The DI asked the helicopter's pilot to hover above the birch copse for a minute prior to landing. From two hundred and fifty feet above the ground—sufficient distance so as not to disturb the evidence—he saw that a campsite had been set up within the perimeter of the old stone circle. A small blue tent domed against the northern face of one stone, and a fire ring burned black like the pupil of an eye in the circle's centre. On the ground lay a silver emergency blanket and nearby a square sit mat coloured bright yellow. A black and red rucksack spat out its contents, and a small camping cook stove tumbled onto its side. From the air, it didn't look like the nasty piece of business that it was, Hanken thought. But distance did that to you, giving a false assurance that all was well.
The chopper set him down fifty yards to the southeast of the site. He ducked beneath the blades and joined his team on the ground as the police photographer strode out of the copse. He said, “Ugly mess.”
Hanken said, “Right,” and “Wait here,” to the team. He slapped his hand against the limestone sentry marking the entrance to the copse, and alone he started down the path beneath the trees, where the leaves dripped condensation from the fog onto his shoulders.
At the entrance to Nine Sisters proper, Hanken paused and let his gaze roam where it would. From the ground now, he saw that the tent was a size suitable for one, and that fact was in keeping with the rest of the gear scattered round the circle: one sleeping bag, one rucksack, one emergency blanket, a single sit mat. What he hadn't seen from the air he saw now. A map case gaped open with its contents half torn. A single ground cloth crumpled against the solitary rucksack. One small hiking boot toppled into the charred remains of the central fire and another lay nearby discarded. White feathers clung wetly to everything.
When at last he moved from the entrance, Hanken engaged in his usual preliminary observation of a crime scene: He stood over each noticeable physical item and considered it with his mind clear of possible explanations. Most officers, he knew, went directly to the victim. But Hanken believed that a body—brought to its death through human brutality—was traumatic enough to deaden not only the senses but also the intellect, leaving one incapable of seeing the truth when it lay openly before him. So he went from one object to the next, studying it without disturbing it. And thus he made his initial examination of the tent, the rucksack, the mat, the map case, and the rest of the equipment—from socks to soap—that was tossed round in the inside of the circle. He took the most time over a flannel shirt and the boots. And when he'd seen enough of these objects, he turned to the body.
It was a gruesome corpse: a boy of not more than nineteen or twenty. He was thin, almost skeletal, with delicate wrists, dainty ears, and the waxlike skin of the dead. Although one side of his face was badly burnt, Hanken could still tell that the boy had a finely bridged nose and a well-shaped mouth and an overall appearance of femininity that he seemed to have tried to alter by growing a wispy black goatee. He was drenched with blood from numerous wounds, and beneath the mess he wore only a black T-shirt, with no jersey or jacket of any kind. His jeans had faded from black to grey in spots where the wearing was most apparent: along the seams, the knees, and in the seat. And he wore heavy boots on his overlarge feet, Doc Martens by the look of them.
Beneath these boots, half hidden now by the sleeping bag which had been carefully moved to one side by the police photographer in order to document the body, a few sheets of paper lay stained with blood and limp with fog-born condensation. Crouching, Hanken examined these, separating them carefully with the tip of a pencil, which he removed from his pocket. The papers, he saw, were anonymous letters, crudely written, creatively spelled, and assembled with letters and words cut from newspapers and magazines. Thematically, they were all of a piece: They threatened death, although the means that were suggested differed each time.
Hanken directed his gaze from these papers to the boy on the ground. He wondered if it was reasonable to conclude that the recipient of them had met the end augured by the messages left at the scene. The deduction would have seemed reasonable had not the interior of the old stone circle told another tale.
Hanken strode out of it, along the path beneath the birches.
“Start a perimeter search,” he told his team. “We're looking for a second body.”
CHAPTER 3
ew Scotland Yard's Barbara Havers took the lift up to the twelfth floor of Tower Block. This housed the extensive library of the Metropolitan Police, and among the scores of reference books and police reports she knew that she would be safe. She very much needed safety at the moment. She also needed privacy and time to recover.
In addition to more volumes than anyone had time to count—much less to look at—the library offered the finest view of London in the entire building. This view spread to the east, encompassing everything from the neo-Gothic spires of the Houses of Parliament to the south bank of the River Thames. It spread to the north, where the dome of St. Paul's dominated the City skyline. And on a day like this one, when the bright hot sunlight of summer was finally altering to the subtle glow of autumn, the sheer scope of the view became secondary to the beauty of everything touched by that light.