Dave Hutchinson: Sleeps With Angels

“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.