Chapter Two

"I could knock you down one hand behind my back!" he'd yelled at Tyler, during a session of 'Tactical Driving: Part Two' back in September 2005 when some idiot instructor, with a class of fourteen to work with, had, of all the police officers in all the world, paired the two of them up.

What really happened between them, that day?

Sometimes Gene isn't entirely as sure as he'd like to be, but it ended clear enough with him yelling and fire lighting in Tyler's eyes as he'd scrambled to get at Gene in return, until they'd had to be pulled apart like wankered Saturday night yobs in an all-night kebab shop.

"He's proper," was one of the things Timms had said to Gene, during that conversation afterwards. "Doesn't like roughhouse, does it by the book, no feelings, talks about 'negotiation' if you try and argue with him. So I don't know what the fuck happened, you must have really got under his skin."

When Gene gets to St James' Hospital on Saturday afternoon, he finds Tyler's been moved from the HDU where he was first taken to a side-room on a neurosurgical ward.

The Sister – or Ward Manager, as you're supposed to call them now - lets him in through the electronically locked entrance and escorts him down a long corridor of doors which is like something out of the bleeding X-Files, until eventually they reach the one with Tyler, Sam (Dr Lee, Nil By Mouth, Hourly Burette) written on the wipe-clean nameplate.

It smells strange in the room – enriched foam soap, Gene will learn later, from daily bed-baths, gentle on a bruised body getting yet more damaged just by doing nothing - and Tyler is very pale and still and small-looking, under a thin blue blanket, connected to various tubes like his body needs tethering to the earth not to just float away.

Any grasp Gene had on why he's bloody well driven all the way here disappears the instant he steps through the door – what the hell did he think was going to come of it? This skinny bloke who might barely remember Gene's name even before all this is in a fucking coma, and Gene is standing next to him still in his coat, rubbing alcohol gel into his hands until all the chapped skin round his cuticles stings.

He sits down facing away from the bed and texts Ray about some drinks next week – walking straight back past the nurse having only that instant arrived is, for some reason, more than he feels equal to.

Tyler keeps breathing, a small up and down movement of the blanket just out of the corner of Gene's eye.

He can't help noticing, and then - after he's left - remembering, that for some reason they've taped Tyler's eyelids shut. Gene assumes they'd know to remove them should he want to suddenly wake up, but the image makes his stomach turn over.

As he leaves, having timed fifteen minutes on his mobile for what felt like several days and played so many games of 'Snake' his eyes have crossed, he sees the nurse sitting at a wide desk reading a lurid, cheap-print magazine titled 'Real Stories' and absently eating a giant tin of Roses with a couple of colleagues, all neat hair and blue uniforms, attractive, most of them. Gene wonders absently if any of them ever dress up as nurses on nights out – the fake red-and-white-and-suspenders kind that are supposed for some reason to be sexy.

"Visiting's two till six weekdays," she calls out as he passes. He wonders who she thinks he is.

Gene Hunt was born in 1965 in Lichfield, youngest of three. His Dad moved them all to Manchester after his mother died, which happened when Gene was born so as far as Gene's concerned it's always been Manchester. Forget about his childhood – he tries to – he joined the Police as a teenager when it was still the Force and then something like life began.

There was a pretty and kind young woman working in a café where he took to stopping for lunch on his beat. She was called Rachel and he married her and bought a house with two spare bedrooms.

He would have been prepared to go to a specialist, undergo whatever necessary embarrassing tests, to find out why no children had come along. He'd told her so. A few weeks later he'd found her contraceptive pills in a box of old photos under the bed. Never, even when they were shouting at each other, did he feel he'd understood how she felt or what her reasons were.

Now Rachel lives in London and has an internet business selling customised embroidery patterns, she has two goldfish and apparently is learning Polish in evening classes. She calls very occasionally to remind him about how and when to pay the utility bills – polite, distant, hard to decipher – and sometimes it feels like more conversation than they ever had when they were married.

