, which was something I hadn’t considered, so I went round 15 agencies in London. When I told them I had no experience, they all showed me the door, until I tried the last one in Surbiton. She had just lost one of her investigators an hour earlier, who had quit after an argument. She told me he had an assignment that night and if I could take it on, the job was mine.”

Private lives

Peter took the job on, and two years later, bought the business. That was in 1955, so he is nothing if not experienced. At one stage, his company employed 35 staff, and while he has now scaled it down somewhat, he says he’ll never retire, citing the examples of fellow private eyes who were still working right up to their deaths in recent years, one aged 89, the other 94. “The work is just too interesting to give it up,“ says Peter.

There is no such thing as a typical day for Peter, given the variety of tasks he is asked to take on, but he says that whatever he is asked to do, technology can usually help.

“Whatever you are asked to do, the faster you can do it, the better it is for your profit margin,” he says. When tracing missing people, for example, Peter uses CD-Roms with the names of everyone on the voting register as a starting point, and the Internet is another valuable source of information.

As for mobile communications, Peter was a keen user of one of the original earphones back in the l980s. They were in such short supply that a businessman once offered me £10,000 for mine, says Peter. It’s a sign of how much he needed the phone (or perhaps how little he needed the money) that Peter refused the offer.

We wondered how the earphone compared with Peter’s current mobile, a sleek Nokia, on the Cellnet network. “You couldn’t begin to compare the two,” he says. ”When I first got my earphone, every call had to go through an operator and the service and coverage were nothing like today.”

Peter says that he uses his mobile only for voice calls, but that this still saves him lots of time.

“If I have a writ to serve on someone, I visit their house and knock on the door and there may be no answer. Without the phone, I would have to go away and try again later but the mobile means I can phone them up and say I need to speak to them on a private matter, which, if there is anyone in the house, is usually enough to bring them to the door.”

On other jobs, mobile phones help Peter and colleagues work together to track their quarry. “If you’ve got a couple of cars on the case trailing someone, you can use the mobiles to keep in touch with each other and make sure that one car is always on their tail,” says Peter.

“Or if you’re waiting for someone to leave their house, it’s difficult to know which way to park the car, because you don’t know which way they are going to go when they leave the house. With a couple of you on the case, you can have someone keeping an eye on the house with a car parked well out of sight somewhere. Then when they leave the house, the look-out can call up the car and tell them which way to go.”

True Crime

Norman Smith established his private investigation business in 1968 after working for 18 years in the legal profession. Because of his legal background, the vast majority of his work is referred to him from the legal profession, and includes criminal defense work, surveillance and tracing debtors and missing people.

Norman uses a Panasonic G520 on the Cellnet network. He’s been using the mobile since his old earphone gave up the ghost three years ago. “It is mainly used for other people to contact me,” says Norman. “But there are occasions when it can come in useful for making outgoing calls. If you’re going to call on someone who is proving evasive for example, if you call him up at home from the mobile from outside the house, then at least you know that he is at home when you knock on the door.”

All about the Private Eyes

It’s a difficult to put a figure on the number of private investigators operating in the UK. When the Government Committee chaired by the late Sir Kenneth Younger produced its 1972 report: ‘The younger Committee Report on Privacy’, which examined the invasion of individual privacy, it estimated that there were some 5000 private investigators active in the UK, and professional private detectives we spoke to estimated that the number has probably doubled since then.

And according to private eye Peter Heims, the vast majority, around 85%, are ex-policemen.

You need no professional qualifications or accreditations to operate as a private detective, though if you wish to become a member of the private investigators’ trade body, the Association of British Investigators (ABI), you have to take an examination.

The Association has around 400 members and dates back to 1913. The work of a private investigator is nothing if not varied.

The bread and butter work of many general purpose private eyes is the tracing of debtors and serving of process, but beyond this, a private investigator can become involved in all sorts of activities, These include repossessions, insurance investigations, tracing missing persons and missing heirs. betting enquires, fraud enquiries, credit enquiries, locating assets, takeover bids, industrial espionage investigations and undercover assignments.

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Peter Heims
Norman Smith