Dave Hutchinson: Sleeps With Angels

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?”