by Gwyn GB
He waited for Harrison to respond, but when the silence lasted more than a few seconds, he seemed compelled to prompt him.
‘I wonder if we could talk in private?’
‘Yeah, well, I was heading off to get some lunch anyways,’ Ryan said, throwing a glance at Harrison. Harrison caught the flicker of worry on his face. Ryan knew full well that Leo Fawcett had been trying to get hold of him for weeks, and why. While he’d done his best to ignore the inevitable, it had finally arrived.
‘Thanks Ryan,’ he said. Trying to give him a reassuring look. ‘Take a seat, Mr Fawcett,’ he added to his uninvited guest, and lifted a stack of magazines from a chair. He loaded them onto his desk instead.
‘Leo please,’ he replied as he sat down and eyed the magazines Harrison had just moved. They weren’t the usual titles found in a doctor’s surgery. Spirituality Studies, The Journal for the Study of Religion, and The Journal of Forensic Psychology Practice were likely to be harder reading than GQ or Esquire. The Paranormal Review, also caught his interest. He resisted the urge to pick it up and flick through to read, ‘Images of the Occult’, and ‘The Family Backgrounds of Highly Psychic Adults’, and instead turned his attention back to Harrison.
‘You were expecting me then?’ He said.
Harrison knew he was referencing how he’d realised who he was.
‘You had called several times. I recognised your voice from the messages, and I saw the NCA logo on that envelope you’re holding.’
Leo Fawcett smiled.
‘I was told you don’t miss much,’ he replied. He seemed to relax once he knew Harrison hadn’t used some strange mind-reading powers. ‘Unusual decor,’ he added, nodding towards the wall of artefacts.
‘All from past cases,’ Harrison replied. ‘So has the decision been made?’ He was already tired of the preamble and wanted to cut to the chase.
‘Decision? Well, yes, it has to a certain extent, but I wanted to see you in person to discuss your options. This is a positive for you Dr Lane. For one thing you can have an office with some natural light.’ He tried to soften the mood, aware the meeting was taking the tone of a redundancy announcement. ‘You have a special set of skills which are being increasingly used by police forces around the UK, not just the Met. You are a very valuable asset, Dr Lane, and you belong with the National Crime Agency, where we can utilise your skills for the benefit of the whole country. While we recognise the foresight of the Met in starting this unit, you have without doubt proven that it is both necessary and highly effective in solving cases.’
‘That’s one thing I want to clarify,’ Harrison interrupted. ‘You are talking about my unit, or just me? Ryan is an intrinsic part of my work. Does your proposal include him?’
‘We do have our own highly trained research analysts at the NCA,’ Leo began, and then seeing the look on Harrison’s face, quickly changed tack, ‘But if you require your assistant’s particular skill set, then yes, of course, the proposal includes him.’
Harrison nodded in acceptance and waited for him to continue.
‘There will be a pay rise, and although the chain of command will change, we expect you to work in much the same way as you do now. You also don’t necessarily need to move if you don’t want to. We can give you a base here in London or at Foxley Hall in Hampshire. I anticipate you will travel around the country a fair amount.’ Leo paused a moment to see if Harrison wanted to ask a question, and then continued.
‘I want to reassure you that apart from your job title changing from Ritualistic Behavioural Crime Unit with the Met, to the RBCU with the NCA, there will be very little change but you will get access to a lot more resource. This is a very positive step, a recognition of your work, Dr Lane.’
Leo Fawcett sat back, his sales pitch done, and he waited. There was no indication as to how Harrison had taken the news. His face was unreadable. Harrison’s eyes dropped to the envelope on the desk next to Leo.
‘This is more detail for you,’ Leo Fawcett took the prompt. ‘Perhaps you want to take some time to think about what we’ve discussed and read through it. If you have any questions, I’m available 24/7.’
Harrison rose from his chair and reached his hand out across the desk. It was a clear signal that the meeting was over.
‘Thank you for taking the time to come to see me, Leo. I look forward to you confirming the position regarding Ryan and I assume that the pay rise will also relate to his salary. I’ll be back in touch once we have received that confirmation.’
