Chapter One
It came within inches of ending before it started.
Late one night in central Manchester, a tired, drunk, middle-aged man had found himself lying on his upstairs landing, on carpet that hadn't been vacuumed in the eight months since his wife had left, and looking up through the skylight at where there should have been stars, had the sky not been choked with street lights.
Millions of rocks, hurtling through space, through vast, meaningless space – the Universe, he thought idly, was a serious heck of a long way to fall - and he wondered why some immense, thoughtless asteroid didn't come down right there and then and wipe the whole damn mess clean away. After all, it nearly happened all the time - if you believed the papers - disaster diverting by merest thousands of miles, by inter-galactic inches.
What makes a pile of dust become a planet, gather an atmosphere, a slimy film of life, the concept of legs and eyes and finally someone clutching an empty bottle of Jack Daniels, too hot in a half-nylon blend shirt, staring blurry-eyed at eternity and seeing nothing?
Millions, billions of things that might happen, that could, that maybe should, that hadn't, that don't.
Half a millimetre – less – here or there, and everything is different. Except that it isn't, it all turns out exactly how it does.
But looking for reasons is what humans do, and those that are especially fond of it become police officers, only it turns out that - whether you've got the methodology of Sherlock Holmes or Scooby Doo - reasons seem to remain pretty much impossible to find.
Which is why we never know quite what's going to happen next, for all that this man, spinning at last out of the hold of consciousness through sheer weight of alcohol, had no hope of anything changing at all.
Detective Sergeant Gene Hunt woke up bleary-eyed and furry-tongued, still wearing most of his clothes, still sprawled on the landing floor, desperate for a piss, already fifteen minutes late for work, alarm-clock blaring from his bedroom like a siren hunting him down.
Not a normal weekday morning – he hadn't let things get that bad, though avoiding the reflection of the bathroom light in the shaving mirror was something he was slowly becoming skilled at.
He'd forgotten yet again to buy cereal or bread – over the last few years Rachel had taken to ordering groceries online. When she'd left, so had the computer and any ongoing awareness of the state of cupboards. The leftover bits of last night's takeaway – or was it the night before? – would give him biting heartburn by mid-morning but something had to soak up the last of the booze.
Since the garage near the Police Station sold instant coffee he never ran out of it, and with two cups down he felt the spark of life return to his aching head; Adam receiving the touch of God.
Were his reactions all they should have been, by the time he got to work and into uniform and finally into the patrol car?
There are some questions for which there is never any bloody hope of an answer, but we ask them anyway, because believing an answer exists is maybe the closest we can get to finding it. Gene would have ample opportunity to interrogate himself afterwards, but the way things turned out, luck or fate or the god that was caffeine was with him – or maybe he really had been fine, maybe his blithe judgement of himself as fit to drive had been correct.
That day, in a few hours time, a man called DCI Sam Tyler was going to be run down by a car, left lying in the middle of the road. When Gene drove past, minutes later, he didn't kill the man, didn't hit his head with the nearside wheel of his Audi, didn't end it once and for all, only almost, only nearly. We see that all this is happening on a small road underneath the Mancunian Way motorway. The music is playing on an iPod in the red Audi patrol car.
Only inches away.
That's the thing about it that he didn't tell anyone, not even those first heart-pounding moments after he'd found Tyler, radioing for an ambulance – no listen, he's just lying in the road, he's not opening his eyes, get them here now – he never mentioned that he almost hadn't seen him down there in the path of the wheels of his patrol car, that he'd been leaning down behind the dashboard to find another fag.
These days you aren't allowed to smoke in police cars. Gene does.
He hears the news zig-zag its way through the radio channels – officer down Lime Road... Tyler... Lime Road... DCI Tyler... found by an officer in Traffic... Sam Tyler... – and in the background some music coming out of Tyler's car.
David fucking Bowie, let's play a game shall we, inappropriate music to play over a wounded man, that might just about win.
One of the many, many reasons why Gene hates working in the Traffic Division is that the fatalities and injuries are just about the most mundane, predictable and depressing possible. After all, about the single most dangerous thing someone is likely to unwittingly do to themselves is get in a car.
So why the fuck shouldn't he be allowed to smoke in one?
You did get some guys with the rulebook actually honest-to-god memorised line by line, driven by an evangelical need to solve the problems of the world by enforcing the seatbelt laws and wearing day-glo orange tabards, and then there were the few who'd basically realised that with a little luck and connivance it could mean a cushy little number, sitting in a soft car seat.
And then of course, some guys had been put there.
Gene was put there, quite definitively. Consider yourself lucky to still have a job, consider yourself lucky to have rank, and Hunt, there are women in the Service remember – please don't call it the Force – so less of the 'guys', eh?
Funny, the kind of mental debris that floats about, something to cling to when you don't want to think about what's happening, don't want to see what's in front of you – the ambulance still isn't here, is it taking a fucking detour via Liverpool?
He's sitting on the ground by Tyler's head, and Tyler is breathing and has a pulse, and the blood isn't much and all from what looks like a shallow head wound. The coffee and the stale poppadoms in Gene's stomach are staging a rebellion and his skull aches as if he was the one that was bleeding onto the pavement and his tongue fucking canes where he bit it as he slammed the brakes on.
Distraction again – easier to look into himself than at Tyler, and that's saying something.
