Let’s pull all these fragments back together and see what we have. Here’s the original snippet.
There’s not much call for private detectives in Fulham.
The day it all started was a bad one. Business was so slack it was falling down all around us. The gas had been disconnected that morning, one of the coldest mornings for twenty years, and it could only be a matter of time before the electricity followed. We’d run out of food and the people in the supermarket downstairs had all fallen down laughing when I suggested credit. We had just $2.37 and about three teaspoons of instant coffee to last us the weekend. The wallpaper was peeling, the carpets were fraying, and the curtains… well, whichever way you looked at it, it was curtains for us. Even the cockroaches were walking out.
Private detectives specialising in alien activity don’t get much work, it must be said.
The day started like any other one. The world was pretty much intact and invasion-free, which meant business was terrible. The sky was beautiful, blue, and annoyingly empty. Not a spaceship to be seen that morning. Or any morning for the last week. Or year, for that matter. No reports of little green beings, despite all of the online ads, newspaper classifieds, TV interviews and town meetings I organised. We got no responses to any of it, except for one couple who arrived at a meeting thinking we were going to talk about immigration and left laughing. Our website had no hits, our business cards were ignored, and the pamphlets we made… well, we often saw them in cat litter trays. Kids didn’t even dress up as aliens for Halloween around here.
There’s no money in solving mysteries for old people.
Let’s be honest, things had been bad before this whole affair even started. Business was in the toilet. Management at the Sunnybank retirement village had refused to let us work in the cabana by the pool and instead shoved us into a storeroom next to the big TV area, with no desk space, and hardly any privacy. I’d been trying to save for college but it was nearly the end of summer and so far I’d made $15, and that was from taking side-bets on bingo. We’d had one client who wanted us to get his daughter to call him, and when we did, they had a fight and he stiffed us. My parents were mad at me for wasting my summer, I smelled of floor cleaner, and my office chair... well, it was two stacked packs of toilet rolls. At least it was soft.
