Chapter Five
The next time Gene visits Tyler, there's already someone in his room.
It's an older woman carrying a huge boom-box cassette player, the sight of which startles him so much that he doesn't bolt as instantly as his first instinct tells him to.
She's grey-haired and wearing a green dress that has none of the shapeless quality he associates with pensioners. Seeing him, she smiles, shrugging helplessly.
"He had this at his Uni, this massive stupid thing." She laughs, the way people do when they want to cry. "I was going through his old stuff in the garage, I don't know why I just... I found the old tapes – god, remember tapes? Broke half the time, take up so much space, I don't know why I let him keep them all but I found them, and I thought he might like it."
Gene experiences a moment of rare panic, with no idea what to say or what excuses to make, but at that moment the auxiliary nurse with the purple lipstick appears at the door and he's surprised when the woman asks for two cups of tea. Whilst this is being poured she goes to her bag and brings out some fig rolls and a bunch of grapes, which she places on Tyler's bedside table, hands trembling slightly.
"It's stupid, I know, but I just feel like it's the thing to do. I almost bought Lucozade. I saw the card from the CID – I'm sure he'd appreciate it. Nurse says you work with him."
She doesn't introduce herself – he's unsure if she's too upset - but Gene already knows this can only be that phenomenon he himself had never really experienced, a mother.
Trying not to think too hard about it, he brings in another chair from the corridor, sits down next to her and waits as the first tape whirs around, Elton John pouring out his heart in a scratchy distant sound that seems so primitive now to ears used to digital.
# And I think it's gonna be a long long time / till touchdown brings me round again to find / I'm not the man they think I am at home / oh no, no, no / I'm a rocket man... #
If Tyler hears it, there's no way of telling, but Gene notices that his eyes are moving again, rapid side-to-side dreaming, seeing goodness knows what.
"It was always just me and Sam, really," the woman is saying softly. She's holding Tyler's hand, leaning over him. "His father left us early days, no kind of person really, no kind of father, though Sam worshipped him. He's probably out there somewhere still, you know. Caught myself wondering if he'd seen it on the news – about Sam – was still fool enough to wonder if he'd turn up at the door. When I first saw there was someone else in here, I half thought... Not that I'd want him anywhere near Sam, now or then. He won't be here, though. Too much of a coward."
She clenches her fist, looking dead ahead at where her son is lying so still and pale. "We come into this world alone and we leave it alone," she says fiercely. "Why try and change that half-way through your life except to have something to miss?"
Gene's dealt with a lot of difficult situations during his career, dealt with a lot of relatives in awful times, but this isn't work and he feels for her with a raw sympathy he hasn't felt in a very long time. Leaning forward in the chair, he watches her, watches her mouth working with grief and anger, the blazing emotion in her eyes that is reminiscent of her son.
"I said I'm not leaving him," she continues. "I told him I'm not and I never want to, but they won't let me visit all hours and I'm looking after my sister, she had a stroke last year, bless her. I have nightmares all the time that he'll wake up without me here."
Although he of all people knows how pointless and irritating platitudes can be, Gene can't stop himself.
"Maybe he knows you're here now?"
She bites her lip and shakes her head, smiling indulgently. Not a look he often gets directed at him.
"Does it look like it? Sam's a long way away, love. A long, long way. Probably can't even feel us reaching. If he could hear me," she's struggling not to weep now, voice going thick. "I know if he could hear me call him, he'd come back to me."
Gene burns with need to help her, but has to rise from his chair and pace away, just to the wall and back, because nothing in life so far has made him very good at expressing gentle emotions.
She doesn't ask how Gene knows Tyler, or anything else about him, why he's here, and he finds himself strangely relieved at that, because he doesn't want to lie, but he can't imagine any way to tell her the story.
Tactical Driving was a mandatory part of being in Traffic, also for all of CID and everyone else who some person in the mystical land of Risk Assessment had deemed likely to ever be in or near a car. Frankly Gene was amazed they didn't make the German Shepherds take it.
'Mandatory' - as in all jobs - had a certain amount of variability, but in this instance it meant what it said on the tin, it was attend the course or get the badge taken off you and Gene had already missed one session.
