The Face (Harry Tyler Book 1)

by Garry Bushell

“What, from work you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, and if they do I’ll say you’re out. Let’s have a bit of time together without your job.”

  “Yeah. Of course.” Pause. “Where’s me moby?”

  “On the kitchen table, where you left it. You going to look at that gate this afternoon?”

  Fucking gate! He thought. You weren’t thinking about gates an hour ago. “Yes, luv,” Harry said meekly. Harry slung on some jogging pants, an old sweatshirt and his battered moccasins, then headed straight to the kitchen to put his mobile on charge. A plate of spaghetti on toast later and he was on the phone to work, as usual. Kara got upset and stormed into the garden. If her husband had seen her crying he hadn’t let it disturb his conversation. Sometimes she felt the phone was some sort of evolutionary growth from his ear. Once, soon after they had married, Harry had actually stopped halfway through making love to her to take a call from work and then sauntered back to bed five minutes later expecting to carry on. “A case of ‘coppers interruptus’,” he’d called it, as if a cheap joke made it all OK.

  After a couple of minutes, Kara came back in and said, “I’m off to Cambridge to do some shopping, do you want to come?” Harry shook his head and carried on talking. He blew her a kiss but it hit the wallpaper. Kara had already gone.

  It was 6.30 pm when she finally got home to find Harry watching an episode of The Sopranos (the third in a row) on video. Kara had collected Courtney Rose from her parents, which pleased him no end. He’d hardly seen his daughter since her third birthday three months before. She was the image of her mum. Courtney’s golden curls and cherubic face made her look like a refugee from a Pears soap advert. Kara loved to dress her in real girlie clothes. She wouldn’t grow up a tomboy. No football boots would ever grace these dainty feet. Harry disapproved of women playing football. And boxing, smoking, wearing trousers, driving and drinking from pint glasses. He wasn’t too convinced about them voting, come to that. According to him the only reason a woman put on a soccer strip was to get their old man’s attention when the football season was on.

  Harry played with Courtney until her 8 pm bedtime. He even feigned interest in The Tweenies. Kara slipped out for a take-away curry. He’d asked for a vindaloo, but she bought him a rogan josh, saying, “I’m not having you stinking the house out tomorrow”. It had pissed him off but he’d bitten his tongue and spiced it up with HP Chilli sauce when she wasn’t looking. Two cans of supermarket lager and a large brandy later and Harry was ready for his bed. He slept well that night.

  Unusually for Harry, he’d taken two days out of work. Kara was delighted. What she didn’t know was his DO had ordered him to clear some of the time-off he had built up. He hadn’t actually wanted to take any leave whatsoever, but he played the situation to his advantage of course. Harry even left his mobile at home to keep Kara sweet and ensure another bunk-up later on. She had rustled up a picnic for them that he pronounced “pukka!” The sun had even come through for them, blazing away as if it were auditioning for a Cornflakes packet.

  They headed for Mildenhall and found a spot on the heath. Harry took a bite on a turkey leg and watched a US transporter climb up into the picturebook sky. This he could suffer. After lunch – he called it dinner – they cuddled up on the grass, dad, mum and daughter. It was idyllic. And then Kara made her move.

  “Harry, will you ever give up undercover work?”

  “Not for a while, darling. Why?”

  “We never see you any more.”

  Harry stiffened. “Don’t spoil it!” he snapped. “Why do you have to fucking spoil things?”

  “Because it’s true. You’re always away working. I never know where you are, what you’re doing, when you’re coming home. You’ve got a lovely daughter here. She needs her dad. I need her dad.”

  Harry’s mental drawbridge shot up. Oblivious to the growing drama, little Courtney was playing feed the dolly a chicken wing. Kara, with right on her side, took Harry’s silence as tacit agreement. “When are we going to get away like other families do?” she asked.

  Here it comes, he thought, bang on cue.

