Sleeps With Angels

The Fortunate Isles

A television is playing in the corner of the room, a big LCD flatscreen model, maybe thirty years old, its picture speckled with malfunctioning pixels. The sound is turned down, but the screen is showing a reality programme, this one involving fifteen celebrities — including, improbably, the last surviving and very aged member of U2 — locked in a decommissioned Russian nuclear submarine on the floor of the Arctic Ocean off Novaya Zemlya. The show’s been airing for a couple of weeks now, and the participants are starting to look bored and listless.

The two men ignore the television and continue walking around the room.

They’re walking in opposite directions, facing outward along the wall, unhurriedly, looking at everything, taking photographs with their phones. The wall is covered with lining paper and painted what was probably once quite a sunny lemon yellow that the years have rendered a sort of shabby nicotine colour. The light switch has been plumbed in by running a cable down from the ceiling and stapling it to the wall. Neither of the men touches the light switch.

When they cross over by the door they go round again, covering each other’s ground, taking more photographs, bending down to examine marks on the skirting, looking up at where the wall meets the high ceiling, checking under the furniture.

“I think I’m coming down with a cold,” says Paweł.

“You should be so lucky,” says Daniel, who is beginning to be annoyed by the smell in the room.

“There’s a lot of it about,” says Paweł, a tall, sandy-haired young man who looks as though he could manage a walk-on part in one of those new World War Two epics — Third Nazi From The Left (the one who gets his throat slit by a British commando during the daring raid on the German radar station in Occupied France.)

Daniel takes some more photographs of the mess on the wall behind the armchair. “Ready?”

“Just a moment.” Paweł leans forward until his nose is almost touching the wallpaper. Leans back. “Okay.”

The two men turn and face the room.

It’s not a big room and there’s not a lot in it. Shabby armchair and sofa upholstered in green velour, to which a grey long-haired cat has added its own touches. Low coffee table in some cheap wood, with a scratched glass top. Television attached to a number of add-on boxes by a cat’s cradle of mismatched cabling. Paweł and Daniel go around the room again, clockwise and counterclockwise, looking under the furniture, looking at the bottle of whiskey and two glasses and the scatter of magazine printouts on the coffee table. They ignore the dead man in the armchair. They go around again, taking photographs.

Daniel’s phone hums. He looks at the screen and touches the answer icon. “It’s yourself, Gard Lockhart,” he says with all the Biblical opprobrium he can load into his voice.

As responding officer, it was Gard Lockhart’s job to secure the scene until Daniel and Paweł arrived, but in a fit of compassion Gard Lockhart felt it necessary to accompany the hysterical widow to the local hospital, and now Daniel and Paweł have to assume the scene is contaminated even if it’s not, which means they’ll have to regard any evidence they find as suspect, because any future defence counsel will certainly tell the jury about it.

“No, Gard,” says Daniel after listening to Lockhart’s explanation for longer than strictly necessary considering how angry he is. “Go back to Ballymena Street. Go into my office and sit down. Don’t stop off in the canteen for a coffee and a chat. Go into my office, close the door behind you, and sit down and wait for me. And don’t touch anything.” He listens again. “No, Gard,” he replies, “it will not appear on your overtime sheet. Not even if you have to wait for me until the end of time. And if, at the end of time, I do finally turn up, and I discover that you’ve fucked off again, I will find you and I will do things to you that will entirely change your outlook on life. Now repeat what I just said.” He listens. Then he hangs up without saying goodbye.

“Bit wordy,” Paweł comments.

“Wordy is the least of Gard Lockhart’s problems,” says Daniel.

“You could go straight home from here and leave him in your office overnight,” Paweł suggests.

Daniel thinks about it. It does appeal, for a moment. He shakes his head. “So,” he says.

“Mm,” says Paweł, and they both walk over to stand in front of the dead man.

He’s sitting in the armchair, white male, in his eighties. He’s wearing a brown pair of corduroy trousers, a white shirt and a tatty grey cardigan. His legs are sprawled out in front of him and his arms are resting on the chair’s armrests. His head is tilted back until he’s looking at the ceiling with an expression of calm puzzlement, slightly cross-eyed, as if he’s trying to focus on the neat little hole in the centre of his forehead. On the wall behind him are a large proportion of the contents of his head. There are blood-spatters all over the armchair and the carpet. Daniel steps forward and palpates the fingers. Rigor hasn’t set in yet, the eyes are still moist, there’s a stench of blood and cordite and voided bowel in the room but no smell of decomposition. All of which unscientific testing appears to mesh with the facts as he knows them. The widow called the police at half past three this morning, about an hour ago, saying that she had gone up to bed and then heard a gunshot and when she came back downstairs she found her husband like this. The widow is, of course, the prime suspect at the moment — the only suspect at the moment — and it’s annoying that she’s now at the hospital under sedation and unable to answer questions. Daniel adds another black mark against Gard Lockhart’s eternal soul.

