On the trail of our private detectives

AT the Haxby roundabout, I almost lose him. The high performance green saloon is already a couple of cars ahead. He slips off suddenly to the right, and before I can make the turn, two more cars have nipped in ahead of me.

I can still see him, just, brake lights winking as he catches up with a line of cars ahead. But with several cars between us, I know that if I run foul of any more traffic lights, he'll be away.

I hammer the steering wheel in frustration. Luckily, when he indicates to turn left, I spot him - and of the four cars between us, only one follows. I grin as I make the turn, just a single car between us now.

He weaves down a series of side roads, me making sure he's always just one or two cars ahead - far enough for him not to 'clock' me, but close enough so I don't lose him. Finally, he pulls into a quiet residential street and parks. I slip unobtrusively into a space a few doors back.

The driver gets out, a tall, well-built man with silvering hair, in smart pale trousers and a black leather jacket. He looks nondescript, as though keen not to draw attention to himself. I pretend to be consulting a map of York as he knocks on a door. A young woman answers. "Hello, sorry to bother you," I hear him say politely. "I'm looking for..."

There's a murmured conversation which I fail to catch, conscious I'm lurking too obviously. Then he turns away and walks in my direction. Before I have the chance to react, he's walked right up to me.

"You were very, very lucky!" he admonishes me.

Instead of turning to run, I grin resignedly. My 'mark' is retired police inspector turned private investigator David Farrar - and he's agreed I can 'tail' him on a job. His challenge to me before we set out: try not to lose him.

I've succeeded - but only, I agree, because the traffic lights ran in my favour.

David's job this morning is trying to trace a man who has gone overseas. David doesn't know why the man has gone. The solicitors didn't say, and David doesn't want to know - his job is just to find out where he's gone and get an address.

This quiet street was the man's last-known York address. David hasn't gone to the house itself, in case there are relatives still there who could get 'spooked'. Instead, he's knocked on a neighbour's door.

"I've had a bit of a result!" he admits. "I told her I was trying to find so-and-so. I said I was an old friend and I'd come to visit York and wanted to look him up. She said he didn't live there now, but a person with that name used to."

It's a result because now David knows he's got the right house - and he knows there are no relatives there either so he can call again and give a spiel about trying to trace an old friend without risk of alerting anyone. With any luck, the new occupant might be able to give him a forwarding address.

Tracing people is just one of the jobs private eyes take to make ends meet. There's no single-handed solving of unsolvable murders these days - and no beautiful, blonde dames in distress to be rescued, as in Philip Marlowe's day.

"We don't solve murders," David says with a wry grin. "That's a police job. The last thing a private detective wants to be doing is trampling all over the evidence and cocking it up."

Your 21st century private investigator, in fact, is more likely to be trailing a man because he's skiving off work pretending to have a bad back than because he's a member of the drug-dealing local mafia who's blackmailing a client. And if he's not doing that, he'll probably be trying to track down a long-lost relative, or attempting to serve injunction papers on a man whose wife has sought a court order to prevent him seeing the kids.

Even so, it's a job that calls on all of David's police skills, honed during more than 30 years on the job in North Yorkshire.

The key to good surveillance, he says, is blending into the background. Most people would never dream they were being followed as they drove around town - but somebody who's doing something they know they shouldn't is much more alert.

He's got a number of 'personas' - casual clothes and leather jacket, trilby and long coat - and the cars to go with them. He'd never drive his performance saloon in certain areas of York, he admits, because it would stick out like a sore thumb. He has a couple of knockabout old bangers for surveillance jobs in rougher areas instead.

One of the best 'disguises', he adds, is a dog - walk a dog on a lead, and you can go anywhere without arousing suspicion.

David's job when on a surveillance operation is to follow the person identified by his client and get the video footage that will prove the injury or bad back isn't as bad as claimed. If he's spotted, he can wave goodbye to the evidence. So often, especially if he's tailing a target by car, he will team up with other investigators.

"Having a few agents means you can follow him and you can change the eyeball car (the car that's in view of the target)," he says. "The eyeball car peels off at a roundabout and the second car will move up, follow for a mile, turn left at a junction when he goes right and then the car behind moves up. You've got radios to communicate, and you can be a mile back and still be in the caravan of surveillance vehicles."

David also takes matrimonial and domestic work - tailing husbands and wives a partner thinks may be straying. But his job isn't all about tracking down people who don't want to be followed - or even all about serving papers on people who don't want to be served. Sometimes, he says, it can be deeply rewarding - like the time he helped a 36-year-old man get in touch with the mother who had given him up for adoption at birth.

All he had to go on was a birth certificate, which gave the mother's address at the time her son was born. He went there, and there was a man in his 80s working in a nearby garden.

"I said, 'You don't remember such and such a family, do you?' and he said 'Oh, aye lad, I do'. He remembered the family had had a daughter, and she'd had a baby. I told him why I was trying to find her, and he put me onto a relative of theirs."

David managed to trace the mother's brother, who contacted her for him. She called and they talked: and while she wasn't ready to get in touch with her son straight away, a month later she called again.

"I gave her my client's telephone number, and a couple of months later he told me he had made contact with her," he says. "It was really satisfying. He'd been trying to find her for years, and because of this 86-year-old man I was able to do it for him."

David Farrar Investigations can be reached on 01904 763111. The next episode of 'The Investigators' is on BBC1 tonight at 9.30pm.

Updated: 11:03 Tuesday, April 10, 2001