Two Faced (Harry Tyler Book 2) (5 page)

The Friday after the Angels were lifted, Harry bumped into Marlene Clavin accidentally on purpose at Charlton Conservative Club, and told her a tall story about how he had evaded the Old Bill when they had swooped, knowing that it would play well with Ronnie. He said he would ‘duck his nut’ in Torquay for a fortnight while the fuss blew over. Marlene purred sympathy and, eyelids fluttering, she dropped heavy hints about how much she loved that part of Devon herself, especially Cockington. Opportunity was knocking, but Harry blanked it. Although his time with Ronnie was coming to an end, he had no wish to abuse their relationship. He had too much respect for the man to do that. He mumbled something about helping Alfie out at Valley Metals when he got back until Ronnie got out of hospital, but rang her ten days later to say that he had landed a job in an Exeter nightclub and wouldn’t be back for a while.

Throughout his long undercover initiation period, Harry Tyler had been booking on and off duty through his controller, a gruff Scot called Bobby McCall. The money that he had been earning ‘off the cards’ was paid into the police covert operations branch. It was then surrendered for tax purposes against his police wages. ‘I declared all of it too,’ he told his second wife Kara years later. ‘What a mug.’ His work experience was a complete success. He had established Harry Tyler as an identity, and set himself up with names to drop and references that could be easily checked out. Scores of people in the London underworld who had come to Ronnie’s yard with their lorry-loads now knew Harry’s face, if not his name. For years to come, he was able to casually slip ‘I know Noodles and Potman …’ or ‘I used to work on the scrap down at Ronnie’s …’ into conversations, and find that these magic words unlocked barriers; although no UC job he ever had after this would feel so goddamn
easy.

October 25, 1986. Harry had met Ronnie Clavin in Gambadella’s caff near the Royal Standard at Blackheath. Ronnie was on crutches and still heavily bandaged but he was in good spirits. They had been there long enough to drain two teas. Ronnie called over to the waitress.

‘How long have you worked here, luv?’

‘Three weeks.’

‘Well, it weren’t you who took our order then.’

Harry grinned.

‘Did you have a laugh with Potman?’

‘Yeah, Ron. Proper.’ He paused. ‘Why is he called Potman? I meant to ask him but it all got a bit lively. Did he work in a pub?’

‘Did he bollocks. You should have asked him to show you round the greenhouse, son. He grows his own. Pot plants everywhere. He must keep half of West London on puff.’

‘You know, I never thought of that. So why Noodles then, some Far East connection? Opium, smack, lady-boys?’

‘No mate, he just likes Pot Noodles. There was a time they were all he’d eat, morning noon and night.’

‘And where does Eggy fit into the equation?’

‘She is Noodle’s daughter.’

‘Fuck. How old is she then?’

‘Sixteen, I believe.’

Harry signed with relief.

‘Yeah, it was her birthday yesterday.’

‘Shit.’ A pause. ‘Why is she called Eggy?’

‘Because she’s over easy, and everyone has had a dip, but I never told you that.’

‘OK, last question: what was the deal with Potman and his Hitler tattoo?’

‘Oh, Adolf,’ Ron chuckled. ‘Well, y’see, he’s got this big Adolf on his left thigh, see, and Hitler’s arm is tattooed on his cock, so every time he gets a perk on Adolf gives the old
siegheil
salute.’

‘No! Fuck …’ Harry was lost for words.

‘I took him to see the strippers down the Fort Tavern in Plumstead once and it was like Springtime For Hitler going on in his pants. And that ’appens every time someone orders pizza to go. He’s invaded a few hinterlands an’ all.’

‘I’m quite relieved I never saw it. Here, I thought Hitler only had one ball.’

‘Old wives’ tale, boy.’

‘Maybe, mate,’ Harry smiled. ‘But he dropped a bollock when he invaded Russia.’