“I don’t recognise him,” Daniel says, stepping back and lifting his phone to take more photographs. It’s not exactly a fatuous statement; this is a small city, but it’s certainly big enough for one person not to know everybody. A disproportionate number of murder victims tend to come from the criminal classes, though, which is handy because they come attached to priors and files and known associates and probable motives, and Daniel knows most of them personally.

“According to the wife, this is Mr Glenroy Walken,” says Paweł. “And that’s about all Lockhart managed to get out of her before he took her to the hospital.”

“Glenroy.” Daniel moves to one side of the body and takes more photographs. “Well, good morning, Mr Walken. I’m Detective Inspector Snow and this is Detective Sergeant Cybulski and we’ll be your investigating officers for today.” He takes more photographs. “What do you think?”

Paweł stands in the middle of the room and looks at Mr Glenroy Walken, his head tipped to one side. “No sign of a struggle. No sign of forced entry. Drink and glasses on the table.” He looks at the sofa, snaps a couple more photos of it. “We should bag this.”

“So he’s entertaining a friend,” Daniel says. “And at some point around half past three this morning the friend pulls out a handgun and shoots him in the head and then lets themselves out before the widow comes downstairs.”

“Works for me,” says Paweł.

“Or he’s been drinking with his wife all night and about half past three in the morning she just gets sick of listening to him and pulls out a handgun and shoots him in the head.”

“Works for me too,” says Paweł.

Daniel sighs. He rubs his face, says, “All right —” and there’s a commotion outside the room. The door opens and a tall white-haired man wearing a rumpled suit walks in, followed by a flustered-looking Gard Kennedy.

“Snow?” says the white-haired man, walking confidently towards Daniel and Paweł. “What have we here, then?”

Detective Superintendent Tweed, well beyond retirement age and famously insomniac, drives around the city through his endless nights looking for something to occupy his mind. Over the years, Daniel has developed a kind of Zen calm regarding his superior’s habit of striding unbidden into the heart of crime scenes. It’s an attitude Gard Kennedy, who Daniel stationed outside the door in the stead of the disgraced Gard Lockwood, has not had time to cultivate, and he’s mugging and rolling his eyes behind Tweed’s back like a Kabuki performer. Daniel waves him back outside.

“Sir,” he says sternly to Tweed. “You really shouldn’t be — sir, please.” Tweed has gone over to Mr Walken, seized his hand, and is repeating Daniel’s unscientific test for rigor. Daniel grabs the Superintendent by the shoulders and steers him back into the middle of the room, where Paweł has switched off his phone and put it in his pocket and is standing looking up into the corner of the ceiling so that one day, if a canny defence barrister ever questions the security of the scene he can say, quite truthfully, “No, sir, I never saw Superintendent Tweed enter the room.”

“Sir,” Daniel says to Tweed. “We’ve spoken about this before.” He lowers his voice until he’s barely whispering. “Uncle Billy, please.”

Tweed is a legend, a myth, a story told in hushed voices in canteens and locker rooms in police stations all the way up and down the West Coast of Ireland, an Olympian policeman, the yardstick against which generations of detectives have measured themselves and found themselves wanting. On his good days he’s still as good as he ever was, but the good days are getting further and further apart, and he’s taking on the aspect of a ruined monument. Daniel doesn’t know what pursues him out of sleep, but he has an idea that after more than forty years as a policeman the inside of Tweed’s head must be a terrible place.

“Sir,” he says more gently. “I must ask you to —” and the door opens again. This time Wee Rab O’Connell, all done up in his sterile white romper suit, is standing in the doorway. Daniel blinks. “Doctor O’Connell,” he says. “Join the party.”

O’Connell, Chief Forensic Officer, gives the room the once-over and Daniel sees his shoulders slump, although his face maintains its usual deadpan. He sighs fractionally.

“Sergeant,” Daniel says to Paweł, “would you show Superintendent Tweed back to his car, please? And then go and see how we’re doing with the door-to-door.”

Paweł comes out of his testimony-protecting trance (“No, sir, I didn’t notice the presence of Superintendent Tweed on the scene until after Doctor O’Connell was in attendance.”) and gently walks the unprotesting Tweed out of the room.

O’Connell remains blocking the doorway. “A moment, Sergeant,” he says, taking out a phone and aiming at the white plastic overshoes Paweł’s wearing. The phone scans the overshoes’ barcodes and logs them into the evidence database. O’Connell looks at Tweed’s brogues for a moment, then scans them too. He sucks his teeth and moves out of the way to let Paweł and the Superintendent pass.

“Don’t say a word,” Daniel warns when they’re gone.

O’Connell thinks about it, then says, “What have we got?”

“White male, seventies or eighties. Single gunshot wound to the head. No signs of a struggle.” Daniel tries to be deliberately vague, to let O’Connell come to his own conclusions from the evidence. “We’ll want everything in here bagged and blitzed, but concentrate on the sofa and the bottle and the two glasses. Check the bathroom in case the shooter used the loo. And dust the lock on the inside of the front door and the button on the doorbell.”

