Yet, he was addicted to mythology. Here there was no author, the author had been erased through time. And so the characters thrived, they became real. The New Testament, though it was told through Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, presented no problem. The author was Jesus, and he was not of this world.

The Old Testament was the history of memory itself.

At school, Jonathan Adams had been an outstanding Biblical scholar. The story of the Bible was for him like a roll call of everything that existed in nature and in himself.

The name Abraham sounded like an Indian gong that called the people to morning prayer. It was a wide primal landscape. It was a name given by simple men to a simple man. Abraham was one of the first words breathed by men. As men were naming the colours and the plants and the animals, they were naming each other. In the word Abraham were deserts, famine, emigration ships. In his private world, as he drove or walked, here and there, when he lay down before sleep, lines from the Book of Job would stir in Jonathan Adams’ mind and haunt his subconscious.

It was the people’s book. They had named the flowers and the rain. They had recreated the world being made before their very eyes in a language given them by God. The movements of the tribes were poems. The translations of the Bible by Wycliffe into English, Luther into German, Calvin into French had extended and enriched all those languages more than ever poetry or drama or fiction had. And yet the story was intended for simple men. Their ears did not sleep. They were simple exact words.

At Pentecost, the gift of first fruits, he could actually hear that sound from heaven fill the room they were in. He imagined the eleven tongues of fire leaping over the heads of the 120 members of the congregation. The words the Holy Spirit gave them were words of law. As the Spirit gave utterance, the people named the world.

And when the world was created the angels shouted for joy!

The people had named the oak and the ash. The parts of the body, the brain. And they named the places where they had stood. They had named the ancient places of Ireland. Places were not a statistic. They were where language stood still, where people had settled before they moved on. But Jonathan Adams, and his people, had come to stay. And he himself, though he did not know it then, was to become one of his most uncherished statistics. Already fate was preparing that path for him.

Meanwhile, he read, he wrote out summonses, he cycled to his barracks through Ulster’s quiet years, he felt safe as a policeman.