Two Faced (Harry Tyler Book 2) (6 page)

‘Briefly. I didn’t mind the decorating but the bed-times …’ he grimaced. ‘I wouldn’t have thought many people here know what platonic means, friend. Probably think it’s a kind of trance. No, Plato comes not from the ancient Greek but my abnormal feet, me “plates of meat”. Station wit, so cutting edge, don’t you think?’

Harry laughed. ‘Goodnight, Pete. Thanks for turning this round so quickly.’

‘That’s what I’m here for.’

‘Good man.’

Harry appreciated Plato’s dedication. If only every civilian he had to deal with was this professional. Harry cast his eye down the list. His heart skipped a beat as he speed-read to the name Dawn Grogan. There she was: The Pantiles, 25 Fullarton Crescent, South Ockendon, Essex. Harry knew Ockendon. It was a dreary and insular, largely Dagenham overspill. What was she doing there? He read the address three or four times, as if weighing up what to do with the information. This was a dangerous game to start. Sometimes he felt he had a death wish, other times he knew that was why he was so good at what he did. Harry picked up the phone and rang 192, directory enquiries. The number was ex-directory. He thanked the operator and hung up. Maybe that was just as well.

Harry got home at a little after ten, fortified with port and brandy. He knew Kara would be there and he was ready to face the fireworks because, apart from anything else, she liked his long-haired, bearded look and he had dared to change it without permission. He would woo her with sweet talk for starters, he decided, then surprise her with the main course – one large portion well and truly delivered. Wallop. And about time too. Harry let himself into the kitchen via the back door. The house was in darkness. He took a cold Bud from the fridge and made himself a sandwich, laying a thick wedge of extra-strong mature cheese between two chunky slices of bread and garnishing it with three slices of raw Spanish onion. He opened the fridge to put the cheese away and, realising he was only kidding himself, he stopped and made a second sandwich. He downed the first Bud and opened a second before noticing that there was half a bottle of Pinot Noir opened too. He carried the lot through to the living room and collapsed in front of the TV, turned it on and managed to hit mute before Channel 444 spluttered back to life. He flicked through the stations to a Las Vegas strip show on
Men & Motors
. That’ll do, he thought. He was halfway through the second sarnie when he decided the plonk would go down a treat. Harry heard Kara moving about upstairs but there was no sound from the kids. She obviously had no idea he was in and he decided to get himself in the mood before he let her know. It was 4am when she came down to find him comatose on the settee and when she saw him she started screeching.

‘What the hell have you done to your hair?’ his wife gasped.

‘Wha’s that?’

‘Your hair, Harry.’

Kara had baby Alfie in her arms. Harry blinked as he tried to take it all in.

‘Well?’ she said.

‘Well, what?’

He rubbed his head as if he’d forgotten shaving off his locks.

‘I can’t leave you alone for five minutes, can I? Why didn’t you have a sensible trim? It’s awful, you look like some Neanderthal Mitchell brother. It’s horrible and your breath reeks of onion.’

Harry raised an eyebrow. What did having no hair have to do with smelling of onion? Women!

‘I fancied it short,’ he said.

‘But why that short? You look like a thug.’

‘Do I?’ Harry couldn’t be bothered with this shit. ‘Can’t you feed the baby, darling?’ he said. ‘I’ve gotta be up for seven in the morning.’

‘Well, it’s nice to see you after a fortnight too.’

‘But you woke
me
up. You started on me as soon as you fucking saw me, nag, nag, fucking nag. It’s not like you were waiting up for me.’

‘You don’t know what it’s like coping with these two …’

‘OK, that’s it. I’m going a-bed. Talk tomorrow.’

Harry was up, showered and gone before baby Alfie had so much as gurgled; his early start was preordained – he was helping out the local drug squad, but even a routine house search was more inviting than another domestic ruck. At 7.05am, he was plotted up in an unmarked car with Sergeant Alan Stead and PC Brian Offer a few doors down from a ramshackle terraced house at the rough end of the roughest council estate. Stead was reading the
Daily Star
. The younger man, Offer, looked over his shoulder from the back seat.

‘He’s a dark horse, in’e?’ he said.

‘Who?’ grunted Stead.

‘Black Beauty.’

‘Fuck off, Brian,’ Stead and Harry said as one, Harry adding, ‘That’s as old as the hills.’

‘How about the inflatable boy who went to his inflatable school with a pin, heard that?’

