LIVING

My grandfather was one of the first private detectives in Spain. He started the business in the 1920s. We are based in the centre of Barcelona but we cover the whole of Catalunya, the whole of Spain, and we have delegate offices in Miami and Argentina.

I started helping my grandfather out with investigations when I was very young, about 15 or 16 years old. His philosophy was “If you don’t ask, you don’t know” and he taught me the art of non-verbal communication which is very important in this line of work.

You have to develop your instincts. When someone shows me a photo of someone they want followed or a missing person, before deciding anything I study that person’s body language and habits. If they are drinking whisky, I will notice how much whisky they drink, and I will ask myself why they are drinking whisky and not rum, for example.

It is a very human profession. If you don’t understand people, you won’t understand anything. Where there is a murder victim, they will almost always have had some relationship with the killer. On the other hand, we have serial killers who kill just to kill, so in those instances, you have to discover the signature that the killer has left, and then interpret what this person is trying to tell us.

The police work step-by-step. The job of a private investigator is to obtain all types of information and analyse it to get the bigger picture. We have a computer program that allows us to analyse people’s habits and movements and any other observations we make. It is very psychological.

One of the most curious cases I had was when a woman asked us to follow her husband. On the first day, he did some very strange things like drive around the block twice and I was thinking “Hmmm.” Finally, he drove up by the side of us and asked us outright what we were doing. It turned out his wife had put our business card in the same place as the ones for the gardener, the electrician etc., so he was onto us before we had a chance to get onto him.

We get around 12-15 new cases a week. They are usually about thefts, missing persons, or finding out where a spouse’s money is being spent. We get a lot of enquiries before Sant Jordi from women who want to know how many presents their husbands are buying, for example.