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“As a private investigator, my job is to track unfaithful spouses. Here’s what I’ve learned about cheating”
When you trail people having affairs for a living, how does it affect your view of human relationships? As told to Rachel Thompson.
Many moons ago, I was a soldier working in a reconnaissance unit for the British army. My job was to gather intelligence on enemy forces and relay that intel back to our commanders. These days, I no longer use those skills to defend the nation. Instead, my focus is a little closer to home: I’m a private investigator, tasked with surveilling unfaithful spouses and relaying evidence of infidelity back to their partners.
It’s a job that’s taken me to some interesting places. There was the time I followed a client’s husband who was staying in London “on business”. After going out for dinner in Mayfair with some associates, he withdrew a large sum from a cash machine and returned to his hotel, where he rang his wife and said he was turning in. But just as she called to tell me I could stand down for the night, I saw her husband leave the hotel and hop into a black cab.
I followed him for a few miles in my own car, an unobtrusive model that’s designed to blend in, and watched him enter a brothel. A bedroom on the second floor was illuminated by a pink light, the blinds wide open. From my vantage point outside, I saw my client’s husband enter the room – accompanied by two women. I knew she would be devastated, but I had the evidence I’d been hired to find.
I started working on what’s known as ‘the circuit’ – a group of self-employed operatives who conduct covert surveillance for private clients – after leaving the army, where my intelligence-gathering training included covert photography. My colleagues and I use methods including close observation, hidden cameras and vehicle tracking when we’re investigating suspected infidelity. People often assume we can hack phones and see people’s messages, but this isn’t the case – in fact, it would be illegal to do so. Most of the time, we catch the cheater in the act, providing our clients with physical evidence such as videos or photographs.
Before we start surveilling a suspected cheater, we work with our client – their partner – to find out when they believe the infidelity is happening (for instance, after work on a Friday). Then we covertly trail the spouse to see if they’re having an affair. We’ve tracked cheating partners to hotels, brothels and massage parlours; I’ve followed subjects on foreign holidays with their lovers. If the infidelity takes place at their home, we can deploy concealed cameras to monitor comings and goings from the property. If the client believes it’s happening online, we can do a background search to look for hidden internet profiles on dating sites.
You learn a lot about human behaviour when you see so many cases of unfaithful partners. My main takeaway is the importance of trusting your intuition – I often rely on mine doing this job, and it rarely lets me down. We’ve all been in situations where something feels ‘off’, and by the time I’m involved, the client usually knows something is going on; they just want the proof. Someone who is cheating will gaslight their partner to try to make them doubt themselves – this is something I see all the time. It’s disturbing behaviour. It’s so important to recognise the signs of gaslighting and to know when it’s happening to you.
This doesn’t just apply to suspected cheating, either. One woman contacted me because she had a strong feeling her ex-husband had installed listening devices or covert cameras in her home. They’d split up two years prior, but he still seemed to know things about her that she hadn’t shared with him. She’d turned the house upside down to look for the devices herself, even buying a bug detector online. But it didn’t work, and the police said they couldn’t do anything because she didn’t have any evidence.
In the end, she called me from her back garden because she didn’t feel she could talk inside her own home. Within five minutes of getting to her house, I found a listening device plugged into the wall in the living room. Her ex had bugged multiple rooms in the property before moving out two years prior – listening in as she spoke to a counsellor in the aftermath of the divorce. I provided her with a 35-page report of all the devices I found, which she was then able to take to the police. Her ex is now being prosecuted for numerous offences. This just goes to show just how important it is to listen to your own instincts and not downplay your feelings as paranoia.
When I find evidence of someone cheating, I remain covert. It’s not my job to challenge them; I try to remain completely neutral and don’t let my emotions come into my work. I’m there to gather the evidence for my clients, and it’s up to them how they use it.
Once, a client asked to join me to watch her husband exit a hotel with his girlfriend. It’s not something I normally allow, and I advise against it, but she insisted on being there. When her husband emerged from the hotel, my client got out of my car and confronted him; after the commotion died down, she was so upset that I had to give her a lift home. If you do hire a private investigator, it’s important that you’re not afraid of change. I see that a lot: clients who choose to bury their heads in the sand after their partner’s infidelity is confirmed, rather than face up to the reality of what’s happened.
Doing this job, I see just how unpredictable people can be. I question everything. But I’m pretty level-headed – you have to be in this line of work. It hasn’t affected my family life at all; I don’t have any trust issues, and I’m certainly not going to be tracking my wife’s car anytime soon. We have a very happy life with our newborn son and our dog. If anything, my career has made me far more emotionally intelligent. I’m certainly an expert people watcher.
Jack Charman is the founder of National Private Investigators
Images: Getty
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