"Tyler," he says, near the man's ear. "Can you hear me? My name's Gene Hunt. DS Hunt out of Traffic, we were at the same frigging namby-pamby Tactical Driving Course last year, do you remember? Can you hear me? Can you squeeze my fingers? Tyler? Tyler, can you blink? Fuck."
He feels like an absolute idiot but when the paramedics do finally show up, they run through all the same stuff, only they talk much more loudly and with much less desperation. But then they don't have to keep thinking that they almost fucking cracked this man's skull like an egg because they couldn't wait five minutes for the next non-Health-and-Safety-approved Benson & Hedges.
"Did you see the vehicle involved in the collision?" Chief Inspector Young asks Gene at the roadside, within the circus ring of flashing lights and high-visibility jackets and scene-of-the-crime tape. "We're assuming it was car versus pedestrian, correct?"
"Paramedics found injuries consistent with that and Traffic reckons so - we're awaiting confirmation from forensics," some other Sergeant pipes up from behind his notebook. "I've arranged to get the CCTV reviewed."
"Why the hell was Tyler's Jeep stopped anyway? Why was he in the road?"
There are some questions in life that never get a satisfactory answer, but that doesn't stop anyone sodding well asking them.
"Please may I be added to the team on the case, sir?" This was also probably in that group of questions, but anyway Gene heard himself ask it.
"You want to...? Which case, DS Hunt?"
"Tyler's case, sir." Breathing deeply so as not to tell his Chief Inspector that he's a brainless idiot with more diplomas in applied computing than sense. The Chief is a tall, strong man run to fat, who seems to think wearing purple and pink striped silk shirts will make him look younger and who gels his hair to the point where it looks permanently wet – Gene tends to feel tired of him before he even starts speaking.
"The case of Tyler or the case Tyler was working on? Anyway, I can't see how that would be consistent with protocol." The Chief Inspector gives him one look, one clear up-and-down look with an expression like he can smell not just last night but every night's drink oozing from his pores.
But this isn't him – this wasn't him, at least.
Gene and the Chief were actually cadets together once, a mere 23 years ago, and the Chief ought to remember it, because back then he was the skinny kid who stammered and blushed when he was sent to ask a WPC to get coffee and Gene was the golden boy, the best damn officer on the force, the one who was going to go far, the one even the local underworld were starting to know the name of.
"I found him, sir, I..." He wants to say: I picked him up, he's mine like a bird fallen out of a tree, but it's not an emotion he understands in himself and it'll sound even more stupid vocalised.
What time is it? Way past lunchtime and he hasn't eaten since the poppadoms, maybe he needs something - he feels like he's floating.
"You should probably take the rest of this shift as emergency personal leave, Sergeant Hunt," someone says gently, pulling him aside. Apparently there's a form for that. When he started in the Police Force, when it was 'the Force', it was 1983 and if the day was disturbing you took everyone down the pub and bought a round and tasked whoever was newest with staying to answer the phone.
Mobiles now, they let anyone who wants you track you down anywhere. Gene's almost never rings.
"Why do people put flowers at the site of accidents?"
Gene, standing leaning back against his car, smoking, contemplates the area of tarmac where Tyler lay as it is now, two days after the event, clear of tape and technicians. One solitary bunch of roses is getting raindrops on its cellophane. There's no card.
Tyler had been on his side, just there, one arm outstretched – the position looked unsettlingly uncomfortable. His eyes had fallen open when Gene tried to shake him, sightless as a doll.
It's not like Gene really knows him – Gene's circled round this thought a lot the past forty-eight hours, along with the image of Tyler's sightless eyes and a starkly intense recollection of the smell of fabric softener in his suit jacket, though he can't remember registering it at the time. Gene does know where Tyler lives or how he likes his coffee or whether he supports City or United or what kind of no doubt inane and politically-correct hobbies he gets up to.
Before the Tactical Driving day, in fact, although he'd been inescapably aware of Tyler's existence he'd actually only occasionally seen him, usually passing in a corridor or as a photo in a Newsletter. And then after that stupid bloody course and all that happened on it, burning with anger and hoping for something poisonous, he'd asked some other officers about the man and been told only that the Department's youngest DCI had a reputation for getting personally involved in cases and forcing a lot of unpaid overtime on his team with a religious zeal. Just as Gene had been relishing this information, the officer had gone on to explain that since Tyler seemed to wind up nailing most of his cases apparently through sheer power of dedication, his slave-driving tendencies were only sporadically resented.
As with just about any senior figure, there were rumours about Tyler's private life, but honestly – the officer talking to Gene had said with a laugh – no one could figure out how he'd have the time.
"Wasn't that your job, Gene?" the officer – PC Timms, a man with the IQ of a shop-soiled lettuce - had said, afterwards, foolishly. "Tyler's, I mean. Wasn't that your job before..?"
Some kind colleague had shut him up with a well placed elbow to the ribs before Gene had had to tell him precisely what he thought of that question, and Gene had just about managed to get himself out of the canteen without breaking any objects or people.
If, at that moment, he'd run into Tyler again, he wouldn't have punched him square in the face, no question.
Now, Gene crushes a cigarette butt violently under his heel and thinks, Fuck it, just see that he's alive, see that he's nothing to do with you, and then stop bloody thinking about it.