It had in fact been about two weeks before Rachel's sudden departure. Gene's memories of a lot of that time - before and after - were hazy with alcohol and conversations he'd imagined afterwards - all the things he'd wished he'd said (or not said at all). He'd certainly been in a foul mood that day right from the start, bored, tired, desperate for a fag, sitting in a cold hangar on a disused airfield in Kent with a dozen or so other pissed off looking Police Officers, watching a bloke in a high-visibility tabard write Acceptable Risk on a whiteboard and turn, smiling brightly, to ask them what they felt it meant to them.
In fact, he'd been so intrinsically annoyed that it had taken a good half-hour before he'd even registered that the man he knew as 'that job-stealing, precocious twat', DCI Tyler, was even there.
Of course, Tyler had been in the front row of the class, notebook ready, answering the instructor's questions in a clear, confident voice whilst towards the back, Gene and some of the other older officers sighed, scratched and looked up at the spiders' webs on the high metal struts of the hangar.
"You. You in the third row in the coat. Gene?" Referring to the class plan they'd had to fill in, the instructor had pointed at him. "What would be your next course of action in this scenario?"
Gene had studied the scribbled diagram on the board for barely a moment.
"I'd go after the bastard."
The instructor smiled smugly – seemingly, he'd been hoping in this very way to illustrate a point. He turned to the rest of the class.
"Why is that not what we'd advise? Sam?"
"Risk," Tyler had answered promptly in a superior tone, turning in his wooden chair to look at Gene. "Unacceptable risk of collateral damage."
Gene didn't twitch a muscle. "I'd go after him," he repeated.
"You'd knowingly endanger the lives of members of the public?" Disdain was written clear across Tyler's face and Gene had glared at him, squaring up for the debate.
Just as things were getting to the point where Gene was ready to push aside the desk in front of him and tell Tyler the old come-over-here-and-say-that, the instructor had clapped his hands and brightly suggested a coffee break over at the tables with the large, incontinent silver urns and the foil trays of fibrous, cheap digestives.
Cup in hand, Gene had wandered outside with two other blokes for a smoke, aware of the heat still under his shirt, of the fact that even before the stimulants could hit his system his heart was pounding.
From the first time he'd heard of Sam Tyler, months earlier, he'd instinctively, inescapably disliked him, but this felt more like hate, this thundering emotion wracking through him, the aftershock of their shared gaze still shaking him.
Refreshments consumed, and Gene breathing more slowly, the class had returned to the rows of seats for all the excitement of covering a potted version of the Highway Code, half an hour of bollocks about 'unusual vehicles' and then some indigestibly dry facts about depth perception, peripheral vision and reflex time.
Then there was a video about Risk Assessment.
Gene would have switched off anyway, but he couldn't seem to stop watching the smug little git two seats ahead and one to the left of him; the way he sat in his chair with limbs still and back straight but at the same time clicking and un-clicking his pen; the way he unconsciously straightened his tie every ten minutes and a ran his fingers back over his hair; the seemingly fixed displeased pout of his mouth; the neat blue string of notes appearing on his pad.
Abruptly, at one point, Tyler looked over his shoulder and back at him and Gene found himself looking away quickly, spooked, before he could stop himself and hold the gaze.
After an interminable period the class was taken outside for the practical exercises in the cars. The first involved driving in various formations on the long disused runway; practising controlled stops, boxing in and simple convoy driving. Between turns, people stood about on the tarmac chatting, sipping tea, but somehow no group seemed eager to absorb DS Hunt or DCI Tyler, certainly not both together, and frequently Gene found that they were both standing alone, probably looking yet more like idiots for not talking to each other.
The instructor looked down at his clipboard: "Alright, next pair – Tyler and Hunt?"
"You've got to be fucking joking," Gene muttered.
But no one else looked keen to swap or intervene.
"Now remember, the driver has to drive," the instructor was helpfully pointing out. "Front seat passenger, it's your job to relay info to base and update them, also to anticipate and request clearances for manoeuvres. Your situational awareness needs to extend at all times to the possibility of decamp and you must be poised – in a safe manner, according to your reading of the situation – to be ready to get out and continue pursuit on foot."