‘Do we want to?’ sniped Stead.

‘The inflatable headmaster told him: you’ve let me down, you’ve let yourself down and worst of all you’ve let the school down.’

Harry groaned. ‘Can we get cracking on this one, Al?’ he moaned. ‘I don’t think my ribs can stand the strain.’

‘Hold up,’ said Brian. ‘Man goes to the doctor and says, “Doctor, I think I’m a moth.” The doc says, “You need a psychiatrist, why come in here?” The man says, “Well, you left the light on.”’

‘Thank you, Jimmy Cricket, and goodnight,’ Harry muttered.

‘Tell him one of yours, H,’ Alan implored. ‘Go on, a proper gag.’

‘OK … right, twenty-four sailors and a Page Three girl are washed up on a desert island. After a week, she is so ashamed of what they are doing to her that she kills herself. After another week, they are so ashamed of what they’re doing to her that they bury her. After another week, they’re so ashamed of what they’re doing to each other that they dig her up again.’

Alan Stead roared. ‘Now that’s funny!’

‘Bernard Manning, nineteen eighty-six. Why don’t doctors like to give old women smear tests?’

‘Dunno.’

‘Well, have you ever tried to pull apart a toasted cheese sandwich?’

‘That’s sick!’ Brian protested.

‘That’s fuckin’ wonderful.’

‘Shall we get to work?’

‘Come on.’

The three men left the vehicle and crossed to number 14. The garden was an overgrown tip, its unkempt lawn strewn with litter and broken appliances.

Stead rapped on the door. No answer. He hammered on it more forcibly.

‘Who is it?’ an irritated but tired voice came from inside.

‘Ground Force,’ Brian Offer wisecracked under his breath.

‘OPEN UP!’ commanded Stead.

The door opened. A skinny guy with unkempt hair peered out. He was only wearing a pair of grubby-looking underpants with piss stains on the crotch.

‘David Cooper,’ said Stead.

‘Yeah, who the …?’

‘Police, and we have a warrant to search these premises. Stand aside, sir.’

Cooper crossed his arms and hunched his back as the three men entered. They were immediately hit by the smell – a mix of cats’ urine and stale dope. Everything about the Coopers screamed white trash from the portrait of a crying boy hanging in the hall to the week-old
Daily Sport
on the kitchen table. The living room was even more squalid than the garden. The wallpaper was peeling, there were no carpets on the floor, just ancient linoleum, and there was a sideboard with no doors that was overstuffed with junk. Even Rab C. Nesbitt would have looked down his nose at the decrepit three-piece suite. There were springs coming through the seats, stuffing spilling out of the side and a few cushions bearing the images of Hindu gods scattered about to try and disguise the crappiness. Where had they got that from, thought Harry, a DFS sale in Calcutta?

Within minutes, the cops found what they were looking for: seven cannabis plants were being expertly cultivated under a 600-watt HID lamp with horizontal mounted reflectors in the loft, and there was about three ounces of sweet leaf drying in the airing cupboard, along with a smaller quantity of Swazi X Skunk.

Cooper, the guy with the green fingers, was a 26-year-old unemployed father of four, married to skull-headed Melinda, who was of a similar age and worn appearance. Harry had never seen a woman this pale; she had a complexion like putty and tits like the proverbial slate-layer’s nail-bag. He would rather suck on a crack pipe, he thought. And what was she wearing? A fucking J-cloth? Both of them looked filthy, like they lived under the carpet.

‘It’s for our own personal use, officer,’ Cooper wailed. ‘It’s nothing to do with me wife.’

Melinda looked up at him pathetically, their youngest a babe in her arms.

Brian Offer wasn’t impressed. ‘You just said for “our” use,’ he said. ‘So you are both being arrested for possession with intent to supply and with cultivating it.’

Harry shook his head. ‘Alan, do they both have to get nicked? She’s got the kids to look after. It’s only a bit of puff.’

He knew he shouldn’t have intervened, it wasn’t his search warrant, but the evidence of the futility and deprivation of the Coopers’ miserable existence was all around them. What harm did a bit of home-grown do anyone?’

Alan Stead half-turned and said dismissively, ‘They’re both being arrested. We’ve found some drying in the airing cupboard and around fifty plastic cash bags that they sell it in upstairs. Plus PC Offer has found about sixty quid in notes in the bedroom.’