O’Connell bends over until his nose is inches from Mr Walken’s. He sniffs the wound in the forehead and then straightens up and looks at the mess on the wall. He looks at the sofa and nods. He looks at Daniel, starts to say something, thinks better of it, and goes back into the hallway to unpack his gear. Daniel hears the sounds of scenes-of-crime officers arriving, O’Connell bollocking them for taking so long to get to the scene. He looks at the serene corpse of Mr Glenroy Walken, takes a deep breath, and lets himself fall into the familiar rhythms of a murder investigation professionally conducted. It feels like coming home.

There’s an old joke. Little Jewish chap’s walking through one of the insanely-sectarian parts of Belfast — doesn’t matter which one — and he comes upon this group of paramilitary hard men — Republican, Loyalist, it doesn’t matter.

“So,” says one of the hard men, “are you a Catholic or a Protestant?”

“I’m Jewish,” says the Jewish lad.

The hard man thinks about it for a while, then he says, “Yes, but are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?”

Okay, so not very funny. The funniest thing about it is that someone actually once asked Daniel the very same question, in all seriousness. Are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?

Some years later, it occurred to Daniel that if he’d had his wits about him he would have told the truth, which is that he’s not really any kind of Jew. Judaism descends through the maternal line, and his mother, the sainted Siobhan, for whom his father threw aside a promising career with the Metropolitan Police in order to relocate to this little city in the West of Ireland, was a Humanist who had left instructions in her will that she was to be buried in the back garden of their house in a biodegradable wicker coffin.

Big Sam Snow wasn’t having any of that. He loved his wife to the fringes of insanity, but there was no way he was putting her in the ground in a laundry basket.

This immediately posed the problem of where exactly the interment would take place. Siobhan had been raised a Catholic, but she had spent the latter years of her life politely but gleefully alienating any priest who came within earshot. The local priest, a man who knew how to nurture a grudge, dolefully informed Sam that it would be impossible for Siobhan to be buried in a Catholic cemetery. Sam tried a number of parishes — some of them tens of miles away — but everywhere he went Siobhan Snow’s lonely battle against Catholicism had been waged there ahead of him.

Eventually, Sam found a Protestant vicar some miles from the city who was prepared to perform the ceremony and allow his wife to be buried in his cemetery, but after the service the vicar posed to Sam a question which he had been too busy to think about: how was the boy to be brought up now?

To be truthful, neither Big Sam nor Siobhan had given it much thought. Daniel had been baptised a Catholic, but that was where his involvement with organised religion had stalled. His parents had thought that perhaps they’d cross that bridge when he was old enough for school, but now Sam, the polite refusals of the priests still ringing in his ears, decided it was time to take the bull by the horns.

So, one day shortly before his fifth birthday, Daniel accompanied his father on the train to Dublin, there to visit a mohel of Sam’s acquaintance.

Returning three days later, bemused, in quite a lot of pain and a fraction of a gramme lighter, Daniel listened to his father telling him that he wasn’t really Irish. He was actually descended from a race of people whose history went back to some awful distant vanishing point and involved a great deal of fighting and slavery and wandering in deserts.

When he got old enough for it to matter Daniel found it in his heart to hate his father for the decision he’d made. His religion initially confused and then enraged his schoolmates and the bullying dogged him all through his schooldays. His father’s cack-handed attempts to keep a kosher kitchen only lasted a couple of years, and by the time he went to university in Manchester they were both ordering Chinese takeaways heavy on the pork dishes with barely a twinge of guilt. They were, Big Sam told him, Jews. But they weren’t orthodox. You had, Big Sam said, to be adaptable. Daniel remembers a conversation with his Rabbi around the time he left for university where the issue of adaptability had almost resulted in physical violence.

But he went to Manchester, where he had his eyes opened in too many ways to count. And then, his father’s son, he went into the Metropolitan Police. And then, after a few years, he went home, this English-Irish-Jewish-Catholic-Humanist copper, to find his father and his Sergeant, the nearly-occult Billy Tweed, more or less running Ballymena Street nick as a private fiefdom.

In truth, it wasn’t an onerous job. The Traveller Wars, the biggest thing that had ever happened to the area, were long finished. In the early years of the century two traveller families, the Mitchells and the Copes, had squared off over control of the local drugs trade, which any rational person would have realised was barely worth fighting about. For a very brief period the city resembled one of those lawless towns in the Old West, and questions were asked in the Dáil about whether the local Garda were up to the task of keeping order. And then the Mitchells surprised everybody by providing their very own solution to the problem.

At some point the Mitchells came upon a paramilitary arms cache — doesn’t matter from which side — long forgotten in the white heat of Decommissioning. The passage of time had in fact rendered a lot of the weaponry beyond use, but enough of it remained operational — including a number of shoulder-launched antiaircraft missiles once meant to be introduced to Brit helicopters — for the Mitchells to mount what they obviously conceived as a mighty hammer-blow against their opponents.

The problem for the Mitchells was that the paramilitaries had not forgotten about the arms cache at all, and now they were in government in the North its deployment became something of an embarrassment. An embarrassment which they resolved with elegant simplicity by erasing the Mitchell family.

