SETH DELAHAYE RESENTED DAYS OFF. It was difficult for him to sit still, to be simply Seth and not detective sergeant. He stood at the window and looked out at the street at night.
His flat was on Wheeley Road. The street had a dark history: in 1959, a young woman, Stephanie Baird, had been mutilated and murdered by Patrick Byrne at a local YWCA hostel, a mansion converted for short-stay accommodation. The murder had shocked the city – not only due to the killer’s blasé, bloodstained escape on a bus but because Stephanie had been decapitated, and a cryptic little note had been found at the scene:
This was the thing I thought would never come.
Byrne was detained eventually, and imprisoned. The building was demolished, and a bland apartment block took its place, with horror now clawed into its foundations. Delahaye doubted its residents were even aware they lived on contaminated ground.
Delahaye loved Birmingham – even its Brutalist city architecture which jostled amongst the great Georgian and Victorian soot-stained buildings. He loved its proud industrial history, and its gruff, honest people with their off-kilter, ironic sense of humour. It was as different from London as London was from Lancaster, his hometown.
In Delahaye’s own tale of three cities, the only one he couldn’t bear to return to was London. Murder was as constant as the flow of the Thames in London, but in Birmingham murder was a staccato event. And somehow more savage when it occurred.
Delahaye sipped a tumbler of Scotch as the Small Faces on the stereo soundtracked his thoughts. Family photographs sat foremost on the mantelpiece, his old boxing trophies tucked behind. On a shelf, among his books, stood his framed graduation certificate from Hendon, alongside a photograph of him and his classmates in their parade uniforms, unsmiling. He’d no idea where most of those faces were now.
He was home but his mind was elsewhere. Being a police officer was a calling and being a detective meant he was an eternal student, always learning on the job in the college of life, where people were tutors who always changed the lesson plan.
It was then his telephone rang.