'No one suspects a thing’: how two mums became top private investigators (and you may have the skills too…)

In many ways, we’re actors – just with secret cameras and tracking devices alongside the costumes and makeup. When we put on a wig, hat or glasses, we can change our appearance completely and gain access to clubs and exclusive venues. Men just don’t have the same tools in the box... or the handbag!

In a restaurant, we might sit down at a table next to a couple we’re surveilling. We act naturally, pretending we’re taking selfies and pictures of each other, like girls on a night out. In reality, we’re wearing covert recording devices; we’ll be taking pictures and video of them. Nobody suspects a thing.

We honed our skills working for the police for many years – in surveillance, child protection, intelligence and, finally, anti-corruption. When we started working together in 2014, we were in a unit that covertly investigated corrupt police officers – the real-life AC-12 from Line Of Duty. Nobody really knew what we were doing. It was a very male-dominated world, and we grew close.

Then, in 2015, we both fell pregnant and left the force to be full-time mothers and give our children the best start in life. We kept in touch, meeting for coffees with the babies, until suddenly they were starting school. As much as we love being mums, we felt like we weren’t needed as much. We didn’t want to go back to the police, but we started to realise we did want to use the skills we’d learned there to build something for ourselves and our children.

We kept meeting up, brainstorming ideas in Tesco. When we finally hit on the idea of a detective agency, we knew immediately that it was what we wanted to do; we just had no clue at all how to build a business. Our first idea was to print out some flyers and leave them in local gyms and spas, where people would pick them up.

Instead, we started doing jobs for other agencies and quickly discovered that this industry is unlicensed and unregulated. Literally anyone can set up as a private investigator and take advantage of some really quite vulnerable people. We were just operatives at the time, but we listened to how the men running these companies spoke to their clients. One in particular had real anger issues; he’d be shouting and swearing down the phone to them. On another job, we watched a different guy sit in his car watching YouTube videos when he should have been watching a property.

Because we’re detectives we’d be thinking: if they did this properly, they could solve the case in half the time and save the client a lot of money and potential heartache. Those early experiences made us believe we could do it so much better – we could offer a different service to everything else out there. We could really get to know clients, really listen to them and be invested in every job. And that’s how our agency, Verity Henton, was born.

We didn’t have an office back then – we created our first website ourselves, borrowed £500 each to place some Google Ads and waited. Incredibly, the work just started flooding in.

Our first two jobs were both infidelity cases. We were used to being underestimated as women in this field, so from the start we used that to our advantage. We found we could play the dumb blonde or dizzy brunette and act innocently but all the while be gathering intelligence. Nobody notices because nobody expects a woman to be watching and following them.

But it’s not just the disguises that make this industry one that women can excel in. The two of us are empaths.

Clients are often frightened and at the end of their tethers by the time they pick up the phone to call up about a suspected infidelity. They sometimes feel like it’s them who’s being deceitful, just by calling us. But it’s a terrible thing to go to bed every night with that feeling churning away in your stomach, not knowing if the partner lying beside you has been unfaithful. It’s unbearable; no one deserves it. Knowledge is power, and we will get that knowledge for you.

Delivering that knowledge can be extremely emotional, though. Sometimes we’ve had to tell clients: ‘Yes, I’m so sorry, you were right; he is cheating. But not only that, it’s with your best friend.’ Whatever bad news we have to give, we make sure the client has support. We don’t just deliver it and move on to the next case. If they want to carry on talking to us for weeks after, that’s what we’ll do to get them through it. Sometimes, we’ll refer them to a therapist.

At least three of our clients have been suicidal. One – an intelligent, savvy, successful woman – had cancer and had recently lost her husband. She was in a very vulnerable place, so when a romance scammer found her online, she really wanted to believe the fairytale he fed her. She gave him a huge amount of money. Even after we exposed him, he carried on trying to squeeze cash out of her, threatening to send sexual videos of her to her daughter’s school. She was so frightened that we were on the phone to her night and day, talking her through it, calming her down.

We love our work. We’re all about empowering women and men with the truth, but there have been times when we’ve been scared ourselves. People have tried to break into our car in the middle of the night. Once, a man started violently kicking bins around the road and trying the car’s door handles. In the police, we’d have had 40 officers to call on at the click of a button. Now, we might be on our own.

Occasionally, we’ll have to dress in dark clothing, go down a dirt track in the middle of the night and sneak around to get the information our clients need. That’s pretty scary, especially now that there are Ring doorbells, cameras and security lights everywhere. But we always have a cover story in case we’re caught.

Five years on from starting the company, we’re really proud that we’ve grown Verity Henton into a reputable and flourishing business. We’re now able to rely on a professional and dedicated team of operatives to carry out the surveillance on our behalf. We have a lot of high-net-worth and celebrity clients, and there’s even a TV show about us in the pipeline – it’s going to be called Spy Mums.

We get lots of work around divorce proceedings now, too – proof of residency, for example, and asset tracing. But some things haven’t changed. The most common task for our agency is still infidelity. We remain one of the very few companies in the UK that offer female operatives, and when people call, we make sure they talk to one of us directly.

We’re lucky to be so busy and in demand, but all that means it’s far from a nine-to-five. We’re on the job all the time, though generally we make sure we’re still there for school pick-up and drop-off. We’re proud to have built something from scratch that plays to our experience and strengths, helps people and supports our families. The children now think our jobs are pretty cool, but often people don’t believe them when they ask what their parents do and are told: ‘Mummy’s a spy.’