I'm A Private Investigator. My Last Case Was Very Strange.
October 11, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readI'm A Private Investigator. My Last Case Was Very Strange.
The arm was the first thing. Not the face, not the clothes, not the way he'd called ahead twice before showing up. It was the arm—how it moved when he laid bills out on the desk, shoulder swinging forward, hand coming down flat, like the elbow joint had decided one day it wasn't going to be part of the operation anymore. The narrator, a private investigator working out of a small office above a hardware shop on Rua do Seculo in Lisbon, watched that arm for four bills before making himself stop. You learn not to stare at the thing that's wrong.
A Missing Son and a Photograph With Something Wrong
The client was Rodney Figg, 67, retired schoolteacher, thirty-one years at a secondary school in Setubal. His son Wesley, 29, had been missing for six weeks. He'd been living in a flat on Rua da Atalaia with two flatmates, Zoe and Xavier, and then one day a man in a grey coat came to the door. Wesley left with him voluntarily, no argument, no agitation. He never came back. The police took a report. Nothing came of it.
Continue reading the full summary in the app — free to try.
Read Full Summary →Free • No credit card required
Never miss an episode of Insomnia Stories Podcast
Get every new episode summarized in your inbox — free, ~5 minutes to read.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
What you'll learn
- 1 (01:00) **The Arm and the Retainer** - PI notices a physical anomaly in client Rodney Figg's arm movement as he counts out twelve bills for a missing-person case
- 2 (04:02) **The Card in the Pocket** - PI finds a police contact's card with a personal warning written on it, setting boundaries for when to escalate
- 3 (09:10) **Interviewing the Flatmates** - At Wesley's last known address, the PI learns about the man in the grey coat who took him away
- 4 (14:36) **The Photograph's Anomaly** - PI notices Wesley's left ear sits visibly lower than his right, a facial asymmetry that shouldn't exist
- 5 (18:49) **Three Nights of Nothing** - A methodical search through the neighborhood yields only partial recognitions of the grey coat man
- 6 (21:24) **The Man Who Orders Water** - Dan Marshall reveals the grey coat man's peculiar ritual: twice a week he sits in the back of the bar, orders mineral water he never drinks, and listens to fado music filtering through the wall
- 7 (24:28) **Following Through the Grate** - After four nights of surveillance, the PI watches the grey coat man descend through an iron grate in the cobblestones
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
I'm A Private Investigator. My Last Case Was Very Strange.
More from this podcast
Insomnia Stories Podcast →