Two Faced (Harry Tyler Book 2) Read Free Page A

quipped Harry Dean. ‘But he’ll help you to get it enlarged.’
    ‘Easy, tiger.’ Limp-wrist laughed. ‘You’ll make Mr Holmes jealous. Now, everyone touching …?’
    Harry glanced sideways to his right at brunette Rachel Freeman, a flirty, loud-mouthed Mancunian detective from the Avon and Somerset force. She wasn’t bad looking but she never shut up. What Rachel didn’t know about anything wasn’t worth knowing – well, according to her, that was. She had turned on Harry in their first week for eating his favourite breakfast – two fried bangers in a crusty roll, smothered in brown sauce and spread with so much butter that it dripped from the sides as it melted.
    ‘Lips and arseholes, that’s what sausages are,’ she had said before setting off on an uninvited rant about the perils of cholesterol and animal fat.
    Rachel Freeman, Harry thought: no opinion unexpressed, no prick unteased. She’d been out with two of the five blokes in the line-up since they’d got here, but neither of them had got past first base with her. Harry put his hand on her plump little bottom and squeezed it gingerly, hoping she wouldn’t bite. There had to be teeth down there somewhere, she was always talking out of it. Yeah, lips and arseholes, all right.
    Harry Aaron Dean was 27. Born in Colchester, Essex, he had grown up poor but proud on a Romford council estate and drifted into the Essex police seven years before on the advice of his former father-in-law, a tough retired cop. The force served Harry better than the marriage. Dawn had run off with the six-foot-two physical training officer next door. Harry’s world fell apart the day he came home to the ‘Dear John’ letter on the kitchen table. She still loved him, she said, but she never saw him. She needed more. That’s where Harry had gone wrong, see, doing all that overtime to try and buy the bitch a better fucking lifestyle – the nicer house, the holidays in Benidorm and Majorca.
    He didn’t tell anyone how much Dawn had mangled his insides. Who could he tell? His parents were dead, he had no siblings, he had never let anyone get close enough to become bosom buddies and it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing you chatted about in the canteen at the nick. So Harry bottled it all up. He never let the pain show; and he never gave all of himself to anyone again.
    It’s surprising how quickly a broken heart heals up when you’ve got something to live for. Dawn left him in the February of 1985, the year Harry transferred into the CID after six years in uniform. A move to the Essex wing of the Regional Crime Squad followed swiftly as he threw himself into detective work. Harry was a natural thief-taker. His assured manner and innate gift of the gab helped him move with ease in the criminal underworld. He relished the shady demi-monde of strippers, drippers, bent publicans and snouts. This was his turf, this other Britain – a world of lock-ins, lock-ups and unlicensed brawls. And Harry notched up more felt collars than a Savile Row tailor. His superior officers recognised his natural abilities. Who better to send on the undercover course at Bristol?
    So Harry and his fellow maverick gladiators went through four hard months of training. They were taught tactics and psychology, how to bluff and double bluff, how to deflect suspicion and get inside the heads of their prey. Their job was to bring on the parcel and make sure the top men on the firm they were targeting were caught ‘hands-on’ with the illicit merchandise. But you couldn’t incite a criminal to commit a crime he would not have committed if it weren’t for you urging him to do so. That was the cardinal rule – ‘the prime directive’ as they called it, Captain Kirk-style. The pitfalls were plentiful, the consequences of any mistake plainly life-threatening. And if the course were mentally and physically draining, the nine knew that it would be nothing compared to the challenge of the real job to