  “When are we going to have a decent holiday?” Harry had spent much of his undercover work tripping around the nightspots of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Madrid, Malaga, Geneva and Munich. Europe was his playground. Kara wasn’t envious of it, but she hated them being apart. She regularly got a postcard from him, seldom a phone call. Harry was everywhere, but her life was going nowhere. She was trapped at home, an hour’s drive from any of her childhood friends, never allowed to tell the few cronies she’d made from ante-natal classes about her husband’s real job – they all thought he was on the oil rigs. There were days when she could have cheerfully screamed the house down. Kara had rehearsed this speech a hundred times, and yet now, as she opened her heart to her husband, she could sense he wasn’t really listening. So she changed gear.

  “Harry, do you care about us at all? Do you really want this? Me and Courtney Rose, are we part of your life?”

  Harry rocked a little at this one. He knew he loved Kara as much as he could ever love anyone. And he loved Courtney beyond question. What he couldn’t grasp was how much the adrenalin-charged thrill of adventure, the dangerous highs of his demanding job were poisoning his mind. His marriage and his mental health were suffering because compared to THE JOB, nothing mattered. Nothing else came close. But how could he tell that to Kara when he wouldn’t even face it himself?

  Rather than row, Harry caved in. “OK, book somewhere. Let’s go away, the three of us.”

  “When?”

  “I dunno. Christmas. Book Christmas away.”

  “Where? Where can I book? I don’t wanna book somewhere and you say it’s off limits because of your work.”

  “I dunno, doll. You think about it and tell me where you fancy.”

  “Florida.”

  “Fine.”

  “I saw some great deals on Teletext for Orlando.”

  “Fine, great, yeah.”

  “TALK TO ME!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “‘Fine, great, yeah’,” she mimicked. “Don’t you have any thoughts about it? If I’d said Timbuctoo you’d have said, ‘Fine, great, yeah’; just to shut me up.”

  “Here we fucking go! I said yes, Florida, yes! What else do you want from me? I want to go there. We’ll have a great time. Why do you have to start a row?”

  “I’m not, I just want some discussion, that’s all.”

  “For fuck’s sake! YES! Florida’s fucking brilliant. I can’t wait for Christmas, let’s go and watch some tosspot paedophile dressed up as a giant rat trying to get into Minnie Mouse’s knickers.”

  Courtney Rose started to cry. Harry got off the blanket and marched off to the car. The picnic was over.

  They drove home in silence. Courtney Rose was asleep in her baby-seat as soon as Harry had hit the first bend. They hadn’t said a word for 13 miles.

  “Are you going to talk to me?” Kara asked eventually.

  “Why is it me not talking to you? You’re not talking to me, either.”

  “You do it every time, try and make out it’s my fault. That’s the policeman in you. Why can’t you just admit you’re at fault for once?”

  “What’s my fault? You’re the one who starts it and it’s my fucking fault.”

  “Don’t keep swearing.”

  “Bollocks.”

  “Don’t ever swear in front of Courtney.”

  “She’s fucking asleep.”

  “HARRY!”

  He turned the CD on. Kara turned the volume down. Both knew their marriage was flawed, but was it doomed? Harry could see it all slipping away. He didn’t want that. Not yet, at any rate. He pulled over into a lay-by. Kara looked at him apprehensively.

  Harry glanced at Courtney, and made a grab for Kara’s hand. “I’m sorry, luv. OK?” He leant over and kissed her gently on the lips. “I am so sorry.” He cuddled her and she responded. “It’s just my
head,” he said. “It’s buzzing all the time. I don’t mean to upset you. Book the holiday. I really fancy Florida. She’ll love it, and when she’s a bit older, we’ll take her to Vegas. Book Florida. I’m sorry.”

  Kara started sobbing, then tried to talk through her tears.

  “Shhh,” said Harry. “Come on, girl. You know I love you.”

  He was adept at emotional manipulation. What wasn’t clear, even to Harry, was if what he was saying was deception or the truth. Was he really sorry, or just keeping the peace? Did he want to save his second marriage, or could he really not give a toss? Perhaps it was just the ag of the divorce and the squabbling over property and maintenance he couldn’t stomach.

  “When we get home I’ll ring work and take a couple more days off,” he said. “I’ve got plenty to do indoors.” Big house points being scored here, he thought. And a leg-over guaranteed.