In the aftermath, nobody could ever prove anything, which was as intended. And the police didn’t fall over themselves to investigate the deaths and disappearances associated with what became, in local legend, The Massacre. It was hardly a shining moment in law enforcement, but as far as they were concerned, Big Sam once told Daniel, the problem was resolving itself and they weren’t going to interfere. When it was over the Mitchells were broken and the Copes, taking the hint, moved on to pastures new.

Since then the city has been like pretty much any city in impoverished, financially-bruised Western Europe. It has a small but muscular drugs scene, several protection rackets, some rather half-hearted prostitution, and its share of gangs and cowboys, all seeking ‘respect’ and periodically becoming enraged when nobody gives them it.

And today it has one more murder.

Daniel gets back to Ballymena Street around seven o’clock in the morning, after almost four hours watching O’Connell’s men logging the scene and bagging up various bits of furniture for later trace evidence examination, and when he walks into his office he finds Gard Lockhart sitting fast asleep in his visitor chair. He feels a faint and entirely transitory pang of guilt for having forgotten about the young Gard, but he can’t raise the energy to bawl him out.

“Oh, fuck off home, Lockhart,” he mutters, settling himself in his chair behind his desk. “Don’t do it again.” And as Lockhart, still half asleep, stumbles out of the office, Daniel docks his phone so it can upload its pictures of the Walken crime scene to the nick’s expert system, which will stitch them together, along with Paweł’s photos and the pictures O’Connell’s team took, into a zoomable three-hundred-and-sixty degree walkthrough for future reference. “Get me a coffee before you go,” he tells Lockhart’s gratefully-retreating back. “Black. Put all the sugar you can find in it.”

And he turns to his keyboard and starts writing his report of the night’s events. After about fifteen minutes, he stops, and the members of the morning relief in the outer office, shrugging off their coats and quarrelling over who gets the canteen croissants and who gets the Danishes, hear him shout, “Fuck! What day is it?”

Big Sam Snow lives a mostly blameless life these days. Early on there were episodes of wandering, sobbing, begging, attempts to negotiate with the nurses and perhaps even God Himself, and on one notable occasion the hurling of a chair through a window and Sam’s attempt to follow it into the Great Outdoors. But those days are long gone. Now Big Sam exists in two states — asleep and awake. And the awake state is divided into two positions — in bed and in his chair.

Today is a Chair Day. “He had a good night,” says Helen, the nurse who looks after Sam and the thirty or so long-term cases on the ward. A good night for Helen is one where only a third of her charges were doubly incontinent. She’s in her early forties, attractive but entirely worn out, and in an alternative universe she and Daniel would have established a Relationship. He’d have started by maybe giving her flowers now and again, and it would have progressed to little presents and then a trip to the cinema to see a thriller, which he would have scoffingly but charmingly deconstructed afterward over dinner. Eventually there would have been Affection, two similarly-afflicted souls living outside normal diurnal existence. Later would have come an Understanding, and after that maybe Love.

But this is not an alternative universe. Helen is a nurse overworked beyond the point of exhaustion, and when Daniel visits the hospital he’s usually running on caffeine overdrive. Every time they see each other it’s like the meeting of two distantly-related species and the idea of a relationship, if it ever crosses their minds, is entirely ridiculous. All they have in common is Big Sam, and, all respect to Big Sam, it’s not enough.

The hospital has seen better days. Back at the turn of the century, in the time of the Celtic Tiger, it was very nearly state-of-the-art. But the Celtic Tiger stumbled, got to its feet, then stumbled again and went down for good as economies across the world blew away on the wind. Since then, investment in public services has been thin indeed. Big Sam’s pension and health insurance barely covers his upkeep; it’s nowhere near enough to pay for private care.

So here he is, the Big Man, sitting in a threadbare armchair beside his threadbare bed at the far end of the threadbare long-term ward. As usual, Daniel tries not to look at the other patients as he makes his way with Helen to Sam’s bedside. Hard though it might be to credit, there are people here worse-off than his father.

The worst thing is that he doesn’t look ill. He looks… thoughtful. Distracted, sometimes. He sits in his chair by the window and looks out over the city. The ward is high enough in the building that you can see the hard sheen of the Atlantic beyond the clustering rooftops, and sometimes you might think Sam is looking out at the horizon and imagining the endless miles between here and America. But the odds are against it.

He’s neat and clean in his pyjamas and dressing gown, freshly-shaved and hair combed. Helen says to him, “Look who’s here, Sam, Daniel’s come to see you,” but he doesn’t pause in his examination of the horizon.

Daniel thanks Helen and pulls up a visitor’s chair beside his father. “Well,” he begins. “That was an interesting evening.”

The sad thing is that the only thing Daniel and his father really have in common is The Job. If any of the other patients were able to pay attention, they would hear Daniel on his visits giving Sam chapter and verse on his latest cases, in nitpicking detail because Sam used to be a nitpicking sort of policeman. So Daniel tells Sam about the callout this morning, about Glenroy Walken and his unusual living arrangements.

