THE VILLAGE SWELTERED BENEATH A mauve sky. Union flag bunting hung above shop windows as the royal wedding fast approached, and homes displayed posters of Lady Di and Prince Charles in front windows in anticipation.
Delahaye had arranged to meet former Chief Inspector Harry Marshall at the New Rose & Crown. Delahaye was a familiar face in the pub, as were many of the police officers over the past weeks. At a corner table by the window sat a man with skin bronzed from a lifetime outdoors. The man rose from his seat and extended a hand. Delahaye stepped forward and shook it.
‘Harry Marshall,’ said the burly man.
‘Detective Sergeant Seth Delahaye. Please, call me Seth.’
Harry grinned. ‘Seth it is.’
As Delahaye settled into the chair opposite, Harry watched him in that way police always watch people, even when retired – looking for secrets and hidden behaviours, even in the innocent.
‘You’re older than you look on TV,’ said the former policeman.
Delahaye smiled.
‘I did some homework on you,’ said Harry ‘You received a commendation for finding the murderer of little Kim Johnson. West Midlands Police were lucky to nab you. So, why’d you leave the Met?’
‘The atmosphere became poisonous after the anti-corruption reshuffle and nobody trusted each other anymore. I just wanted to do the job, but if you didn’t choose a side you were scabbed. It broke up good teams, so I wanted out.’
‘With what happened in Brixton, I think you had a lucky escape in more ways than one,’ said Harry. ‘Why Birmingham?’
Delahaye grinned. ‘Because I get all the excitement without the politics.’
‘Aw, West Midlands Police has got plenty of politics, Seth,’ said Harry.
‘Not like the Met. The Met is part Hoxton Mob and part hen party from hell.’
Harry laughed. His mirth was infectious and Delahaye chuckled too.
Harry studied Delahaye’s face. ‘So, you want to know about Nev Coleman.’
‘As much as you can tell me,’ said Delahaye.
‘Is he a suspect?’ asked Harry.
‘No, he isn’t,’ said Delahaye. ‘But I think he’s linked to the investigation somehow, and not just because Mickey Grant’s body was discovered on his property.’
‘How’d you know where to look?’ asked Harry. ‘I’ve been following the investigation on the news and through former colleagues, but that little piece of information wasn’t disclosed.’
‘A teenager showed us where it was.’
Harry almost choked on his drink. ‘I’ll do you a deal,’ he said. ‘You tell me as much as you’re allowed about the investigation, and I’ll tell you all I know about Neville Coleman.’
Coppers always want to know what other coppers are doing, retired or not. Delahaye gave a stark recap of the investigation: the autopsy findings of both murders; the canine link; the fox and dog companions found with the boys’ corpses. He told of the dog spotted on the night the murderer disposed of the body. Even about the mysterious Miss Misty, Ava Bonney leading the police to Banlock Farm, and the children’s telephone call on the day Bry Shelton was found.
But Delahaye didn’t mention clinical lycanthropy. He needed to talk to a qualified doctor about the condition first.
‘And then there was the interview with Neville Coleman,’ Delahaye said. ‘But his illness has stolen his capacity to make sense most of the time.’
Harry shook his head, sad that an old friend had fallen so far. ‘You’re right – dogs do seem to thread through the case.’
‘That’s why Nev Coleman is important.’
‘Well, it’s a long story so we’re going to need extra liquid sustenance.’ Marshall raised a hand to catch the attention of the barman.
‘Poverty drove Neville Coleman into the army – he’d lied about his age when he signed up a year after the Great War began. He found his calling in the mud of Flanders: the British Army had seen how the Germans were using dogs in warfare and hadn’t caught on let alone caught up. Neville had noticed how some German soldiers had brought German Shepherds with them. A POW had a puppy and Nev traded for it with a bar of chocolate. That was his first dog – Troy. He smuggled him back to England, intended to set up a stud, but he needed capital to buy land. He didn’t want to work in the factories, so he joined the police instead, Seth.’
Delahaye’s pen stopped mid-flick. Harry smiled. ‘Yes, Coleman had been in The Job back in the day.’
‘Nev gave us no inkling he’d been police when we interviewed him,’ said Delahaye. It is generally understood, he’d thought, that coppers gel with coppers even after resignation or retirement – the old tribal pull.
Harry shrugged. ‘The job wasn’t Nev’s be-all and end-all. But he did make it to sergeant. In the summer of 1940, his beat was the city centre.’
