I looked over at the new guy and wondered whether he’d make the cut. He wasn’t exactly new, but he was moulded in the cauldron of the recent floods. I was supposed to mentor him, and I liked what I saw so far. He wasn’t necessarily smart, but he had a nose and an instinct for things. I felt a swell of pride; he was already far ahead from the rest in terms of field work, and berating him daily to keep good notes and ask the right questions have paid off. It’s just his grasp of language that was unsettling. I’ve read primary school work that was better than anything he’d written so far.
“So we’ve no information on this guy. We’re going in blind, and I’ll admit: I don’t know how to begin this investigation,” I said. The window of my door was down and we were about a hundred meters from our client’s office. I needed a cigarette and he needed time to think about what we were going to do next. “What do you think we need to know?” I said, throwing the question out in the open.
“His history and background,” he said, and paused, “and what he do in the place, his job scope, and what he do at that time,” he said.
“History, yes, background, yes. We need to know if he’s had experience in the sort of work he’s doing now,” I said, nodding.
“He’s new, he only start work about two months already, not possible for him to make so many contact,” said S.
“Especially contact with drivers, right?”
“Yah,” he said.
“So what details do we have on hand?” I asked.
“The driver arrive at location A at this time. Then he arrive at location B at this time, but only unloaded about one hour later. Then the driver disappear for two hours. The reading at location A cannot change but there is no reading at location B. That means the thing must have lost at location B. But how I don’t know,” he said, frowning.
I didn’t know, either. It was getting hard to believe our interviewee was innocent, but we didn’t have our facts. And I was afraid we were losing time; it had been days since the incident, but I felt uncomfortable at not being able to get to our interviewee immediately. Our client smelled a rat, but we had to be a little more cautious. There were other considerations at play. If we couldn’t prove anything, we were going to be in a difficult position.
I flicked the cigarette out the window, and wound it up, and turned down the volume on BRMC’s noise rock. We weren’t about to learn anything new by sitting there.