Chapter Three
Gene's aching stomach demands a drive-through McDonalds on the way home from the hospital, although the way his hands still smell like alcohol gel disconcerts him as he eats the chips one-handed as he steers.
On the backseat of his Ford Mondeo Ghia X are the stack of files he's really not supposed to have removed from central records about the case Tyler was working on the day he was run down, which he's been told is still more or less in limbo, since apparently the other senior investigative officer assigned to it has now also taken some of this fabled 'personal leave'.
It's late now, the street lights coming on and the drug-dealers congregating in the alley-ways like shy nocturnal creatures in a hedgerow. In a city, crime is everywhere, and Gene likes that, because you never let your guard down, you never stop suspecting everyone and mistrusting everything. You meet people from the other side of an invisible blue line that puts you in charge, stops you feeling for them. You draw back into yourself and prepare, ready to pounce, ready to win.
He was a winner once, he was the best. He has a nose for crime, a sixth sense for patterns in all that darkness, for the meaning and logic in the void, and now for the first time in years he feels those threads in his mind again, that yearning to solve a case, that need to force justice into an amoral universe. And when his mind drifts, buoyed on that feeling, it homes back inescapably to Tyler, again and again.
On his sofa, in the light of a single lamp, files strewn around, packet of biscuits and a strong coffee to hand, Gene reads about dead women.
Sees the photos too.
Gene's worked for two decades, he's seen some horrible stuff in his time, but this is genuinely nasty.
It seems Tyler was closing in on a killer with all the personal qualities of a Great White Shark; Gene's prepared to bet the entire current contents of his drinks cupboard that what ended up happening to him was not utterly unconnected.
Grabbing a pad of paper, he starts making of a list of names, dates and references that need further investigation and at the top of the page he circles the first person he's going to have to talk to.
"So it was the right car but an unconnected driver?"
DI Roy – 'call me Maya' - is looking at Gene with fixed concentration. She's sitting on the edge of her desk, here in the land of cubicles that is CID where you get a personal computer and buckets of free pens stamped with stop-smoking web addresses and nothing smells of piss. It's late on Friday and even the overworked detectives have mostly gone home, but the office is bathed in fluorescent light.
Gene, standing in front of her, shakes his head. He's been on the phone all day, trying angles, hurrying lab techs, annoying archivists at the database. He feels tremendously awake, even though he barely had time for coffee all day and missed his lunchtime fag.
"I stopped them initially," he explains, "because they matched the description of perpetrators involved in the theft of a Mercedes last week. They confessed to that and to nicking the Vauxhall from a Sainsbury's car park four days after Sam got run down, apparently it had been left unlocked with the keys in the ignition."
She shakes her head, already understanding: "And now all the prints in it are theirs?"
"Precisely. Of the few hundred or so specimens Forensics have found – we'll never test all of them, it's been around since the 90s, several owners - we've got their fingerprints, hundreds of others, traces of spit, semen, blood and piss. Oh, and three bags of herbal cannabis belonging to the arrested boys and traces of amphetamines which they deny having anything to do with. The database has it registered to a Mrs Whiteside in Stoke but she was deceased two years ago, her son lives in America and has no idea what may or may not have happened to it."
He's rehearsed this speech on the phone so very many times today – his ear is aching with the pressure of the receiver, holding it close in eagerness to hear something useful.
Roy nods grimly, biting her lip. "I take it someone's reviewing all the car park CCTV since the date of the collision with Sam?"
"The camera was busted by local youths throwing stones on the 10th, the manager of the supermarket didn't bother to get it fixed for a while and when the tapes start it's already there." Gene has managed now to get to the point of being able to restrain himself from kicking the nearest inanimate object in frustration whenever he remembers this.
Roy sighs – she has the look of someone growing immune to bad news. "I don't know if anyone's told you yet that Sam thought I'd been taken by a suspect in the case we were working on," she says quietly. Another woman would be hugging her arms around her chest, but she is keeping her hands neatly folded in front of her and stares forward at him.
It wasn't until he managed to get time to see her today that some other Sergeant had remarked 'yeah, she'd be interested in Tyler, they were dating, people said they were going to move in together.'
He couldn't process it then, and now he's having even more trouble, struggling to imagine this woman with scrawny, proper, flammable Tyler.
It hasn't passed him by that people have started to talk about Tyler as if he's already dead, and in the last half hour he's noticed even Roy slipping into it now and again. He wonders how she feels when she goes to see him, whether having been intimate with Tyler makes it harder or easier to see his body like a fish on a slab.
Does Tyler react, when Maya Roy talks to him?
He shakes his head, trying to clear it, and waits for more, intrigued.
"We'd interviewed a suspect," Roy is continuing. "It was... well, anyway, I was following him after he left, phoned Sam to say that I was – he told me not to, of course – and then my battery died, of all the stupid things."She closes her eyes in frustration. "And then to crown it all, I ran into some kids mucking about pretending to be gangsters in a playground on the Satchmore Road. One of them was bleeding, I didn't have anything but my shirt to give him, I had to take another one to Casualty. And Sam gets the wrong end of the stick, apparently finds my shirt and... I just keep wondering, if he hadn't seen that..."
Shaking her head, she rouses herself, standing up. "It's stupid to think there's more to it than a simple hit and run, but you want a reason – when someone's hurt you always want a reason."
"Have they given you any word on Tyler's chances for now?" Gene hears himself asking. He's never managed to ask at the hospital himself – he's afraid of being asked what business it is of his, or who he is, or perhaps simply of the answer. "What, and be sued for harassment of a schizophrenic? He's a fantasist."
"Look, Kramer! Can you see what you did to him?" Gene empathasised during the interview of Edward Kremer thirty odd years later to Detective Chief Inspector Sam Tyler after he was arrested on suspicion of leaving an accident scene without stopping in a vehicle with no insurance, MOT or tax.
She stiffens, almost imperceptibly; whether at his use of the surname or that he asks at all he isn't sure. Then, frown passing, "Oh yes, you found him, didn't you? He's just the same, which apparently isn't necessarily a bad or a good thing. Not recognising anyone. But the doctor says it's definitely a coma, not a vegetative state – they've done some kind of brain scan, saw a lot of activity."
Gene's lost, and it obviously shows.
"He could still wake up," she explains, making a passable attempt at smiling brightly. "He's still in there somewhere."
She stands up, picking up a folder, interview over. "Excellent work all round, DS Hunt."