Harry nodded and bit his tongue. Sixty quid! Well, that makes all the difference. They had a regular Bonnie and Clyde here, bang to rights. Sixty fucking quid. This operation was costing ten times that just by them being at the house.

David Cooper had slumped into his rotten old armchair. The support springs had busted long before, so he was almost sitting on the frayed carpet. He looked even smaller and more pathetic sitting down than he had standing.

‘Thanks for trying to help, mate,’ Cooper said.

Harry looked at the boney little scruff-bag. If he’d been drowned at birth it would have saved the tax-payer a fortune in benefits.

One of the Cooper kids grabbed his legs. He was a fair-haired boy with big brown eyes – a living image of the pathetic crying boy in the hallway. The kid looked up at Harry and shyly scooted back to his dad. What chance did that chavvy have of making anything of himself? He’d go straight from school into the welfare system without ever attempting to do a day’s hard graft, just like Mum and Dad. The words ‘work’ and ‘ethic’ would not feature in their school syllabus. If they went to school, that is. The lot of them would be better off in chokey than in this pokey hovel.

‘That’s OK,’ Harry said evenly. ‘That’s life, pal.’

Alan Stead allowed Melinda Cooper to call her mother over from one of the neighbouring houses to tend the kids while their parents were being charged.

As they waited he pulled Harry outside.

‘Have you gone soft, H?’

‘Sorry, mate, I was out of order.’

‘I thought you’d gone all social worker on us.’

‘Nah, I’m just having a rough time indoors, mate. It’s making me sentimental.’

‘We’ll keep this to ourselves then, eh?’

‘Yeah, thanks. I’d appreciate that. No worries.’

Stead went back in the house. Harry knew that he was wrong. By local police standards, this was a reasonable bust. The Coopers had been selling puff to some grateful neighbourhood teenagers. Yet Harry had spent years of his life teeing up real players, some of the biggest drug importers in the country. And to go from that to this kind of under-class chickenfeed was messing with his head. Not that it gave him the right to question the enthusiasm of these young officers.

Back at ‘the factory’, Ipswich police station, Harry Dean sat through the debrief and wrote up his notes, before popping into the canteen for a black coffee. He sat alone, staring at an opened copy of the
Daily Mail
on the table but not taking any of it in.

‘Call for you in the office, Harry.’

There was no response.

‘Call for you in the office, H. Hello, is there life on Planet Dean?’

Harry looked up. ‘What?’

‘Call for you in the office,’ the young constable repeated. ‘Some DCI. He didn’t want to leave a message, he’s hanging on for you.’

‘Thanks, Tony.’

Harry got up slowly and took his coffee with him.

‘Hello, DC Dean,’ he said flatly.

‘Hi Harry, it’s Barry Green, how are you?’

Harry snapped wide awake in an instant. DCI Bazza Green was head of the Essex undercover unit, based at Brentwood, a fine man indeed.

‘Hello, guv, how are you? How can I help you?’

‘Harry, can we have a meet? I’ve got some West Mids lads down and I need to put something to you.’

‘Go on.’

‘No, this needs a face-to-face.’

‘I’m pretty free now, guv, but the job car is tied up with the local drug squad boys.’

‘That’s no problem, we’ll be across to see you early afternoon.’

‘What time, boss? Only I’m off at three. There’s no budget left, no overtime.’

‘We’ll be there by one-thirty at the latest.’

At 1pm, Harry looked out of the office window into the station yard and saw DCI Green emerge from the passenger side of a dark green Ford saloon; with his beer-drinker’s belly and his piss-taker’s smile on display. He was accompanied by a lean and angular, casually dressed Asian male and a portly middle-aged fellow in a crumpled suit whose demeanour screamed, ‘Look at me, I’m a Copper In Disguise.’

Harry felt strangely elated.

Fifteen minutes passed before his phone rang.

‘Ipswich CID, DC Dean.’

‘Harry, Superintendent here, come down to my office please.’

‘Yes, sir, on my way.’

This was all very odd. The Super’s office door was shut. Harry rapped, heard a muttered ‘Enter,’ and went in. The trio were sitting around the office table with Calder MacKenzie a dominating presence behind his large leather-topped desk.

‘What the fuck have you done to your barnet?’ laughed the DCI.

‘Hello, boss, yeah, bit tight to the wood. How are you?’

Bazza Green had no time for small talk. ‘Harry, you’ve been away too long, languishing here with Mr MacKenzie. We’ve got a big one on and no one to fit into it. Harry, we want you back in the unit.’