It turns out that Mr Glenroy Walken was not really Mr Glenroy Walken. There’s no record of a national ID card in that name, no passport, no National Insurance Number. His fingerprints are still making their weary way through the National Fingerprint Database, and it’ll be days — weeks, probably — before there are any results from his DNA. A quick google brought the news that ‘Glenroy Walken’ was a character in The West Wing, a turn-of-the-century American television drama.

Whether this is relevant or not, nobody knows, and it’s impractical to ask the widow because about an hour after Gard Lockhart brought her to the hospital she suffered a massive heart attack and is now in a coma in the intensive therapy unit four floors below Sam’s chair. ‘Widow,’ indeed, is a misleading term because, while Mrs Ellen Wright is certainly a widow, she is not Mr Walken’s widow. The late Mr Wright died of cancer fourteen years ago, and since then Mrs Wright has lived alone. According to statements by neighbours, Mr Walken is a new addition to Mrs Wright’s life. He’s been living at her house for between two and six weeks and he didn’t go out much. So far a search of the house has not turned up any documents belonging to or pertaining to him.

Daniel tells his father this much, tries out a few half-formed theories on him, but Sam just sits looking into the West like a character from some old story, and when it comes time for Daniel to leave there’s no sign that his father ever knew he was there.

On his way out of the hospital, Daniel stops off in ITU and checks on Mrs Wright. There’s a Gard stationed beside her bed in case she comes out of the coma and makes a statement, but so far the old woman’s condition is unchanged. Daniel stands by her bed for a few moments looking at her, a bone-thin old lady with long white hair and the blue smudges of old tattoos up both arms. What was it with her generation and tattoos? These days it’s rare to find young people indulging in any form of body modification more extreme than earrings, but Daniel has seen the bodies of old folk adorned with sometimes astonishing decorations. He remembers a local councillor who died of a heart attack aged seventy-five, a staid and upright citizen and a figure of great probity. There was a brief question about the cause of death, and the body was given the once-over at Antrim Road mortuary and, once undressed, turned out to be an alien landscape of piercings and jaw-dropping old decorative scarification. That was the day Daniel first encountered the phrase ‘Prince Albert.’

Standing there, a thought occurs to Daniel. He takes out his phone and takes a couple of snaps of Mrs Wright’s tattoos. It’s a long shot, but anything they can learn about her would be useful.

Outside in the late afternoon sunshine, he stops and takes stock. He can’t think of anything else they could be doing in the Walken investigation. He’s visited his father. He’s managed some shopping. What else? Oh, yes. Sleep. Ought to make time for some sleep.

A week on, and no one is any the wiser about the Walken killing. Mrs Wright remains in a coma and things are not looking so hopeful for her. Mr Walken remains a mystery wrapped in an enigma, although like Mrs Wright he has many tattoos and a number of the designs are similar to the old lady’s. Cause of death was indeed the single gunshot to the head; a bullet dug out of the wall behind the armchair has turned out to be a.38, but too damaged to provide reliable comparison evidence, even if they do find the murder weapon. Local CCTV has proved inconclusive, mainly because budget cuts have eaten into the camera network’s maintenance and only a third of it is currently in operation, none of it in the area of Mrs Wright’s house. Daniel takes on new cases, visits Sam in hospital, returns to his flat above Ballymena Street nick, cooks himself solitary meals, works works works.

And then one morning Wee Rab O’Connell knocks on the door of Daniel’s office and comes in with a briefcase in his hand and a smile on his face.

“Have a win on the Lottery?” Daniel asks over the top of his monitor.

“Not far off,” O’Connell admits, sitting down on the other side of the desk. “We got an identification on Glenroy Walken.”

Daniel sits back in his chair. “Do tell?”

“The DNA results came back about an hour ago. It turns out Mr Walken’s on the database under the name of Mitchell. Alan Mitchell.”

Daniel thinks about it. “You know, that rings a bell.”

“It should. Mad Dog Mitchell. The Traveller Wars?”

Daniel sighs. If only he had a euro for every hard man who styled himself ‘Mad Dog.’ But that isn’t what’s ringing the bell. “You think that’s started again? After, what, sixty years?”

O’Connell shrugs. “I don’t know. All I know is that Alan Mitchell went missing during The Massacre. At which time he was sixty-two years of age.”

Daniel raises an eyebrow. Then the bell rings again and he starts pulling up the Walken file from the expert system.

“We also got DNA off one of the glasses you found in the living room,” O’Connell continues, “and that also was in the database. We have a positive identification of one Gordon Cope.”

Daniel opens another window on his monitor. Cope, Gordon. One previous arrest for joyriding fifty years ago, which is when his DNA went into the database. He’s in his early seventies now, lives in one of the grim little estates over on the northern edge of the city. Daniel shouts, “Paweł!”

Paweł comes to the door of the office. “Boss?”

“Get a car from the pool. We’re going for a drive.”

Paweł nods and goes back through the office.

