Dr Harrison Lane pulled into Felton Woods car park and put the Harley’s brakes on, just in front of the uniformed police officer who stood there, palm forward, ordering him to stop. The young officer looked intimidated but stood his ground with the briefest of twitches, acknowledging the twenty or so colleagues who swarmed all over the area behind him. Harrison took his helmet off and an earbud out, cutting Metallica off in their prime.
‘This car park is closed, sir,’ the officer said. ‘I need you to leave immediately.’
Harrison said nothing but reached inside his leather jacket and pulled out a Metropolitan Police ID card. He handed it to the officer with the raise of an eyebrow and the whisper of a smile. The card read, ‘Dr Harrison Lane, Ritualistic Behavioural Crime Unit’.
The officer looked at it and then at the face of the man in front of him. Harrison watched as a wave of recognition, then suppressed inquisitiveness, swept across the man’s features. Without another word, he stepped aside and handed the ID back. Harrison took it with the hint of a nod, replaced his helmet, and slowly rode his motorbike into the car park, aware of the young man’s eyes following him.
There was no apparent urgency to Harrison’s movements. Around him buzzed a swarm of activity. Police officers and Scenes of Crime personnel rushed from vehicles into the woods that formed an embrace of brown and green around the top half of the parking area. He got off his bike and stopped to take in the scene, his eyes scanning every inch.
They had taped the car park closest to the woods off and it was empty except for a single car, a black VW Golf, almost directly in front of him. To his right, a pale-faced man was talking to two police officers, a bored-looking Spaniel at his feet. Near them stood a huddle of white-suited forensic officers sorting small plastic boxes and bags at the back of their van. Three paths broke the line of trees and bushes, the middle one guarded by a uniformed officer. You didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to realise there was a body in those woods.
Harrison already knew this; he’d received the call at 6.30 a.m., and it had taken him just forty-five minutes to get across town and out here. After running a hand through his short dark hair, he unzipped his jacket. He closed his eyes, breathing deeply so his muscular chest strained rhythmically at the white T-shirt underneath.
He pulled the scent of the place into his nostrils: earthy, the autumnal signature of decaying leaves. A dampness was in the air; that was good. The early morning dew would act as a canvas on which any physical disturbances could be read.
Behind him the young police officer watched transfixed as the solid bulk of Dr Harrison Lane stood planted in the middle of the car park, not moving.
Finally, his eyelids flicked open, revealing a deep look of concentration that sharpened the brown pools of his eyes. After placing the white forensic boots and suit over his clothes, he started a slow journey towards his target.
As Harrison walked, he examined the ground and bushes. The investigating team’s feet had stamped and churned the path, but that didn’t stop him from looking. He knew even the minutest clue could turn the direction of the case.
A forensic photographer came down the path in the opposite direction, brushing past. Harrison’s concentration remained unbroken.
The path led to a small clearing, a breath of sky that broke the canopy of leaves. At the edge stood two women who stopped talking and turned to watch him, but Harrison didn’t acknowledge their presence. He only had eyes for what was in front of them.
At his arrival, the older woman, a plain-clothed police detective in her fifties and clearly in charge, motioned to the forensics team to stop what they were doing and stand aside.
Harrison stepped closer to the centre of the clearing. A body lay amidst the mud and leaf debris. It was too small to be an adult. Pale waxy skin glistened with dew in the thin white light of the morning. He stopped and drank in the scene in front of him. Position. Cover. Conditions. Trees rose all around the clearing, forming an impenetrable circle, broken only by one entry and one exit path. Mature oaks and beech were interspersed with fir and horse chestnuts. Their trunks, skirted by elderberry bushes, were entwined with ivy that reached up towards the branches as though shackling the trees to the forest floor. Where there wasn’t ivy, the cracked brown roughness of the bark was upholstered with furred green moss and lichen.
Other than the paths, the wood was a suffocating darkness made more impenetrable by the occasional grey barrier of stone ruins that rose like drowning sailors from the undergrowth. To those who stood in the clearing, this didn’t seem like a place to go for a stroll, or perhaps it was the focus of their visit that lent the woods their sombre, ghostly edge.
Slowly Harrison moved forward, turning his attention back to the ground as he walked.
He was upon it now. The body of a boy, around seven years old. He looked like he had just fallen asleep, but the rotting leaves upon which he lay were his grave.
Harrison came to a stop on the forensic platform placed around the boy’s body, and dropped to a crouch. The boy’s thin upper torso was uncovered, and across his chest, “V R S N S M V–S M Q L I V B” was written in black marker.
He turned to examine the roughly made wooden cross behind the boy’s head. It looked upside down. The arm—fixed by what appeared to be a length of wool—crossed the vertical bar around one-third from the bottom. Four candles were pushed into the earth at each corner. They had been lit and mostly burned down. In the boy’s left hand was what looked like a small torch.
As Harrison turned his head, he exposed the small brown eagle tattoo on his thick neck to the group of bystanders who all stood watching silently. Even the birds had exited the clearing, as if in respect for the intensity of his concentration.
He stood up and moved around the body, studying the ground beneath the stepping blocks laid out by forensics to protect the evidence. He almost sniffed at the air. There was something raw and animalistic about this man and the way he moved. All his senses focussed and alert.
Harrison gave one last scan around the area just as from behind him the sound of crashing footsteps heralded the arrival of someone new into the clearing.
‘So the Witch Doctor’s arrived!’ A blond mid-thirties police detective walked up to the two women and nodded toward Harrison, smirking.
‘Shut it. Don’t start now,’ the older woman snapped at him, not taking her eyes off the scene in front of her. The younger woman, an attractive brunette, shot him a look of contempt, which he failed to notice.
Harrison took another walk around the body, and then his face softened. The concentration slipped from him. He gave one last look to the boy, this time with compassion in his eyes, as if seeing him as a child for the first time.
