Dave Hutchinson: Sleeps With Angels

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.

The Household Cavalry had set up their own country on Oxford Street. It wasn’t a very big country, but it was pretty wealthy. Even after fifteen years the stores on London’s main shopping street were still packed with goods for trade.

They had created their country by the simple expedient of parking buses across each end of Oxford Street and then blocking all the side streets with various vehicles. As countries went, they weren’t too bad — the Sangatte Republic had been much worse — but Oxford Street was the most direct route to Hyde Park and the Household Cavalry had recently begun to require visas from anyone who wanted to pass through their territory.

“I’m starting to get sick of this,” Willem muttered from the front seat of the Espace.

“They’re just frightened,” Rae said. “They only want somewhere to call home.”

Willem snorted. “This is their home. England. What do they want to create another country for?”

Rae closed her eyes and leaned the side of her head against the window. It was a bright summer’s day and the glass was warm. The sunlight hurt her eyes and the heat was making her nauseous and her mouth tasted as though she had been chewing a wet dog. “We could always go round them,” she said.

“Yes, I suppose we could,” Willem said in a hectoring tone of voice. “But I don’t see why we should have to.”

“At least they’re not shooting at us.” Rae sighed and opened her eyes. The convoy had come to a stop at the junction between New Oxford Street and the Tottenham Court Road. Ahead of them, two Routemasters had been parked nose-to-tail across the entrance to Oxford Street. Rae remembered when the Routemasters, the iconic London Buses with the open platforms at the back that you could hop on and off of, had been taken out of service because they didn’t conform to European Union rules about disabled access. A few had been left running on heritage routes for the tourists, but Rae had to admit they made a handy barricade as well.

She opened the door and got out of the Espace, stood stretching and looking about. Apart from the unusually-parked buses — and of course the total lack of pedestrian or vehicular traffic on what had been one of the busiest junctions in London — everything looked completely normal. No signs of rioting or looting, no bodies, no crashed cars. It looked like a particularly easy `what’s wrong with this picture’ scene. What’s wrong with this picture? No people, that’s what.

“Still there?” Willem asked from inside the car.

Rae tilted her head back and shielded her eyes with her hand, wincing as the sunlight burned into her head. If she squinted against the light she could see, far far above her, a tiny figure, wings beating periodically as it soared in and out of the thermals rising from London’s buildings.

“Still there,” she agreed, lowering her head and blinking away purple afterimages. She wiped her eyes.

“I don’t understand,” Willem said. “I mean, it’s done what it was sent to do. Why keep following us?”

“Because it still has something else to do, dear?” Rae suggested.

“I don’t understand,” Willem said again, stubbornly.

“What doesn’t he understand?” asked Mikhail, climbing down from his mini-bus.

Rae pointed at the sky.

Mikhail looked up. “Oh,” he said. “Still there, then.”

“We’ve all been together too long,” Willem said from the driver’s seat of the Espace. “We’ve run out of things to say to each other.”

“Been a long time, that’s true,” Mikhail nodded.

Rae took off her cap, brushed her hair back off her forehead, put her cap back on. She’d found the cap in a gift shop at the Eurostar terminal in Calais. It had the stylised image of a Chunnel train on the front. She looked back along the street at her little convoy: half a dozen people movers and SUVs and a Polish paramedics’ ambulance, all of them dusty and battered. She’d warned everyone to stay in their vehicles, but they’d been parked here almost an hour and people were starting to get out and stretch their legs, and she couldn’t blame them. They’d had a long trip. She waved and a couple of people waved back.

“What do you think everyone’s going to do now?” she asked.

“Company,” Willem called.

Rae looked round. Two figures were emerging from the narrow gap between the Routemaster barricade. Even without zooming her viewpoint, it was easy to tell that one was Eddy Colorado, with his foot-high orange coxcomb and his baggy green clown’s pantaloons. She had to concentrate more to make out the other figure properly. It wore British Army battle order (Northern Europe) and was carrying an SLR across its chest on a webbing sling. Rae started to walk back along the convoy towards the junction.