Both men laughed as the waitress turned up with their breakfast. Harry had a sausage roll, Ronnie a mountain of cholesterol: two fried eggs, bacon, sausage, tomato, beans and chips, which he covered liberally with brown sauce.

‘So tell me what happened after that night in Southall, mate,’ said Harry. ‘’Cos as soon as the Filth turned up I had it on me toes and I ain’t heard a word about them since.’

‘Well, the bloke who got away, the brother, must have called in Plod and Potman and Noodles were both banged up in the local nick. And the way I hear it, in comes this right old-fashioned detective and this weasel-like DC. They tell Noodles that Potman has rolled over and confessed the lot. Now Noodles, being smart, knows that this is double bollocks and gives it a blank, but then the DS goes on and tells him who done what to the prick and with what. Who had the claw hammer, who used the screwdriver and so on. Want another tea?

‘Here, love, same again over here.’

‘Tea or coffee?’ she replied.

‘I give up. How can you tell?’

The waitress grimaced.

‘So Potman grassed,’ said Harry.

‘Hang on, you’re jumping the gun. Noodles thinks, fuck, they must have given him drugs or something, and slams up. So they go and do the same thing with Potman, but saying Noodles has rolled over. Potman hears the story, can’t figure out how the little prick knows so much but being a pragmatist he wipes his mouth and says, “Can we have a deal?” Long and the short, they get a bent little brief, who both sides have known for years, the Old Bill cop a nice few quid, there are no charges and the kid who got hurt don’t want to know nothing from nothing – well, obviously, ’cos he’s been thieving as well. So all’s well that ends well. See, that’s what I told you, son, you can’t have enough friends in low places.’

‘Yeah, but I don’t understand. Who was the grass, Potman or Noodles?’

‘Neither, you tart. The Old Bill had the video. The only time the silly fuckers got anything on film was when they were torturing the kid and about to run him over.’

‘That is a fucking classic.’

‘They don’t get better than that. So you coming back to work for us then?’

‘Mate, I’d love to, but this fella from Exeter, a proper face I met down in Devon, wants me to pay me big money to make a few plane trips for him and import some parcels into the country, if you know what I mean.’

‘Risky, son.’

‘Yeah, but if it comes on top I’ll plead ignorance.’

‘Well, there’s a job waiting for ya whenever you want it.’

‘Thanks, Ronnie, mate. I appreciate that.’

They shook hands as the door opened and a pretty redhead with heavy breasts entered the caff.

‘Lucy,’ said Harry. ‘Over here, love.’

He stood up. Ronnie clocked her as the tight-bloused nurse from the hospital.

‘You filthy bastard,’ he said in a stage whisper and laughed.

‘What’s that you’re eating, Mr Clavin?’ asked Lucy. ‘A heart attack on a plate?’

‘Well they half-starve you in your poxy hospital, know what I mean? And I’ve gotta keep me strength up now I’m on sticks.’

‘Right, we’re off up town for the day, Ronnie,’ said Harry. ‘It was good to see you. Take care, mate.’

They shook hands again.

‘Yeah, be lucky, son. See ya soon, H,’ said Ronnie, but he never did.

F
ebruary 4, 2002. Harry Dean looked at himself in his bathroom mirror, Grisly Adams glared back. Harry’s hair was lank and unwashed. He had a full beard, but his face looked gaunt. He was wearing an old flannel chamois shirt, the one he used to do the gardening in, and a pair of paint-splattered jogging bottoms. What a fucking state. Harry’s mobile rang impatiently in the adjoining bedroom – ‘The Ride of The Valkyries’ reduced to a ring tone! – but he was too transfixed with horror to notice. It was as if he was seeing himself for the first time in months, and he weren’t no oil painting. Not even a coat of metal primer.

Harry walked into the bedroom to study the evidence in a full-length mirror, unbuttoning the shirt and stepping out of his joggers as he went. The weekend’s pub clothes were all over the room as if they had exploded off him. The TV was on. The pumping pop culture adrenalin of
The Big Breakfast
had paused for newsreader Phil Gayle to relate the morning’s main story: armed robber Nicholas Nelson, one of five jailed brothers from a notorious Islington crime family, had been denied early parole. Harry didn’t hear a word of it. He was in a state of shock. How had he got so manky?

