A few years ago, Paul Hawkes was imprisoned in a Bavarian castle. He escaped by fashioning a cord out of curtains and sheets, which he used to abseil out of the window. Friends joked that this was just another day in the life of a private investigator, but Paul’s captors weren’t criminal masterminds – they were hospitality staff. Having hosted a party for Paul and his friends on holiday in southern Germany, they had accidentally locked him in and gone home.
When I visit Paul at the offices of Research Associates, the “investigation and intelligence agency” he runs in Notting Hill, west London, he is seated behind a desk with a magnifying glass in front of him. PIs occupy a special place in the British psyche, conjuring up a range of images that runs the gamut from the svelte genius of Sherlock Holmes to rogue investigators hacking the phones of dead children. I ask Paul to recall his most theatrical case but he struggles to think of one. He remembers having his cover blown and falling foul of a Russian arms dealer he was investigating for fraud “somewhere around 1992 or 1993”. “I certainly don’t like arms dealers being angry with me,” he says.
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