Daniel looks at the Walken file again. Yes, there’s that little ringing bell. Mrs Ellen Wright, née Ellen Mitchell. “They’re related,” he says.

O’Connell can’t see the screen, but he knows exactly what Daniel’s talking about. “We took DNA from her at the hospital, for elimination purposes. We need more careful tests, but off the record I’d say she’s his daughter.”

Daniel sits back again and tries to rearrange all of this in his head to make a meaningful narrative. O’Connell’s phone rings. He takes it out of his pocket and says, “Yes?” Then a puzzled expression crosses his face. “I didn’t authorise that.” He listens again. “Who did they say they were?” He listens again. Looks at Daniel and says, “Did you order the Walken body moved?”

“Me?” Daniel asks in surprise.

“No,” O’Connell says to the phone, “he didn’t either. How long ago was this?” He listens, nods, and hangs up without saying goodbye. “Someone’s stolen the body,” he says to Daniel.

When O’Connell and Daniel get to the mortuary it’s strangely difficult to get a straight story out of anybody, even allowing for the fact that nobody wants to be blamed for the mess. It seems that no one can exactly remember what happened, but it looks as though, while O’Connell was on his way to Ballymena Street, a police officer arrived with documents signed by Daniel authorising the removal of Alan ‘Mad Dog’ Mitchell’s body. The body was loaded into a police van and the Gard drove away.

Except nobody can agree what the Gard looked like, and at least one member of O’Connell’s staff has a feeling it wasn’t a police van at all. Another, who was there through the whole thing, can’t remember anything about it. The supposed documentation signed by Daniel turns out to be a blank sheet of paper torn from a notebook. O’Connell looks at it and starts shouting at people. Daniel takes out his phone and puts out a crash bulletin for vans — all vans — travelling around the city.

Two hours later, fifteen miles south of the city, a patrol unit pulls over an unmarked blue van. Inside is a driver and a biodegradable plastic utility coffin containing the earthly remains of Alan ‘Mad Dog’ Mitchell, latterly Mr Glenroy Walken.

A veteran of police interviews, Daniel used to think he’d more or less seen it all. He’s seen suspects in tears, he’s had suspects attack him. He’s had them deny everything, he’s had them confess the moment he sat down across the table from them, he’s had them feign heart attacks. Once, a suspect got down on their knees and prayed to him. Not to God or Jesus or Allah, but to him, which was an experience that stayed with him for some time afterward.

But the moment he steps into the interview room at Ballymena Street nick this evening he knows that this is something new.

Sitting at the table is the van’s driver, a man who has only given the name ‘Rhuari.’ Rhuari is almost a cartoon of a Black Irishman. Black curly hair, handsome smiling face, twinkling blue eyes, devil-may-care air. He’s wearing jeans, a black sweatshirt, a denim jacket and battered workboots and he’s sitting there as if he not only owns the interview room but the police station and the entire city. His self-confidence is so intense that it’s almost a physical thing. Beside him, Mr Spode, the duty solicitor, is sitting quietly writing on a notepad.

Daniel takes a breath and walks over to the table and sits down, Paweł beside him. Paweł fiddles with the recorder while Daniel takes a moment to consult his notes.

Rhuari, however, chooses to occupy the silence. “We’re getting short of time, Inspector.” His voice is low and musical and as twinkly as his eyes.

Daniel looks up. “Oh?”

Rhuari grins. “Well, you are,” he says. “I’ve got all the time in the world.”

Daniel clasps his hands on the table before him and looks levelly at Rhuari. “Perhaps we should hurry, then.”

Rhuari sits back and beams at Daniel. “I have a story for you, Inspector.”

“Good.”

“It’s a story about a place. A place a long, long way away. And then again, it’s not a place. It’s more of a metaphor for a place.”

Daniel sighs. “I think I’d prefer it if you told me why you stole a corpse from a Government mortuary.”

“Well,” Rhuari says with a shrug, “we’ll get to that. May I go on?”

Daniel spreads his hands in assent.

“This place isn’t on any maps and no one will ever find it by accident, and that’s where my employers live.”

“Your… employers,” says Daniel, bemused.

“It’s an old place, you see,” Rhuari continues. “Almost as old as… well, everything. My employers have been living there for a very, very long time and they’re quite content to keep themselves to themselves. But on occasion they find it appropriate to interact with the outside world.”

Daniel stares at him. “This is bollocks, son,” he says finally. “Why did you steal the body?” Actually, the question is just as much how he stole the body. According to O’Connell, nobody at the mortuary now remembers the body ever being there in the first place. And when Daniel spoke to him a couple of minutes ago even O’Connell sounded as if he was struggling to recall the details.

“When my employers need to interact with the outside world,” Rhuari continues as if Daniel hadn’t spoken, “they prefer to do it at arms’ length. They prefer, in fact, for people like me to do the work for them.” He grins again. “It’s a dirty job, Inspector, but someone’s got to do it.”

“You steal bodies for them?”

“Now, I have to admit, Inspector, this was a first for me. But I’ve done stranger things.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, stuff I can’t tell you about.”

