34 Cyrus

34

My phone is ringing. I fumble for the handset. The digital clock glows in the darkened room.

‘Cyrus Haven?' asks a voice.

‘Yes.'

‘I'm sorry to call you so early.'

‘That's OK.'

The constable sounds young, but I can hear the tiredness in his voice. ‘DI Carlson is sending a car to pick you up. It will arrive in fifteen minutes.'

‘Why?'

‘A body has been found in Willingham Woods in Lincolnshire.'

‘Is it the boy?'

‘I'm not sure, sir.'

I get dressed and try to sneak past Evie's door, avoiding the squeaky step on the stairs. It doesn't work. She appears on the landing. Her hair is sleep-tousled. A long T-shirt reaches past her knees. ‘Where are you going?'

‘Out.'

‘Is this about Arben?'

‘It's police business.'

I know that's not a lie, but Evie sees something in my face and the gold flecks float in her eyes.

The car is waiting for me, engine idling. The female driver is a young detective, about my age. Her first name is Fiona. She has more details. Two ramblers stumbled upon the body of a teenage boy, partially covered by a blackberry bush and ferns, as they crossed a water-filled ditch in a woodland area with walking and cycling trails.

‘When?'

‘Just after seven.'

Rain is falling by the time we drive through the village of Market Rasen. Two miles east along the A631 we come to a side road that leads to a parking area and a small dour building that has toilets and a shuttered café. Visitors, braving the weather, are being turned away by officers in high-vis coats.

Fiona offers me an umbrella as we walk along a single-lane forestry road before turning off on a walking trail. The mud has already been churned up beneath the shoes of police and SOCO. Moving further into the woods, I smell the damp earth and rotting boles and the cavalcade of reeks made more pungent by the rain. The trail curves and descends. Getting nearer, we reach duckboards, arranged like stepping-stones across the wet ground. I glimpse a flashgun firing. Forensic teams dressed in light blue overalls are moving in and out of a white canvas tent. More awnings have been strung from the trees, trying to preserve trace evidence from being washed away.

I barely recognise Carlson when he appears from the tent. He's wearing disposable overalls with the hood secured tightly around his face. His mere presence answers my first question. The body belongs to Arben Pasha.

‘How?' I ask.

‘Ness won't say without a post-mortem.'

He's referring to Robert Ness, a senior Home Office pathologist.

‘Time of death?' I ask.

‘Too soon to tell. His body was dumped overnight.'

I plot the sequence of events in my head. Arben must have been held somewhere for at least twenty-four hours.

‘Get him suited up,' says Carlson.

Fiona takes me to a police four-wheel-drive vehicle and waits while I get changed. When I return to the main tent, the rain is heavier, running off the canvas, and being channelled into newly dug trenches. The tent flap opens. A camera flash blinds me momentarily.

Arben Pasha is lying on his back with his head tilted back. His eyes are open, as though watching people work around him. Leaves and grass cling to his hair. Mud is smeared on his left cheek. The flashgun pops again.

‘Nice of you to join us,' says Ness, who is crouching beside the body.

The pathologist is in his late forties, with rimless glasses and an oiled scalp. At six-foot-five, he makes every space feel small. ‘I thought you'd be coming,' he says.

‘Why?'

‘Because of this.'

Ness reaches forward and touches Arben's jaw, pulling his mouth slowly open. He shines a torch into the boy's mouth, revealing a flash of silver, a coin, resting on his swollen tongue.

‘Charon's obol,' I whisper.

Ness and Carlson turn to me, waiting for an explanation.

‘In Greek and Latin cultures there are stories about a coin being placed in the mouth of the dead. It's supposed to be a payment to Charon, the ferryman. His job was to convey souls across the river that divided the world of the living from the world of the dead.'

‘How do you know this stuff?' asks Ness.

‘I was reading about it the other night.'

‘Any particular reason?'

‘Personal interest,' I say, glancing at Carlson, who shakes his head, wanting me to be quiet. Ness knows I'm hiding something.