Harry extracted a plastic wallet from his jacket pocket and handed it to Delahaye. Inside was a laminated newspaper clipping from the Birmingham Mail from 1 August 1942, with a faded photograph featuring a uniformed policeman crouching in rubble with his arm around a German Shepherd dog. The officer’s face was unmistakeably Neville Coleman’s. Delahaye read how Coleman and his ‘remarkable canine comrade Apollo’ successfully rescued survivors of the bombed shelter on Coleshill Street, and how the duo attracted a crowd of awestruck onlookers as the dog discovered more people under the wreckage. Neville received the George Medal for his contribution that day.
Harry tapped the clipping with a forefinger. ‘This started it all for me,’ he said. ‘I wanted to be a policeman with a police dog by my side. I got in touch with him and we clicked. Coleman had saved his money in a proper bank account at a time when most people stashed their cash under mattresses. He bought Banlock Farm in 1945.
‘A year before West Midlands Police set up its Harborne dog unit,’ Harry continued, ‘I’d volunteered to take on a dog as part of an early experiment, thus was sent to Banlock Farm. Neville was married to Sophia with a daughter by then.’
‘Tess,’ said Delahaye, but Harry shook his head.
‘Nah, Seth, not Tess: Tiss. Tisiphone. Can you believe it? Who calls their baby girl that? But Neville loved the name. It was in keeping with the dogs’, I suppose. They’d grand names too, and all from mythology.’
Harry watched the detective write the girl’s name correctly and he smiled.
‘Tiss had authority over the animals even as a tot. She’d be playing out in the fields surrounded by a pack of twenty or so Shepherds. She’d communicate with them using their own sounds and body language.’ Harry turned his near-empty glass on a beer mat, lost in reverie. He shook his head when Delahaye offered to buy him another. ‘I bought my first dog from Nev – Kronos. He’d already created his Banlock Shepherd-type, and began producing bigger-boned stock with diverse colour differences – and white dogs. Her father built Tiss a set of kennels and she bred a line of Snow Shepherds and sold them as pets. They had odd eyes, just like Tiss and her father had. By aged twelve, she was earning her own living.
‘When Tiss was eleven, Sophia died of ovarian cancer. Nev was devastated, but work, and his daughter, kept him going. His business boomed. He bought real estate and became a landlord. Became a rich man. But by then he had help.’ Harry’s eyes darkened, his smile now sad. ‘That’s when a bloke called Jip started working for Nev.’
Delahaye waited, pen paused, ready to roll. ‘Jip?’
Marshall shrugged. ‘I never knew his full name. Jip might be short for gypsy, for his looks. But he was quite well-to-do, obviously from money, and with a solid work ethic. He was about nineteen or twenty at the time. He and Nev got on. Jip and Tiss fell in love, and she was sixteen when she became pregnant. I expected Nev to be angry but he wasn’t – she was his daughter. After Tiss died, though, they blamed each other, and Jip must’ve moved on.’
‘Where did Jip end up?’
‘No idea. The last time I saw Tiss she was obviously expecting. I didn’t visit Nev again until about three months after she died in that car accident. When I saw him, he was so grief-stricken and full of rage. I didn’t know how to help him, and I never went back. I should have. He never mentioned a baby though, and I didn’t see a child so I assumed the poor girl must’ve miscarried or put it up for adoption.’
Harry shrugged. ‘I was told Nev suffered a nervous breakdown, that he sold most of his property portfolio and became a recluse. He lost interest in his stud, shut the kennels down, gave the dogs the run of the place. I understand the conditions became so bad and he had lost his mind to such an extent, police had to go in. But most of the dogs had become wild and so vicious they had to be destroyed. Nev was sectioned and sent to Rubery Hill Hospital then diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s Syndrome soon after.’
Harry returned the laminated newspaper clipping and pulled out a photograph tucked behind it: a small black-and-white picture, with ‘Banlock Farm, 1963’ written on the back. It depicted Coleman with sunglasses on, his arm around the slim shoulders of his teenaged daughter, and between them sat a Banlock Shepherd.
‘I took that picture,’ Harry said. ‘The dog is Zasha, Nev’s favourite of all time. She was always mothering Tiss, mothering any younger animal, no matter the species.’
Coleman had mentioned Zasha. Delahaye sat back in his seat. .
‘And there’s no other family?’
Harry shrugged. ‘All I know is what he told me: his own parents had died before he married, his older brother had been killed in the Great War, Sophia was an only child raised by a widow who died a year after Tiss was born.’
‘He’s on his own,’ said Delahaye.
Harry studied Delahaye. ‘You’re not on your own, Seth – remember that. You’ve a good squad, you turn up in a suit without fail every morning; you’ve solid hunches and a wealth of experience. Bear with yourself and you will catch this bastard.’