“Are you trying to tell me you’re with Intelligence?” says Daniel. “You’re a secret agent or something?”

Rhuari thinks about it. “Well, yes,” he allows. “And then again, no.”

Daniel stands up. “I think we’ll continue this conversation when you’ve decided to stop telling fairy stories.”

Rhuari grimaces. “Ah, sit yourself down and stop interrupting, Inspector,” he says amiably, and Daniel finds himself sitting down again without the slightest memory of having done it. He stares at the young man on the other side of the table.

“Now then,” Rhuari muses, “where were we? Oh, right. Yes. Fairy stories. Well, there are times when it’s useful for my employers to send me and my friends to do a job here. But to be honest with you, it’d be counterproductive to have us stay here all the time. We’re sort of high-maintenance. No, for the everyday stuff, the meat-and-potatoes stuff, the occasional odd-job, they like to recruit native talent. And that’s where Mr Mitchell comes in.”

It has become very still in the interview room. Spode is writing on his notepad… No, now Daniel looks more closely, Spode is doodling on his notepad, like an absent-minded professor sitting in on a particularly dull lecture. Daniel glances at Paweł, who is staring at the wall above Rhuari’s head with a faraway thoughtful expression on his face. Neither Paweł nor Spode seems interested in the conversation. Or even aware that a conversation is going on. Daniel feels a prickle of apprehension in his stomach.

“Mr Mitchell was a bad man,” Rhuari continues. “But my employers, well, their general rule of thumb is that morality’s just something that happens to other people. Over the years, Mr Mitchell did some useful work for them. So when he had his little contretemps a few years ago and asked my employers for asylum, they agreed to grant it him.” He leans forward a little and lowers his voice conspiratorially. “Actually, between you and me and the gatepost, he paid them for it. My employers aren’t stupid. And they’re easily as venal as the next man.” He sits back again. “What you have to keep in mind is that time in the place where my employers live isn’t quite the same as it is here. You could live there forever and always be young. Yes, Inspector, you’ve heard of that place, haven’t you? People still tell stories about it and sing songs, and that really is rather sweet, you know?”

Rhuari’s musical voice, the rhythm of his story, the strange sense that some of the details of the case — the dead man’s address, for example — are starting to get hazy, are all combining into a strange, soothing state of mind. It does not occur to Daniel to disbelieve anything Rhuari is telling him.

He makes an effort and says, “His daughter.”

“Well, yes.” For a moment, Rhuari looks disapproving. “Mr Mitchell thought of himself as a feudal warlord, really. And he thought his association with my employers made him superhuman. Which it did in the end, I suppose. All he thought about was his own survival. He never even asked for asylum for the rest of his family. Not that my employers would have granted it. But he never even asked.”

“He came back,” says Daniel.

Rhuari nods. “And we may never know why. Someone else, I would have said he had second thoughts or he wanted to see his daughter, but as I said, Mr Mitchell wasn’t wired that way. Possibly there was something here that he wanted.” He shrugs. “He was warned what would happen if he came back. My employers told him that as soon as he was here the years would catch up with him very quickly.”

“They don’t seem to be catching up with you,” Daniel says dreamily.

Rhuari nods. “Yes, well, I’m a lot younger than Mr Mitchell,” he says. “And of course, I’m not human, strictly speaking.”

Daniel makes another effort. “No one is ever going to believe this,” he says.

Rhuari shrugs again. “By this time tomorrow there won’t be anything for them to believe.” He glances at Spode, looks at Paweł, both of them lost in their own reveries. Away with the fairies, Big Sam used to say when Daniel was daydreaming as a boy. Rhuari looks at Daniel and smiles. “People don’t want to remember, in general. It’s an effort — so much stuff to try and keep track of, some of it not very nice. Much easier to forget.”

“Particularly if someone helps.”

Rhuari sighs. “Sometimes there are situations which need… tidying up. Things which might be problematical for my employers but don’t warrant their direct intervention. Direct intervention is rare — and really you ought to be grateful for that. Most of the time, it falls to people like me to tuck in the loose ends.”

“There are documents,” says Daniel. “Computer files.”

Rhuari holds up his hands and wiggles his fingers. “We always move with the times.”

Daniel looks at Paweł and Spode and wonders what’s going on in their heads at the moment. He says, “Why are you telling me all this?”

Rhuari grins. “Because I have something you need.”

“You’ve got nothing I need.”

“Ah, now.” Rhuari leans forward. “Think about that a little, Inspector.”

“So who killed him?” Daniel asks.

“Who?” says Rhuari.

Daniel jerks his thumb towards the back of the van.

“Oh.” Rhuari smiles. “Well, from what I can gather, Mr Mitchell was admirably circumspect for the first couple of weeks after he came back. My employers told him where to find his daughter, and he moved in with her and kept his head down. But Mr Mitchell was not the sort of man to hide himself away. He wanted to have a look at his old kingdom, and while he was out and about someone recognised him.”

“Gordon Cope.”