Leo Fawcett realised that Ryan’s salary was a statement rather than a question. Dr Harrison Lane drove a hard bargain, but it was a request which would be met. They needed Harrison Lane on the team. His track record made that very clear, and he’d been told to secure his services whatever the cost.
5
The pounding beat of Klute nightclub was in contrast to the gentle flow of the River Wear which meandered around the heart of Durham. At its narrowest, the river was only around a third of a kilometre in distance from itself, and in its heart sat Durham Cathedral and Castle, built on their bed of sandstone. Along its bank, next to Elvet Bridge, was the infamous Klute, known as the worst nightclub in Europe, but beloved by Durham University’s alumni. Two of its current student body, were stood out the back of the club on the bridge, staring down at the dark river in a semi-drunk state. They were freshers, two lads from Cumbria and Yorkshire, who had been making the absolute most of their new freedom. Both of them were proud of the fact they’d been drunk every single night since arriving, but it was catching up on them. They were contemplating the walk back up the hill to Van Mildert College, and discussing the option of heading back into town first to get a kebab. It was just gone 1am, and they hadn’t yet worked out what take-aways would still be open.
They were about to go off in search of food when one of them spotted a rowing boat that was floating along on its own. At first he thought it was empty. The dark shape of the figure lying inside it merged with the boat’s interior in the gloom of night. As it passed under the bridge, there was just enough light to make out the form of a person.
‘Oi mate!’ he shouted down. ‘Wake up.’
His friend, who was dreaming about a large lamb doner kebab, turned back to see why he was shouting at him to wake up, before realising it wasn’t actually him he was talking to.
‘There’s a guy fallen asleep in a boat.’ His friend pointed down to the river and rushed across to the other side of the bridge to look for the boat, which had disappeared underneath them.
Both lads leaned over the stone bridge, peering at the water, and were rewarded by the sight of the boat, oar-less, floating out from underneath where they stood. The person still asleep and seemingly unaware of the danger they were in.
‘Hey, hey wake up. Wake up. Somebody help, there’s a man in that boat.’
At this point, luck played its hand. Two Durham constabulary PCs were strolling a couple of hundred yards away, and had only just remarked on how peaceful everything seemed. They responded instantly to the shouts and joined the two students in leaning over the edge of the bridge. The boat was drifting well away from them by now, but one officer used his torch to shine in the boat, mainly because he could smell the alcohol on the breath of the two lads and wasn’t convinced about what they thought they had seen. Within seconds he was on his radio and alerting colleagues that someone could be in danger.
The boat had drifted quite a way downstream before the fire services’ water rescue team could secure it and pull it to the bank. At first the crew and officers thought they’d wasted their time, a student prank, tricked by a dummy dressed in a black hooded cloak. It was only when a police officer pulled the hood back that they all realised they were, in fact, looking at a corpse. A young man dressed in a monk’s black habit and cowl, who was decidedly dead.
6
Harrison was meeting his mentor and friend, Professor Andrew McKendrick for dinner. They had a table booked at one of Andrew’s favouri
te restaurants, a little family-run Italian in Wimbledon. To save the cost of a cab, and so he could have a couple of glasses of his favourite tipple, Barolo, Harrison was picking him up from his house on his Harley. Andrew always said it made him feel like a young rebel when he got on the back of his bike.
Andrew lived in a Victorian terraced house in Balham, south London. He’d lived there for as long as Harrison had known him, although the condition and decor of the house had changed considerably over that time. In Harrison’s student years it had been an eclectic mishmash of 1970s and 80s style with a veneer of original Victorian features.
In those days Andrew had found his mortgage took up most of his salary, leaving little for refurbishment. Now the monthly payments were a snip compared to the London property values and his salary. With no family to spend his hard earned cash on, Andrew had instead spent a good chunk of it on his home. It was a large house for just one man. Spread across three floors, he had a good sized sitting room on the ground floor, with a large kitchen diner. His favourite room was the office, come library, filled with mementos from his many research trips around the world. It would also undoubtedly be the best place to hide in the event of nuclear attack, because of the floor-to-ceiling stacks of books which lined the entire room. He and Harrison had spent many evenings in there pulling books off shelves and quoting theories and scriptures to each other as they pondered the mysteries and foundations of the world’s religions.
