Novel extract: Sync by Dan Tyte   

We are pleased to publish an extract from Dan Tyte’s new novel. The cover tells us it’s ‘Set in the Welsh capital Cardiff with a story that travels the world, Sync is about synchronicity. When you think of an old friend you haven’t seen in years and then bump into them. It’s about people from the past who the universe brings back to us. It’s about the impact those people have on our lives, locked away, and what happens when it emerges.’

‘I’m sweating Clark’s Pies back here, brother,’ Graves had maneuvered his not inconsiderable arse to the edge of the back seat and tapped on the plexiglass, ‘any chance of a bit of air con or what?’

The driver slid the plastic open and asked his passenger to repeat his request.

He’d been hoping to spend the two to three hour journey catching up with the latest edition of a Somali podcast he was hooked on, but it seemed he had a talker, worse luck.

‘I said it’s tropical in this cab.  Sort it out and south Wales’ finest won’t be shy with the tip, if you know what I mean.’

Psychopath

The driver had expected Graves to laugh at the end of that, but he hadn’t, and he wondered if he was a psychopath.

A recent edition of the podcast had interviewed an eminent Somali psychologist, one of the world’s leading experts in such matters, a female head of department of social and behavioural science at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.

It was the little things, she said, the little things were the giveaways.

He twisted the dial and the sound of reconditioned air whirred out.

There goes peace, he thought.

‘Abdullahi Mohammad,’ Graves read the driver’s ID, his eyes straining from the back of the cab, his pronunciation all rat-a-tat-tat.

His eyes were the one part of his constitution which retained the sharpness of youth.

He’d have coped with specs if he could shave six inches off his gut.

The Lord moved in malicious ways, he thought.

‘Servant of God, ay?’

‘What?’

‘Your name, Abdullahi.  Servant of God.’

Graves had nicked a Somali kid down the docks years back.

He’d suspected him of flashing his bits at al fresco diners at an Italian chain restaurant.

There were twenty or so positive IDs and just as many people put off their carbonara.

‘Abdullahi wouldn’t do that because Abdullahi is a servant of God,’ the kid had repeated over and over until Graves had thought long and hard about giving him a back-hander in the chops.

‘Servant of you for the rest of the day by the looks of it.’

Graves laughed this time, right from the bottom of his belt.

‘Not me, brother, that’s not the way to look at this,’

‘Brother’

Graves had a habit of calling black people ‘brother’, something to do with his police training and mod youth, ‘you could be stuck outside the station all day, doing your fucking Suduku book for hours.  That don’t pay a pittance does it?’

‘Suppose not.’

He was humouring Graves.  91 miles to London.  This was going to be a long day.

‘And instead, we’re a pair of lads going to see if the streets are still paved with gold-’

‘-how’d you mean?’

‘It’s Dick Whittington, brother, nevermind, but don’t think of this as work, think of this as a chance to break out of the humdrum and grab life by the big hairy balls.’

Graves had lived in London once, a lifetime ago now.

That saying wasn’t very accurate was it, he thought, unless the lifetime belonged to someone quite young and tragic. It was the 1990s.

Everything seemed a lot simpler then.  He’d lived in a rotten flat in Walthamstow, sharing with another copper, an Irish sergeant by the name of McKellen who ate lamb vindaloo three times a week and never bought any toilet paper.

Graves wasn’t sure who’d rubbed off on who.

When he’d moved there, Graves had thought being a cop in the big city would be glamorous, that he’d be a law enforcer at the heartbeat of a metropolis, equally feared by the gangland and city hall.

The reality had been different.

London was just like south Wales in lots of ways, a collection of interconnected villages.

Depressing

Graves’ village wasn’t really the home of criminal masterminds, not that he’d got to deal with anyway, but immigrants and petty crimes, drugs and car theft and muggings and a murder, once in a while. One particularly depressing night in the pub, the ‘Famous Pig & Whistle of Walthamstow’ the sign said (‘it’s what it’s famous for you need to be worried about’), he’d asked McKellen,

‘What exactly is it we’re doing here in London anyway?’

McKellen had looked at him, all ginger hair and dragon breath.

‘I mean it’s hardly the fucking Untouchables being a copper in Walthamstow is it?’

‘Fuck knows what you’re doing here but there’s a lot less fucking bombs then there are in Belfast, so there are. That’s what I’m doing here, so it is,’ McKellen replied, before necking his lager.

Graves had left London for his hometown of Cardiff a year later, a transfer to the South Wales Police, and had been offering varying degrees of usefulness ever since.

This case already had all the hallmarks of being at the shittier end of that stick.

Sync is available in paperback and Kindle here.