  Peace reigned on the domestic battlefield for the next two days. Harry spent time mowing the lawn and tending flower beds. Even the gutters got cleaned out. Harry was most of the way through a weed patch when Pete, his next door neighbour, stuck a cold beer over the fence. He was an amiable sort of guy, and one of the few locals who knew Harry was a “secret copper”. Pete had retired from “the gas”. Before that he’d been a frontline soldier and knew how many marbles made six. He never asked about Harry’s work. They spent 40 minutes shooting the breeze – football, local gossip, the bloody yobs who were vandalising the local primary school. Everyday shit. Harry realised he hadn’t thought about work all day.

  Kara came out of the house with a trowel in her hand. She was wearing pink shorts and a tight-fitting pastel yellow T-shirt. “You two are like a couple of old women,” she joked, and Harry smiled. He was at peace with himself.

  That evening Harry fired up the barbeque and slung on some quarter-pounders and butterfly chicken breasts, half-cooked in the oven. He loved to cook outdoors, it was the only cooking he’d ever do. There was something primordial about it. Man the hunter preparing his kill. A million years BC, Fred Flintstone was doing this with mammoth steaks and spicey hot pterodactyl wings. Harry raised a large glass of red – a 1998 Fleurie – to his lips, winked at Kara and said, “What do you think the poor people are doing now?”

  She had smoked half a joint in the shed and was feeling as mellow as her husband. She didn’t even notice the mobile phone had slipped back out and was lying on the patio table behind the sea salt. It was exclusively a work phone. Kara didn’t know the number. If she didn’t know it she couldn’t ring it and compromise an operation. Besides, as Harry had explained, it had caller display. He couldn’t afford to have a target clock the number or by chance overhear a conversation that would put his safety in jeopardy. Harry regularly changed numbers anyway. Once a big op had been successfully concluded, the mobile would be off for a week or two and then sacked.

  Kara had been working on a cross channel ferry when she had first met Harry. She was a stewardess on the Felixstowe to Gothenburg line that crawled across the North Sea. The first time he set eyes on her, he knew he had to have her. She had smiled at him, green eyes sparkling, and he’d frozen. If he’d been in a cartoon his eyes and his heart would have been out on stalks. If the cartoon had been Fritz The Cat, his groin would have been out there too. Kara’s reaction to Harry was similarly cathartic. It was almost like the guy had an aura about him.

  She was a strange girl, bright but naive at the same time. No one could accuse her of being worldly-wise. Kara came from Hadleigh, near Ipswich, originally. Her parents had moved across country to Dullingham which is a stone’s throw from Newmarket and Cambridge. She’d had just three previous boyfriends.

  Kara and Harry had been together for six years now, married for three of them. At first she had enjoyed hearing stories about his exciting work, until the demands of The Job had shunted her into a kind of slipstream of his life. Back then she’d been enthralled to hear how easily Harry gained the trust of big-time villains and how even the smartest suckered themselves when they saw money on the table. He described his job as “like hunting a tiger in the jungle armed only with a pointed stick … but with a back-up team packing surface to air missiles”. Kara knew he was a special kind of man, and tried to make allowances for it. Harry was brilliant at his job, the best of the best. He believed in himself totally. His ability to lie fluently under pressure would impress a convention of door-to-door salesmen who had qualified as lawyers and were aiming at becoming EPs. And he was tenacious. Like the Mounties, Harry Tyler always got his man.

  Kara was dead proud of him, of course she was. She just believed that, in fairness to families, the force should put a sell-by date on undercover operatives. Most of the men in Harry’s line of work ended up as serial divorcees. Kara questioned if anyone in authority really cared about the men’s well-being. Maybe some of them did, a bit. But there were fabric softeners that cared more. As long as the bodies were getting put away, no one was ever going to say, “Move over, H, go enjoy some downtime with Kara and your kid.” And there was no one she could really talk to about it. Oh, her mum, dad and sister knew vaguely what Harry did for a living but she was too much of a trained soldier to give much away. Harry had drummed the “loose lips cost ships” message into her from day one. It wasn’t even as if there were other wives she could confide in. Friendships between families of undercover officers weren’t forbidden, but they weren’t encouraged. Besides, could she cope with being around more than one professional porky-pie merchant at a time?

