Secret Agent: ‘As any liar knows, a well-meant distortion of the truth will soon turn into a minefield’

There's something undeniably satisfying about hearing a vendor lambast another firm of estate agents. Obviously, this happens quite a lot, and when there's a chance that they're simultaneously sussing you out as a potential replacement, it's very hard not to join in.

"And then, would you believe it, the idiot lost our keys!" exclaimed the disgruntled woman sitting across from me. I gave a pantomime-like gasp of horror and tried not to look at Gavin, for whom key-losing is an integral part of his day.

"Of course, they didn't say they'd lost them..."

"Let me guess," I interjected. "They said they're with a colleague who's 'off sick'."

She rolled her eyes. "And if we were ever lucky enough to actually have a viewing, the people they brought round..."

"Time-wasters?" I offered.

She peered at me beadily, as if I possessed an almost supernatural perception. "Precisely!"

It was shortly after my insidious slandering had earned us the instruction that I began to realise that life is so much easier as an estate agent when everyone just assumes you're going to be utterly useless. You can simply bumble along like a goofy dog, occasionally getting a pat on the back for coming to heel when called.

Inherent in taking on someone else's unhappy customer, however, is the expectation that you're going to be the one to turn them into a happy customer, and the pressure, as we were in the process of discovering, was unbearable.

"It's her, it's her!" Gavin whispered, shaking the handset. I pushed the mute button. "She's not going to eat you, Gav," I snapped, relieved I hadn't been the one to pick up the phone. "Just tell her everything's fine." Gavin did as he was told, but unfortunately in a stilted Dalek-voice that implied everything was very far from fine.

"What's going on?" the vendor barked at me, when it became clear that Gavin's ineptitude was about to ex-ter-mi-nate our contract with her. "I seem to have got through to a mutant."

"There's a lot of them about in this industry," I said, laughing. A cavernous silence suggested she didn't share the joke, so, in panicked overcompensation, I bleated: "We've got eight people lined up to view your house at the weekend!" I realised, the moment the deceitful words tripped off my tongue, that I'd made a grave error indeed. As any seasoned liar knows, what starts off as a well-intentioned distortion of the truth very quickly becomes a dangerous and muddy minefield.

"Great!" she squealed. "I'll be in and out all day, so I'm sure we'll cross paths at some point."

"What are you going to do?" Gavin asked, stunned.

I stared at him venomously, until it dawned on me that the mutant might have a use after all. "I guess someone's going to have to lose the keys."

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