Whatever was wrong between them, Gene doesn't think more money or less frustration on his part would have changed any of it much, but he wonders sometimes what might have happened if he hadn't been assigned the Carruthers case - getting on for ten years ago now, god, where did the time go? - with the suspect who wouldn't say where he'd buried the body of a little girl, a rodent of a man who frankly wasn't worth shit and was clearly going to get beaten up by somebody sooner or later anyway, the lip he had on him. Gene had done worse before and got away with it, and on this occasion did at least keep his job – the powers that be understood, and it still wasn't OK to do down your own kind – but by then it was the nineties and there was paperwork to do and targets to meet and press to respond to and suddenly he wasn't in CID any more, and his job got given to his DI and then, when she went on maternity leave, to a short-arse twat called Sam Tyler.

"You'd knowingly endanger the lives of members of the public?" Tyler had asked again, disgust in his face, twisted round on the stupid wooden kiddie seats the instructor had made the Driving Course class sit in.

Gene was two rows back and slightly to the left of him, hunched into his coat with dislike of the early hour, the cold classroom and the lack of caffeine.

"I wouldn't let a man I knew had killed someone get away in front of me bleeding eyes just because I wasn't cleared to drive on the frigging kerb."

"No, you wouldn't know he'd killed, you don't get to decide who's killed. You just have suspects – you're the policeman, not the judge, remember?"

Gene, arms folded, stomach grumbling, had looked the man square in the eye, just about at the end of his tether. "You seriously telling me that's how you think in the field, cold as a calculator?"

Holding his gaze in a way few could, Tyler's eyes had narrowed. "It's how I ought to think. How you ought to think. Otherwise, DS Hunt, you will know a killer because it'll be you."

Arrogant as hell, idiotic as fuck, and yet it had blazed from him, from that twat Tyler, that belief, that fire, that force of life that by then Gene had long forgotten, coming up against him and challenging him to meet it.

Gene spends Saturday night on the sofa trying to push aside his thoughts with a six-pack of Carling Export and some obscure replay on Sky Sports. He's woken at 3am by a burning pain in the centre of his chest which eases a little after he's sick. If the fucking GP was ever open at a time he could get to it, he'd go, he reasons, and downs a handful of Gaviscon tablets (thank god the garage sells them) and goes back to sleep.

On Sunday, Tyler's on the twelve o'clock news headlines, which is about the first thing Gene hears. He turns off the TV and stretches and surveys his living room. Things seem to be bearing down on him now with almost palpable pressure and he feels a sudden, strong, almost desperate urge to clear up, to dig himself out. He wanders around emptying the ash trays, then starts picking up abandoned shirts and socks and takeaway boxes and even wipes the coffee table before stuffing a load in the washing machine, having a shower and taking himself down the local pub for a roast dinner and then the quiz – Ray turns up and a bunch of the others from work.

Despite the beer and the laughter and the lads around him, Gene can't seem to clear his mind of the image of the tape on Tyler's eyelids. The memory has twisted – maybe some dream combined things overnight – until he sees Tyler lunging at him, that day on the course, with his eyes taped shut instead of open and fierce and blazing at him.

All of which suggests he really shouldn't visit Tyler again.

It's not like Tyler would even know he was there, like Tyler could have in any way taken in that Gene had had anything to do with him these last few weeks, like it could in any way have mattered.

Maybe Tyler never even thinks about him.

The following week Gene gives out eighteen tickets to unlicensed drivers, another seven or so for no insurance, spends an entire day on the bypass with the speed gun and then on Thursday finally gets to chase some car thieves with blues and twos. All four look to be about twelve years old and run away into an estate but he's faster than they're expecting and their sportswear is not purchased in view of hours down the local Fitness First.

"Fat fucking police git," the one under his knee manages, gasping for breath.

"Sore loser, are we?" Gene mutters, smiling in the fresh air, surrounded by straggling grass, used needles and the dumped Tesco trolleys, with the line of smoking mums with the babies in the pink frilly buggies just watching him.

Back in the Ford squad car, waiting for a backup van to get the suspects to the nick for processing, he looks up the precise details of the wreck of a vehicle he's just recovered on the Police National Database.

Car: Vauxhall Cavalier. Registration: E599 SRJ. Colour: Blue. Wanted in connection to suspected dangerous driving, leaving the scene of an accident. April 12th 2006, Manchester

The date he notices at once and two calls to the station for a computer check confirm his first suspicions.

