Featuring Harry Box
Meet Harry Box, a sometime private investigator based in Alicante, on the sun-drenched Costa Blanca, whose life is more doom scrolling than detecting. Harry isn’t your typical slick PI. A former French Legionnaire, he’s standing in for an old colleague and friend who’s in forced exile.
Harry’s few cases have ranged from investigating elderly husbands’ younger wives to scrutinising a dubious property partner with a short-term car lease and a penchant for KFC.
But when an old couple knock on his office door, Harry’s antennae are not attuned as they should be. There starts a tense struggle to work through the lies and steer his own course.
A Corpse in Alicante introduces readers to a refreshingly blunt and self-deprecating former warrior who floats through life, trying to live and let live, but all too often finds the truly bizarre lurking beneath the seemingly mundane. Join Harry Box as he navigates the oddities of human nature, proving that even if he doesn’t give a shit, his cases are anything but boring.
Chapter 1
A nice old couple
It was one of the rare times when I was sitting in the office.
People don’t call on others any more – email does the job instead.
But this couple were old school. They even knocked on the slightly open door and waited until I shouted come in. They had manners – I should have taken their picture and hung it on the wall. It would have made a blank white wall look a little less like a backdrop for an impoverished doctor’s surgery.
“Are you Mr Box?” The old woman trilled from the now open office door.
She was straight out of central casting for a nice old lady: close-cropped grey hair, off-the-shelf, flower-splattered M&S dress, a huge handbag and thick tights. The man behind her looked bashful, as though reluctant to waste my time.
I was wasting my own time – business was a little slow and I had been checking my Instagram. Everyone looked like they were having a better life than me. I think they call it doom scrolling – it made sense. Funny how all the women were bountiful, youthful, interesting and always in a sun-draped location.
The men were equally vacuous, toned and well-hung, and were in on the joke; one that the scrollers never got and never would. A few minutes of that, and self-harming would seem like a decent way to kill a few minutes of downtime. I put my smartphone in a drawer in my desk. I was sure the old-timers wouldn’t appreciate it vying for my attention.
“I am, please come in.” I gestured to two empty seats in front of my desk. I figured they had got the wrong address and were looking for a neighbouring estate agent’s office. That wouldn’t be a problem. Shooting the breeze with a couple of old-timers from the UK wasn’t going to be a bad thing.
The couple made a bit of a thing about coming into the office and settling down into the hard seats. Like a couple of majestic old liners berthing at Southampton after a tough Atlantic crossing. Both of them had Persil-white complexions. The spring Alicante sun had not made a dent.
The old boy took his fashion sense from what I guessed was his wife. Today he was sporting an obligatory chequered shirt, drip-dry slacks and beige loafers. I guessed every day was the same. He had a grey comb-over that looked like a tarnished U-boat hatch.
It crossed my mind that if these were contract killers and I was the target, I was dead meat. Her handbag was so big it could have housed a Gatling gun. By the time I had started to lift myself out of my chair, I would have been applied to the wall like a fresh coat of red Artex.
I stupidly wondered if she had the agility to handle a Gatling – it was a bitch – I knew from experience. It was one of those thoughts that rushed through your head in a millisecond; the next one was that I needed to get out more.
I made a mental note to myself that if I survived this encounter, I would be more careful in future.
I waited until they were settled and relaxed when her hands gripped the top of her handbag, but they didn’t withdraw the Gatling.
I smiled my professional smile, which said, “please begin, I’m friendly and won’t bite.” I also leant slightly back in my chair. I’d read in a self-help book, left by a previous girlfriend, that such gestures were meant to relax the prospective customer. I needed such gimmicks.
I wasn’t what you’d call ideal Insta material. A little over six feet, with a face that resembled a scraggy outcrop. My designer beard was less designed and more cheap decorator. I had some hair left, which was kept under control by a strict military buzz cut. I hadn’t gone to fat, but the years hadn’t been kind. If I was in a bar, people thought I was the former bouncer, fired, but nowhere else to hang out. It made making friends hard.