I leave the tent, escaping into the rain, which is colder than the air. The day is suddenly different, as if the storm has created a strange twilight, which is not this world or the next. Maybe we're trapped here, waiting for the ferryman.

Mentally, I begin putting the scene into context, looking for reference points and psychological markers. The distance from the car park. The isolation of the woods. The coin in his mouth. Was Arben alive when they brought him here, or had he lapsed into a diabetic coma? When the brain doesn't get enough glucose, or receives too much, it cannot function properly. The symptoms can appear slowly: an altered mental state, inability to speak, drowsiness, weakness, headaches, restlessness, shaking, an irregular heartbeat and, eventually, the loss of consciousness. If left untreated, it results in permanent brain damage and ultimately death.

I hold up my phone. No signal. That could be why they chose the location. Their phones couldn't be tracked and the canopy of the trees hid them from drones and satellite surveillance.

Most crimes involve a conflation of circumstances, pressure and desire. A moment of rage, a wrong choice; a minute earlier, a different doorway, a few yards to the left or right, and the outcome could have been altered. Not this one. Whoever abducted Arben knew that he was the sole survivor of the small boat sinking and therefore the only witness. They traced his movements. They watched the police station. They followed him.

As a psychologist, I'm supposed to be perceptive, to recognise when something is out of place, or unusual; but I didn't see this threat. I didn't recognise their intent. Neither did Carlson or the National Crime Agency or Border Force. This goes beyond two fishermen in a refurbished trawler, who deliberately rammed a small boat. They are part of a criminal conspiracy to control the flow of people crossing the Channel. The sinking wasn't a racist attack or a hate crime. It was a warning – a lesson to those who follow – pay the Ferryman, or you'll never reach the other side.

I think about Evie. What am I going to say to her? She wanted me to bring Arben home with us. Would that have made a difference? Perhaps not, but I doubt whether Evie will agree. It is almost impossible to fathom how much tragedy she has experienced in her short life. And it makes me wonder if it can build up inside a person, accumulating like a trace metal, or a forever chemical, slowly poisoning them.

People could say the same about me, but I refuse to let tragedy define me or become an excuse. After my parents died, I was raised by my grandparents and returned to the same school. My classmates had mixed reactions. Some avoided me, treating grief like a virus. Others talked behind my back, speculating on whether I was like my brother. Two peas in a pod. Bad seeds.

I overheard two teachers talking. One of them mentioned the Menendez brothers. I had to look them up. Lyle and Erik murdered their parents in Beverly Hills. The father, José, was shot six times and their mother, Kitty, eleven times. When Kitty was lying on the ground, trying to crawl away, Lyle ran to his car, reloaded the twelve-gauge and returned to finish her off.

Years later, while I was studying psychology, I watched a true crime show about the case. It wasn't my choice of viewing. I was with a girl, on our third date, and she made the suggestion. As the details of the crime were revealed on the show, I realised that she was watching me, instead of the screen. She asked me if I could introduce her to Elias.

‘Why?'

‘I think I can help him.'

‘How?'

‘He needs a friend.'

Instead of being shocked or saddened or even angry at the girl's infatuation with my brother, I was intrigued. I had learned about hybristophilia – the sexual interest in and attraction to those who commit crimes. It's the reason so many women fall in love with serial killers and marry men on death row. I wanted to understand this girl, just as I wanted to understand Elias, and am now intrigued by Angus Radford and Kenna Downing.

My old university professor, Joseph O'Loughlin, once told me that a piece of human brain the size of a grain of sand contains one hundred thousand neurons, two million axons and one billion synapses, all talking to one another. The number of permutations and combinations of activity that are theoretically possible in each of our heads exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe. That's why we know less about the human brain than about the dark side of the moon.

Professor Joe also taught me that when one is confronted by a complex problem, it is sometimes best to solve the easiest part of it first, or the most obvious one. How does Evie know Angus Radford? If I trace his past, I can find where it intersects with hers.

Radford said he was a fourth-generation fisherman and gave an address in St Claire, in north-east Scotland. A guest house called the Belhaven Inn. It's not much, but it's a start.