Sitting in his driver's seat, sweaty from the chase, two handcuffed boys in the back muttering abuse at him, Gene rests his forehead on the steering wheel and groans.

He's only just gone and found the car that ran down Tyler.

"Nice weather we've been having," the same nurse as last time says, leading him to Tyler's room.

"I bet you say that to all the visitors."

"Not when it's raining." She smiles and walks away – grey eyes and curly brown hair and a nice chest that Gene can't help but notice, helpfully aided in disguising his gaze by reading her name badge: Annie Cartwright Junior. She was named after her former police officer mum who was one of the first female Detective Constables in the Seventies and followed in Mr. Cartwright's footsteps instead as a nurse.

The visitor chairs are padded and wipe-clean. Thinking of the all the legitimate people who must have sat in them – Tyler's parents, girlfriend maybe, brothers or sisters, people with a real connection to him - Gene pulls one up to the bed.

"Tyler, my name's Gene Hunt." He feels like an idiot, stops, breathes, stifles a sense of déjà vu. "We met doing the Tactical Driving thing."

Probably the less said about that the better. He's wondered before if Tyler would remember it, if his mere presence would make Tyler wake up and yell at him again, revitalised with righteous anger.

"And then we met again after the accident. I mean... Someone ran you down in the middle of the road and I found you. Would be nice and easy if you could tell me who they were, of course, but you're no bleeding use for that, are you?"

He still feels like an idiot. Tyler's eyes aren't taped any more but there's a layer of Vaseline over the lashes, and underneath the thin lids pupils move occasionally, randomly, as if the man's only asleep.

What magical, mystical thing makes you able to wake up from a dream? Why do we trust that when we drift away, we'll be able to crawl back again?

"Tyler," Gene says again. "I don't know if you can hear me, but I'm working on it. I'm..."

Tyler lies still, breathing. There are fewer tubes attached to him now – all Gene can see is the one leading into his nose, taped down, and attached to a brightly coloured plastic bag labelled Nutrison disgorging brown goo.

"Any coffee or tea?" an auxiliary nurse asks brightly, propping open the door with her foot.

"Ta, love," he says, grateful for the distraction.

The tea is bitter, brown and small in volume but at least the milk is real.

"I've got biscuits too – Hovis Wholegrain or shortbread?"

She's pretty – probably about nineteen, small and smiling with carefully painted bee-sting lips that give her an expression of gentle astonishment. "Nothing fancy then?" Gene teases her. "No garibaldis or pink wafers?"

"You want to go to BUPA for that, love." She smiles – the bright purple lipstick clashes wonderfully with her green striped uniform. "Your brother, is he?"

"We work together," Gene tells her, which is more or less a lie but seems to suffice – she makes a grimace of cheerful sympathy and withdraws.

Gene's almost finished the tea, glad to have something to occupy him, to keep his mouth closed, when suddenly Tyler moves.

It's barely anything, probably a reflex – he flings one arm over himself, looking to be aiming for his nasal tube and groans, a horrible primal sound of distress.

He's alive! Gene feels like calling out, like a character in a Hammer Horror B-movie, except that's how it feels, extraordinary, miraculous, exhilarating. His heart is beating fit for both of them as he presses the nurse-call buzzer, half-expecting Tyler's eyes to open now, see him sitting there and flare into life...

The nurse called Annie comes into the room, frowns at the sight of Tyler's flailing hand and reaches for a bunch of keys in her pocket, then unlocks a cabinet by the bed and gets out some vials, a needle and syringe.

"Should you be sedating him if you want him to wake up?" Gene can't help asking; noticing the label; midazolam – what they'd given his granddad at the end; not that by that stage the man had been capable of noticing being alive.

She looks up, wide eyes calm, patient. "Maybe it would be best if you leave," she says gently. Then, turning her attention to her patient, her voice soothing and practiced, she takes his hand with one of her own, the other holding the needle poised in the air: "Now Sam, calm down, it's alright, it's all alright Sam, you're safe here..."

Gene pulls the door closed behind him; his fingers have gone cold, his stomach tight, gooseflesh on his back like someone walking on a grave.