The couple had given me the once over and perhaps regretted their entrance. My smile and leaning back tactic had maybe back-fired – made me look like a maniac who was grateful that his next victims were walk-ins.
I smiled more and spread my hands open, as if in church, welcoming the newly anointed.
“We’ve never used a private investigator before,” she said, her voice pitched high, strong, just a little nervous. The accent was slightly Yorkshire, maybe north Midlands. Her husband nodded, not wishing to add anything, happy for his wife to take the lead.
At least they were in the right place.
“We saw your ad in the newspaper we bought at the hotel shop.”
I’d purchased a small ad which would run for six months in the local rag. It wasn’t far from the private ads promising massages with happy endings. I was next to a large Swedish woman offering a fun half-an-hour, privacy guaranteed, her place, or yours. I didn’t know whether being close to her was a good, or bad thing, but at least someone had seen it. One hundred euros well spent, if the woman in front of me now had some money to spend.
“Happy to meet you. I’m Harry Box. I help people with a number of problems, most of them everyday, so please, this is very normal.” It was my standard patter. I hoped it worked on people. Because using a private investigator was, for most people, very not normal.
Most of my work had been for elderly husbands, anxious to find out what their younger wives were up to when they were playing golf and doing business. I’d had to stake out a couple of apartments, watch their wives do the shopping and lunch hard. It was exciting stuff – about as exciting as washing the car, which I rarely did, even if I had one.
I couldn’t pin anything on the wives. They were straight out of Wives of Somewhere – leaning into their 30s and getting used to the Botox lifts and silicone implants. Staying looking good was a full-time job. I felt sorry for them – I hoped having rich twats as husbands was worth the upmarket lifestyle.
The husbands seemed disappointed with my boring feedback and questioned why they had spent the money on finding out there was nothing going on. One questioned my invoice, until I told him what I thought about smart arses. He wouldn’t be a repeat customer.
I hadn’t been doing the job for long; my only other case had been a businessman who wanted me to check out his future partner. My client was an English bloke, new to the Costa Blanca and ready to invest a slice of his money into yet another new property development.
Property was a growth industry on the coast, that and golf courses. His would-be partner was from the Middle East, had all the right credentials, including a Rolex and a Mercedes coupe, and an address in Dubai. He dressed like he thought the English dressed – it came across as pushy car salesman. Englishmen always looked a bit crumpled, no matter how much they spent on clothes.
My client couldn’t get round his inbuilt racism – anyone with a too healthy tan, cropped thick black hair and a gold bangle around their wrist was suspect. I followed the bloke for a couple of days. He lived in a small apartment in one of the less desirable areas of Alicante. His Mercedes was on a short-term lease. He frequented KFC and did his own laundry.
He was accompanied by a youngish, Eastern European woman who looked to be the brains of the relationship, as well as the beauty. She had a figure as well – straight out of your average man’s dream. I figured she should front the business; most of the men wouldn’t be able to think straight.
When together, she did the talking with a lot of gesturing and raised eyebrows. He looked a disappointment to her, not the sharpest knife in the drawer. He’d be soon be gone and the woman would be flying solo, working the con – she’d do better. Good for her.
I relayed this to the client, who did a lot of lip chewing. He didn’t like it. He asked what I thought. I said I wasn’t paid to think; I just told what I’d observed. He said he still wanted to know. I told him I wouldn’t trust the guy with developing a garden shed, never mind a new apartment complex. I guessed that finally killed the partnership. I didn’t bother to find out. It wasn’t my business.
I maybe should have sung him a line. It’s what people in this business do. It’s about the clock—getting the most billable hours out of a client. In other words, you played it out, fed them titbits, and rarely delivered the punchline. I had a habit of blurting it straight out. Even the clients were upset, disappointed I hadn’t built a whole narrative around their particular issue. The problem was, I just didn’t give a shit. I was not a people person.