  Kara had met many undercover buyers, operators whom Harry rated as quality. They were all like him. Male, female, black, Chinese, Irish, Yank or Canadian, they were all Harrys. Some of them were very sweet, some OTT on two pints of lager, but they shared Harry’s supreme confidence, his ability to flatter and box clever. “Bullshitters with cast iron bollocks”, was how her husband had proudly described his profession. Not one of them had a home life to talk of.

  In her heart of hearts Kara knew Harry could never go back to being a normal cop. How could he be setting up a gang of counterfeiters one week and trying to detect who nicked old Mother Wade’s knickers off the line the next? The only thing he could do was leave the Force and get into some kind of private detective work. He was smart enough to run his own agency and when they got to Florida she resolved to plant the seeds in his mind. It was about time her husband made some serious money from his talents.

  Harry didn’t know it but his one true friend was his wife. She was the only one who would never betray him.

  All his life Harry had kept people at arm’s length. He had no friends at all from his schooldays. His job meant he couldn’t socialise regularly with other cops and he was only on nodding acquaintance with the men he sat with at football. His drinking buddies in the village pub were just that, faces to have a laugh with and who swallowed his oil rig cover story whole.

  After school, he’d found it hard to put down roots. He’d bummed around from one job to another, drifting from flat to bed-sit. Harry was working as an office clerk in Ilford, Essex, when he’d fallen for a legal-audio typist called Dawn, a year his junior, who had proved easily impressed when he acted the clown. A bright, attractive brunette from a working class background, Dawn was shy and had had a sheltered life. She still lived locally with her parents and two younger sisters. Her father, Bob, was a retired cop, and when Harry asked for his daughter’s hand in marriage, Bob suggested he get a job “with prospects” with the Essex police.

  Harry had been neither pro nor anti police at the time. He vaguely considered the boys in blue to be the enemy of the working classes but had no time for the arseholes who glamorised the Kray twins and other two-bob thugs. His own father stirred the pot telling him how he wished he’d joined the police instead of the brigade. One morning on a whim Harry rang Directory Enquiries and got numbers for Metropolitan Police recruitment and Essex police. For no reason at all he rang Essex first and the forms were in the post. The summer of 1979 was a blur.
He joined the police, married Dawn and got a flat in Braintree, all to a soundtrack of The Jam and Ian Dury. Harry was happy. Or at least he was until Dawn started playing away, and the great betrayal brought the whole house of cards crashing down around his ears. Thank fuck they hadn’t had kids. It was the lowest point in Harry’s life. He had briefly considered suicide but decided that, the way his luck was poxed, if he’d hanged himself the rope would have broken.

  To escape the pain, Harry flung himself into his work. It was amazing how fast “Please come back, darling” turned into “Fuck her, the prat.” Harry learned how to use a washing machine and that funny metal thing that straightens out the creases of your trousers. He never did master the oven.

  Harry Tyler stayed in uniform for six years. He was a natural thief-taker and made the inevitable transition into the CID and then the Essex wing of the Regional Crime Squad. He loved the fringe benefits of coppering back then, the hard drinking, the easy access to strippers and Toms. Harry amassed snouts the way Jim Davidson collected speeding fines. He moved easily in the criminal underworld, and had the innate ability to persuade the best lying thief to give an honest confession.

  His bosses soon noted his gift of the gab. Harry’s patter was like a force of nature. Forget Parkinson, Harry Tyler could talk to anyone and get them to open up. It made him an obvious choice to go on an undercover officers’ course in Bristol. He learned quickly. At first Harry was second fiddle to the experienced players, acting as their pretend gophers, but within months he was pushing himself forward. He wanted to be the main man, the guy the faces would show their parcels to, and when he got the chance he performed with breathtaking self-assurance. The ritual was always the same. Target the bad guys, gain their confidence, see their parcel, and then send in his gang – more undercover men – to collect the goods. And, as Cilla would say, surprise surprise, one of them turned out to be a lousy, no-good cop. Harry would be long out of the frame by now, of course. He always distanced himself before the trade fell down, so he would retain his integrity and “honour” among the thieves, most of whom were soon doing deals with the feds, sacrificing other faces in exchange for lesser sentences.