Harry wasn’t a vain man, but he had always prided himself on his appearance. He had dressed well all of his life. He was clean and he was cocky. In his early twenties he had radiated so much confidence that his face seemed to glow. It was if he had charisma in his genes. Now he looked like a something Buffy should be driving a stake into. From
Top Gun
to Ben Gunn in twelve easy steps …

Harry hadn’t been happy for months and he could pinpoint the start of his melancholy precisely. It set in exactly one day after John Baker, the South London villain nicknamed Johnny Too, had been sentenced to fifteen years as a result of Harry’s virtuoso penetration of his firm (and, he chuckled inwardly, his women). It was the high point of his distinguished undercover career. It should have been the proudest moment of his life. Instead it was the beginning of Harry’s decline, because that was the day he agreed to retire from UC work ‘for the sake of his family’, for his wife Kara who had nagged him into submission and their daughter Courtney Rose, now nearly five. To keep Kara happy, he had transferred to the Essex wing of the National Crime Squad. She rewarded him by falling pregnant, giving birth to a claret-and-blue son and heir, Alf – ‘Alfie’ – Robert Moore Dean, in July 2001.

Harry had managed to suffer the job until the end of August, when he requested a transfer to divisional CID. Kara was puzzled but didn’t object. She couldn’t be expected to understand how much he hated it. How could she have any idea how Harry felt covering other undercover officers who were doing
his
job? It wound him up to watch them screw up trades that he would have pulled off with ease. He had been the best, without question. How could he play second fiddle to the rest?

It was only when he had done his first shift as a divisional officer that Harry fully appreciated the exact dimensions of the hole he’d left in his foot by shooting himself in it.

Harry’s bosses had pleaded with him not to quit. ‘Just take a three-month breather,’ they’d said. But he knew that wouldn’t have worked. It needed to be a clean break, a complete separation, no turning back, no remorse and no reminiscing. What a pillock.

Now, as he stared at the zombie he had become, Harry realised how utterly fucked he was. Four months of divisional CID work had drained the life out of him. The way he felt went way beyond boredom; his mind was inactive, his spirits were round his ankles. He was up to his neck in a quicksand of depression.

Kara hadn’t been there for the last fortnight. She had taken the kids away to Faliraki with her parents, and was due back later that day. So she hadn’t been around to watch her husband exist on cold beans and takeaways. Harry froze as a thought occurred:

They hadn
’
t made love at all this year.

He couldn’t even remember his last erection. Harry stepped out of his paisley Ralph Lauren boxers and looked at himself in the mirror. Then he closed his eyes and thought of Ruth England. Then Kylie. Then Jordan. Then Kylie and Jordan. Then Zoe from Page Three of the
Sun
. Nothing. His cock just hung there limply, a symbol of the impotence of his new existence. He punched the bedroom door in frustration. Harry had always been the stud, the shag-meister. Now he was fuck-all. Fucking Kara! But it wasn’t her fault. He had no one to blame but himself. In that moment, Harry Dean finally allowed himself to acknowledge the truth he had suppressed for thirteen months: he should never have walked away from UC work. He had done it for his wife’s happiness but it had cost him his soul. Harry was never cut out to be a stay-at-home, Mr Average family man. It wasn’t in his blood. He was a risk-taker, an achiever. ‘A hero’, the newspapers had called him. But the hero had allowed himself to be harnessed by the obligations of marriage and family; handcuffed first by guilt, and now by bitter regret.

