From Sherlock Holmes to Philip Marlowe, Jim Rockford to Sam Spade, who doesn’t love a private detective? Apart from the subject of their investigations, obviously.

But, says Andy, even they can be won round.

He describes a long and complicated case in which his agency, Answers Investigations, whose Dorset office he runs, was asked to help a businessman who alleged he was being blackmailed.

“He was married but had been having a relationship with a woman he’d met through a cheating site, then he dumped her,” says Andy.

“He got in contact with another profile from the site and sent her some images of his genitals. It’s amazing how many people do this!”

Unbeknown to the client, the ‘profile’ was a false one created by the dumped woman and she contacted him to let him know that unless he paid £25,000, she would dispatch the images to his wife and children.

“She did send them to his wife and then said she’d send them to his daughter,” says Andy.

After the woman sent them to a fake social networking account for the man’s daughter, set up by the agency, investigators visited the woman’s home to explain that the daughter was under the age of 18 and, technically, what had happened was against the law.

“She knew she had made a mistake and we got talking,” he says.

“The end result was her providing a written assurance that this would not happen again. As no one under the age of 18 had actually received the images the law had not been broken but I did tell her we were going to advise our client to chuck his smartphone away and buy a cheap one from Tesco’s, so he couldn’t do this again, and she ended up laughing,” says Andy.

He sees this as the best outcome. “I don’t like being horrible to people, or being a bad cop because we are not there to police people’s morals,” he says.

However, when they discover criminal wrongdoing they do report it.

He’s anxious to dispel the traditional image of his profession as seedy, trench-coated individuals, riffling through people’s bins and blagging their way into the Police National Computer.

“That’s illegal and so is bin-trawling, and dealing in stolen information,” he says.

In the USA private investigators are licensed and have the same ability as the police to use the national computers and resources.

“When we serve legal papers we have a bit of backup, you can say we are court officers as such, because we have been instructed by the court to do it,” he says.

“But apart from that we have the same rights as any ordinary citizen although all our investigators are Criminal Records Bureau checked.”

He keeps an eye on the Dorset and Hampshire beat but will work anywhere his agency – which has a number of offices – asks him to. The work is varied, ranging from paper-serving to photographing people having sex in cars – infidelity and stupidity seem to create a lot of work for PIs – hate mail, tracking down missing people, and domestic or workplace theft.

Police don’t tend to get involved in these cases as there has usually been no break-in, he explains.

“These cases usually involve an amount of money or perhaps jewellery going missing from a someone’s home and they suspect a family member, or maybe someone has been accessing company documents or stealing goods and selling them on,” he says.

He worked with a cosmetics company which suspected its wares were being stolen and flogged on at a car-boot sale and they used what he believes is the only in-house fingerprinting service employed by a UK PI firm to nail the wrongdoers.

Andy trained to take fingerprints, an echo, perhaps, of his original ambition to become a police officer, which he pursued until he was 17 when an accident put paid to his chances of passing the fitness test.

He studied criminology at university and joined an engineering company in Dorset.

“I became a manager pretty quickly but one day, when I looked at my manager and his lunch box and realised I knew he’d be having a cheese and pickle roll because it was a Tuesday, I knew it was time to leave,” he said.

After making a few inquiries he started working for Answers, commuting 180 miles a day just to get to work.

Like many jobs dealing with the difficult side of life it can be depressing as well as, he says, ‘hilarious’.

But isn’t it horrible, having to tell clients they are being cheated on, sometimes in the most cynical and callous ways?

“They would never call us if they didn’t have suspicion in the first place,” he says.

“They might seem a little upset and yes, sometimes they cry, but then they become exceptionally strong.”

Sometimes, if the information Answers has uncovered is so serious it must go to the police, investigators offer to go to the station with their client to help them through the ordeal of reporting it.

But there are also the days like the one where: “A naked Nigerian lady opened the door when I was serving papers on this man – he got her to do it to throw me off the scent! That’s the best thing about this work – you really don’t know what will happen next.”

  • answers.uk.com