Rhuari takes his hands off the steering wheel and claps, and while he does so the van slows down, brakes, waits to let an oncoming bus pass, and then makes a right turn, all on its own. It’s not actually a van at all, Rhuari told him when they left Ballymena Street. It’s more of a metaphor for a van. Daniel has decided, in order to maintain his sanity, that he’s going to keep thinking of it as a van.

“So the old man let Cope into the house? Why would he do that?”

Rhuari takes hold of the steering wheel again. “I think you’re going to have to resign yourself to never solving this case, Inspector,” he says. “One of the people involved is dead, and the other one can’t remember anything about it. This time tomorrow it’ll be as if it never happened.”

“What about the daughter? Have you visited her?”

Rhuari looks sad. “I’m afraid Mrs Wright isn’t going to regain consciousness.” He glances at Daniel. “No, that doesn’t have anything to do with me, Inspector. That’s just life.”

They’re having this conversation around Big Sam Snow, who’s sitting between them in the front seat of the van staring out through the windscreen with the same look of distant concentration with which he used to look out of the window of his ward.

Daniel looks at his father and says, “We’re Jewish.”

“Ah,” Rhuari says with a wink, “but are you Catholic Jews or Protestant Jews?” He chuckles and shakes his head. “Why do you think it matters?”

“Aren’t we the wrong religion or something?”

Rhuari gives an astonished little bark of laughter. “At least you believe in something, Inspector. Your average little fecker these days can’t even be bothered.” He looks out through the windscreen. The buildings are thinning out now; they’re passing through one of the city’s modest little suburbs. Tidy houses with tidy gardens. “You’re an outsider, Inspector, and we work best with outsiders. You’re a policeman, you’re Jewish, your Dad’s a Brit, you’re not married. All you do is work and sleep, and if you’ll excuse me saying so, I don’t think you sleep a lot. I wasn’t sent here to recruit people, I was sent to tidy up the mess Mr Mitchell left behind. But I made a command decision; we don’t often interact with people in your position and you might come in handy. Don’t let yourself think we’re doing this out of the goodness of our hearts. You will wind up paying for this, one day.” He glances over at Daniel. “Ach, don’t look like that, Inspector. We do you a favour, you do us a favour. How can that hurt?”

Daniel looks at his father. “And he’ll be better?” he asks.

“Good as new,” Rhuari promises, looking out of the driver’s side window, where the view has given way to fields, the road curving west towards the coast. “Better than better.”

“He’s going to be angry when he finds out what we’ve done.”

Rhuari laughs. “He’ll learn to live with it, Inspector. I promise you.”

A loud snore sounds from the back of the van, where Superintendent Billy Tweed is stretched out, fast asleep, alongside the coffin containing the earthly remains of ‘Mad Dog’ Mitchell. Rhuari sucks his teeth.

“You know,” he says, not quite so amused any longer, “it was well within my operational boundaries to recruit you and bring your father back. But this…” he jerks his head backward. “I had to bring in backup to cover this guy’s tracks.”

“He and my Dad were inseparable,” says Daniel. “Snow and Tweed, supercops. After Mum died, he… He was a big man and he helped us get through it, and in a year or so he’s going to be…” He gestures at Big Sam. “My Uncle Billy. You want my help, you help him too.” He adds, “How can it hurt?”

Rhuari looks over at him and grins, as if Daniel has suddenly learned how to play a complicated game and has managed to take some points off him at the first try. They have passed through the city in a storm of forgetting, Daniel facilitating the second theft of Alan Mitchell’s body, spiriting Big Sam out of the hospital, leaving in their wake people who can’t remember any of it ever happening. Rhuari and people like him have already made all the evidence of the Mitchell murder disappear. The same people have erased the recent memories of Superintendent Tweed, tampered with records, done some other things. Billy Tweed truly has passed into legend.

The van pulls to a halt at the side of the road. “That’s us, then,” says Rhuari.

Daniel looks at him, at his father. He opens the passenger door and climbs down, stands there looking into the van. “Dad?” he says, but Big Sam just sits looking through the windscreen. Daniel says to Rhuari, “You take care of him.”

“As if he was one of my own,” says Rhuari, and Daniel can’t suppress a shiver. “We’ll be in touch.”

“Look after yourself, Dad,” he says, and he slams the door shut and steps away as the van pulls out into the road and drives off into the West. As it gets further down the road it starts to look sort of vague, and the sound of its engine could be the sound of horses’ hooves, or the sound of the ocean lapping against the side of a wooden ship. Daniel wipes a tear away and the van’s gone.

He sniffs and puts his hands in his pockets and looks around him, registering for the first time where he is.

“You could at least have dropped me off on a bus route, you gobshite,” he mutters, and starts to trudge his way home.

•

This was written for Gerard Brennan and Michael Stone’s anthology of Irish-legend-inflected crime stories Requiems For The Departed. I was reading David Simon’s monumental Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets at the time, and I fancied having a go at a police procedural. The supernatural bit of the story comes from the tale of Oisin and Niamh, which I’ve been very partial to down the years.