Harry didn’t hate his colleagues. The lads at Ipswich nick were good, hard-working, honest coppers, but he didn’t belong there. The big conversation in the canteen every day was who had what in the Tupperware box. There was an old joke he’d used to tell years ago: ‘How does a wooden-top tell if he’s going to or from work? Easy, if his box is empty he’s going home.’ But the gag turned out to be true. Harry had nothing in common with the other guys and they knew it. It wasn’t a vanity thing. Even though he never spoke about it, they all knew what Harry had been and appreciated that he was out of their league. What puzzled them was how he had come to be where he was. Harry kept himself to himself. He couldn’t be bothered to socialise. Their small talk drove him nuts. Who gave a fuck about the soaps, Ipswich Town or the price of fucking mince? The police force he loved was changing beyond recognition. You couldn’t talk publicly about anything that mattered – asylum madness, Brussels, the destruction of working-class communities or how much New Labour hated everything great about Britain – for fear of coming to the attention of the new lefty-approved management.

Harry had voted for Blair yet he believed passionately that Phony Tony and co. were out to abolish the police service as a crime-fighting force. The evidence was all around him. The police weren’t here to protect the public any more; they were uniformed social workers, agents of a corrupt state whose job was to enforce liberal values. No proper copper believed that the metric martyrs should have been nicked for trading in imperial measurements. They certainly didn’t think Tony Martin should be in jail. They thought he should get a medal. The farmer had only had to shoot that burglar because Norfolk police had let him down. Of course, Woy Jenkins started it all in the 1960s when he destroyed local autonomy, took bobbies off the beat and put them in Panda cars. Old Bill in Pandas could not prevent crime, they could only turn up after it had happened. The small felonies – petty theft, burglary and muggings – were no longer even considered worth chasing up. But nick a man for ‘racial abuse’ at a football match and see how many brownie points you’d get; if you could squeeze in any arrests between those oh-so-crucial courses on gay awareness, that is. Welcome to the brave new world of post-millennium Britain: singers who can’t sing, actors who can’t act and coppers who can’t nick anyone. Even if they did the CPS wouldn’t prosecute, lefty magistrates would side with the bad guys and good cops faced fake complaints lodged by canny felons who had learned exactly how to play the system. Macpherson’s inept report on the Stephen Lawrence case had driven what might prove to be the last stake into the heart of the force. Orwellian self-censorship was a fact of life in a modern constabulary riddled with self-doubt and crippled by a mindset of political correctness that naked self-ambition merely stoked, fed and fuelled. Morale had collapsed, fitness standards were going down like Harry’s beloved Hammers with male recruits getting progressively weaker and weedier, bossed about by the right-on ‘feminista’ female cops who were pouring in. Try wolf-whistling one of those pan-faced gorgons and keeping your job.

And that was the one thing Harry needed to do. He had been a cop for 22 years now, but he had 8 long years in front of him before he could walk away and pull a pension. Eight years that would feel like eighty. He had to do something to escape the living hell of the 2pm–10pm CID shift; to change the long drizzle of disappointment that his life had become. But what? There was nowhere left for him to go. Something else hung heavy in the air this morning besides his cock. It was the smell of burning bridges.

As the alarm clock kicked in at 9.15am, so did Harry Tyler’s resolve. He would fight back, stop the rot. He had a few hours to tidy up himself and the house. He switched on his Philips electric razor. A haircut could wait, but the beard had to be trimmed, his teeth needed cleaning and, come to think of it, he hadn’t had a shower for a fortnight. No wonder he’d been getting funny looks in the canteen. He took a bottle of Ginseng tablets from the bathroom cabinet and popped two. There was no way he was going to stop functioning today. Two hours later, Harry had spruced himself up enough to grab a tea break in front of the living room TV. The morning channels were churning out their usual cretinous mix of patronising DIY shows and feminised babble, so he skipped through the music stations: Kerrang!, Q, The Box, MTV, MTV 2, MTV hits. He settled on Sky 444, the classic smooth channel where Belinda Carlisle was belting out ‘Heaven Is A Place On Earth’. It wasn’t the song that held his attention so much as the fact that she was such a dead ringer for his first wife, Dawn. He had noticed this at the time of course, but Harry had confined all memory of his cheating ex to his mental dustbin so long before that it seemed like a fresh observation. Whatever happened to Dawny? He had a flash of his missus in the baby-doll nightie she loved to wear, a whiff of Lou-Lou on her neck, her long brown hair cascading over her shoulders, and he felt something he hadn’t experienced in months – a twitch in the groin. Was it the thought of Dawn or the Ginseng? He neither knew nor cared. This was it, the trigger. Suddenly Harry felt energised. He took the stairs two at a time and gave himself a number one razor crop. He had no idea how he would survive the next eight days let alone eight years, but one thing was for certain: Harry Dean would not get through the coming ordeal looking like some washed-up,
Big Issue
-selling muppet.

