Dave Hutchinson: Sleeps With Angels

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.