Chapter Six

In the end it's good old-fashioned knackering, plod-worthy legwork that turns up trumps.

For a few days in his Ford, Gene has been visiting the dodgiest garages he's ever encountered, in his civvies, telling a story about his mate's lost Vauxhall Cavalier, knowing almost all the workers he meets will assume it's something about drugs and be as likely to tell him as not if he hints at being fairly threatening.

Finally, in a dim workshop that smells of several semi-legal substances, there's a guy in an overall with a scraggly, oily beard who looks at the picture of the car on Gene's mobile with a glimmer of recognition.

"Yeah mate, I know that one. Wouldn't forget. MOT last year. Terrible. Shot to pieces."

"I'm very glad to hear this, my friend – who brought it in?" Gene's prepared to bet that the car hasn't seen an MOT in a decade, but if it had been brought in it might well have been under memorable circumstances – tyres slashed with a knife, drugs left in the boot, that sort of thing.

The guy smiles at him – he's missing several teeth. "Well that's what you might call the sixty-four thousand dollar question, innit? Not a clue I'm afraid, mate. We don't keep all that many records, you know?"

Gene smiles back, grabs him by the collar, pushes him to the wall and just stops shy of pinning him.

"Oh I bet you can remember if you think. And if that doesn't work, you'd be amazed what techniques they have these days to help with amnesia."

"OK, chill mate! Alright! Maybe I do remember something..."

Gene walks away with a new name on his list.

Kramer.

A few blocks away, back in his car, already on the phone to get things underway on a search of the criminal database, Gene takes another bite of the cheese and ham toastie from the motorway cafe he passed on the way here and necks two ibuprofen; he doesn't have time to stop for a bit of niggly stomach pain.

"What was it about Raimes, Tyler?" Gene leans forward in his wipe-clean chair in the wipe-clean room, careful of the stack of paper balanced across his knees on a discarded meal tray.

"You knew something, didn't you? Your instincts had figured something out, even if you never wrote it down. What the hell was it?"

It's not David Bowie but it can't hurt.

There are a lot of Kramers in the Greater Manchester area – if it's even the right name and the lugworm at the garage wasn't cleverer than that he looked. No obvious link between any of them and Colin Raimes, at least on what Gene's been able to turn up today, certainly not on any of the ones with previous.

It's helped that DI Roy's somehow managed to get him formally seconded to the Raimes case, which has been hanging idle since she's now left it entirely – conflict of interest, she'd told him curtly, not inviting questions. There's no senior figure directly linked to it so Gene's just grabbing the bull by the horns and keeping at it, before someone higher still notices and cuts the budget.

"Come on, Tyler," he murmurs, not even thinking about it now, just asking, asking, asking those unanswerable questions to the void in front of him. He takes a swig of coffee and rubs his hands over his eyes. "Why not answer me, eh?"

Mrs Tyler had told him before she had to leave, an hour previously, that one day when he couldn't visit the doctors had brought in a hypnotherapist, with results that that were apparently called 'inconclusive' – it's still not entirely clear if Tyler can wake up and if he can, why he isn't.

Gene's also met Mrs Tyler's sister now, a lovely lady called Marjorie who can't move her legs or left arm anymore but hasn't let it stop her crocheting like there's about to be a shortage – she has two children of her own, both with small babies apparently, and when she talks about them Gene notices Tyler's mother smile and bite her lip at the same time.

"Dammit, Tyler," he says now, "we're waiting for you."

He sinks into the chair, can't believe himself, still talking to an empty space. "Just listen to me, Sam."

That night, Rachel phones.

"Can't really speak now, actually," he tells her, cradling the phone under one ear as he twists the dial on the microwave, casting a glance back at his pile of paper.

She sounds a little softer today – maybe she's had a rough day or maybe a good one, or just done some thinking.

"You and I never did speak, darling," she says, sighing. "We didn't have a relationship, we had a contract and I think you knew that. You didn't understand me and God knows you wouldn't let me understand you. What decade do you think we live in? It's supposed to be about connection. Communicating, talking, telling each other stuff."

He wonders if she's slightly drunk – he can't quite remember how the tone of her voice should be any more. Hearing her down the phone line is disconcerting, like some strange message from some other side, some other reality, an echo of a present that doesn't exist anymore.

She's still speaking – he can't remember ever having had such a long pronouncement from her before. "Sometimes, talking to you, it was like talking to a wall. And I don't think you ever really talked to me. I could see there was so much inside you, so much feeling just boiling away, eating you from inside. But those walls never came down, not for me."

Phone still in hand, he rests down on the sofa, taking a deep breath, feeling something like an ache in his chest and instinctively looking for the nearest whisky glass.

"I'm sorry," he says, after an awkward silence. "I don't know what else to say."

She laughs down the phone, light and amused and maybe little sad.

On that airfield, that cold day in 2005, the Tactical Driving instructor had pulled Gene away from Tyler, making loud, cheerful comments and suggesting another coffee break before sticking Tyler in his Vectra to go back to the hangar, leaving Gene to drive the practise vehicle back alone.

For the rest of the day they'd been kept well apart, being placed for the other exercises with other, rather palpably unenthusiastic partners.

And yet nothing had seemed real, nothing had imprinted on Gene's mind of the course after that, only that he'd still been terribly aware of Tyler, and that he kept catching Tyler looking at him, unless maybe it was the other way round.

And this is the thing he always tried not to remember, the thing he never told even to himself, that that night he'd dreamt about him, about Tyler, about Tyler coming at him all fire and intensity, colliding, connecting; about getting his hands on Tyler and Tyler sinking through every last boundary and into him, unstoppable, bright, burning life.