It was 1.59pm when Harry sauntered into the Ipswich CID office. He felt heads lift as he passed. He was clean-shaven, smart and, had you wanted to, you could have grated cheese on the top of his head.

It started immediately:

‘Who cut yer hair, H, a fucking cartoonist?’

‘Harry, put it in the crime book and I’ll nick the son of a bitch that did that to ya.’

‘Tell us what barber’s you went into, bro, and I’ll get the place sealed off.’

‘I want ALL you skinheads to put your boots on your feet!’

Superintendent Calder MacKenzie, a cocky Scot, stopped him in his tracks and thrust his face so far into his space that Harry could detect last night’s stale Scotch on his breath.

‘Anyone seen DC Dean?’ he asked loudly, adding a trademark ‘Eh? Eh? Eh?’ MacKenzie squared his shoulders and jerked his head back. ‘Harry,’ he went on. ‘We need to do some covert work down at the snooker hall. Get yourself over there, paint yer head red and you can hide out on the table amongst the balls.’

‘Very droll, sir.’

The Scot pulled back his chin as if preparing to launch it.

‘Very cold?’ he said out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Aye, you’ll feel the cold looking like that, my son. Better ask the duty sergeant to lend you a helmet on the way out.’

Harry grinned weakly at his feeble badinage and walked on, leaving the laughter echoing behind him. He didn’t mind the piss-taking. He had created the target, so why not take it? The senior officers’ canteen was ahead of him, but as Harry strolled past the Intelligence Unit he remembered he had work to research and wandered in. The unit was run by Peter ‘Plato’ Sharpe, a civilian. A few years before he would have been known as Peter the Poof; but nicknames like that were for private thoughts and muttered conversations between close pals rather than open expression nowadays.

Harry didn’t mind Plato. He didn’t hide his sexuality, or make a big deal of it, he wasn’t overly camp or in the least bit predatory, and he knew the ins and outs of the Intell world backwards.

‘Hi Plato,’ Harry said. ‘Can you run these names down for me – CRO, voter checks, the lot, mate. I’ve got a fraud to sort out at the Felixstowe shipping company; no rush.’

Peter, a sandy-haired man in his mid-thirties who walked with a limp, ran his eye down the list of names, some of which had dates of births and/or addresses. He couldn’t be expected to know that the last entry, Dawn Grogan, was the maiden name of Harry’s first wife.

6.13pm. Harry was sitting alone in the CID office, typing the finishing touches to a set of case papers on his computer. The office was a mess. Discarded paper tea and coffeecups littered every desk, there were piles of files in all directions and the white board was a mass of scribbles relating to a grisly murder on the outskirts of town. There was a knock on the door. ‘Come,’ Harry muttered, and Plato hobbled in, clutching sheets of paper in his hand.

‘There you go, DC Dean,’ he said in a clipped estuary accent. ‘I’ve done the best I can. Only one with a criminal record and the rest no trace. I’ve got a few possibles off of the voters’ register, though.’ He put the papers on Harry’s desk and turned to leave.

‘Why do they call you Plato, Pete?’ Harry asked. ‘Is it a reference to your brain power or the fact that you only have platonic relationships with the ladies?’

‘Apart from the one I married, you mean.’

‘You were married?’