"I'm driving, then," Gene stated.
Tyler shrugged, raising an eyebrow. "Oh please, be my guest, I don't feel the need to demonstrate my testosterone levels to the world."
With Gene gritting his teeth, they had climbed into the marked car, which smelt like the practise cars always did, very strongly of body odour and spilt cola and ill-chosen aftershave. The seats were stuck at awkward distances and the steering wheel was peeling leather and managed despite being intrinsically black to look grimy.
Tyler's mouth was a moue of disgust, but he was looking at Gene.
"What on Earth did you have for lunch?"
"Chips."
"They just drowned in the beer then, did they?"
"Are you saying I'm not legal for driving?"
"If I thought that there's no fucking way I'd let you drive me about."
Tyler looked rattled too, face flushed. Gene got the impression he didn't let himself swear very much.
As they set off in the pursuit after the instructor in his 'stolen' Vectra, Tyler picked up the radio and began the running commentary. "Left left at the junction... speed now fifty in a thirty zone... continuing along the A road, requesting other cars in the area to undertake a controlled box, air support would be much appreciated."
"More tea, vicar?" Gene muttered. Tyler was actually being textbook perfect, not missing a thing, which if anything made it more annoying.
Suddenly the Vectra made a sharp right turn and Gene followed with expert precision, gripping the wheel with a pleasing rush of reflexive adrenaline, weaving almost elegantly between the cones that marked the boundaries of the 'road'.
Tyler's mouth went wide open with outrage: "Stop! You're supposed to stop! That's the whole point, this is a pedestrianised walkway through the local shopping complex! We'll fail the whole bloody thing now!"
Not trusting himself to respond and manage to steer at the same time, Gene slammed on the brakes, lurching them both forward with a grunt and, once they were still, before Gene could speak, Tyler pushed the door open and leapt from the car, visibly seething.
They had reached the end of the airfield far away from the hangar, near where the tarmac ended and the chipped edges faded into sandy soil and then a boundary of thick woodland and bushes; after the engine had stopped they could hear the raucous alarm of startled crows flying from their perches.
Instantly, not pausing to think, Gene had got out too, pacing around the car and towards Tyler, who turned and looked daggers at him as he advanced, raising his hands to the heavens, not even slightly backing down.
"You're crazy and you're going to get me killed! You're going to get yourself killed!"
Gene kept coming closer and Tyler had kept just not stepping back; a tosser, maybe, a health and safety nut, certainly, but no wimp.
"You tell me sunshine, how do you catch criminals in your land then, eh? Bore them to death? Smother them with paperwork?"
Tyler was right in his face now, shouting. "I follow the rules, alright? You have to follow the rules, you can't simply..."
Somehow Gene had grabbed two handfuls of Tyler's jacket. His heart was pounding again and more than anything it felt like fear, because he could be a bit of a brawler, for sure, but he'd never before got like this, never wanted to grab a man and shake him, really get hold of him, get right in there and just...
Once, the year Gene had joined the police, when he'd first had the money to take himself far away on a little bed and breakfast holiday in the sun, he'd shagged a bloke.
It hadn't been the plan. It had most definitely never been in the plan but he'd been drunk, wandered into either the wrong bar or the right one, depending on how you looked at it, and it had been the most intoxicating thing he'd ever done, the most in his own skin he'd ever felt, the simplest pleasure he'd ever found.
Afterwards the feeling, the wanting, the sense-memory of it all, it was like the booze, but he'd found himself more able to resist it because at least with the booze even admitting you wanted it didn't have to be a lie.
A queer copper in 1983? Not a fucking chance.
He'd met a nice girl and he'd loved her, in one kind of way at least, and he was always almost sure she never knew.
The confession won't come to his lips even now, even in the stillness of the hospital room, even for the all-absorbing void of Tyler.
"I wasn't just angry with you," he says instead, very softly, watching the unseeing eyes. "I mean, get this clear, you're obviously a knob, but..."
Maybe Tyler knew? Did Tyler know? Did Tyler understand what was happening all along? Did he pick up the strange atmosphere, the chemistry between them? If he'd collared him about it, would it have kept on happening?