Harrison had occasionally wondered why Andrew never married. He was a good guy, attractive enough to have had his fair share of student crushes, although nowadays those were thankfully thin on the ground. The age gap had got just too large for even the most besotted groupie to venture there. Harrison had never brought the subject up about his single status. He was hardly in a position to comment on someone else’s lack of relationships, when he had his own aversion to intimacy and commitment.
He hadn’t seen Tanya since last Sunday. They’d ended up having a fantastic day out of town. Harrison had gone round to her flat in the morning and they’d talked about going to one of the big museums in London, or going for a walk in the park. Just being with her was a pleasant enough way to spend the day, but Tanya had always wanted to see the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, so Harrison told her to jump on the back of his bike and off they went for a spontaneous day out.
The Ashmolean was the world’s first purpose-built public museum, with some amazing treasures collected by Oxford’s finest academics. Both Tanya and Harrison were intrigued by the history of the original museum, which had combined its displays of rarities with the School of Natural history and a chemistry laboratory. Its founder, Elias Ashmole, had received his Doctorate in Medicine from the University and fourteen years later opened the museum in 1683.
The pair of them spent hours wandering through the collection, marvelling at statues, Egyptian mummies and relics, prehistoric skulls and Roman artefacts. When they reached the Princesses Fresco, a painting from Egypt in around 1345 BC, of the daughters of King Akhenaten, Tanya remarked on the shape of their elongated skulls.
‘It’s not hard to see why some people think the aliens built the pyramids when they depicted their Royal families like that.’
‘I believe it was just their style of art during this period, although there was also inbreeding because they were expected to marry within their own dynasty. That meant marrying siblings and the like.’
‘Eugh.’
‘This whole period with King Akhenaten is interesting because he moved away from worshipping their traditional gods and instead worshipped the sun. That probably added fire to the conspiracy theorists as it related to the sky where aliens might have first arrived from.’
‘I can see why you get so interested in all this.’ Tanya smiled at Harrison.
He was avidly looking at all the exhibits and reading every information card.
‘Sorry, I guess I’m a bit geeky over all this stuff. Not the most exciting date. Are you getting bored?’
‘I’m loving it,’ she’d replied, ‘your historical knowledge is amazing and better still, you use it to solve crimes today.’
‘It’s the whole reason I set up the unit. Humans have been obsessed with the gods, spirits, and ritual since the earliest times. Look at this carving, it’s a supernatural spirit with the head of a raptor. The Egyptians did death and the afterlife like no one else and there will still be someone today who believes in at least some of what they believed in.’
‘I find the sphinx and the crocodile and dog gods so creepy.’
‘Anubis, he’s the dog god. I think he’s quite handsome, but yeah, he was supposed to lead souls into the afterlife. I think I’d have had nightmares when I was a kid if I’d expected to have to hold his hand after I’d died.’
Tanya reached for Harrison’s hand instead. Warm life amid the mummies and ancient artefacts, and he’d felt a contentment within himself that he’d never experienced. It was both enjoyable and frightening at the same time.
Since then, he’d been unable to see Tanya for a few nights due to work commitments, and he could almost hear the disappointment in her texts. He felt it too, but a part of him was also relieved because the more time he spent with her, the more he opened his heart and he wasn’t sure where that would lead. He really wasn’t ideal boyfriend material, so judging Andrew was hardly fair.
Both of Andrew’s parents were now dead, his mother only recently. She’d been forced to go into a care home after dementia had reduced her mobility and memory. Andrew spent four years watching her dignity and personality get taken from her, until she’d become a child in an old woman’s body and he a stranger. Every week he’d visited her, even when she’d no idea who he was. Last year she’d finally found release, and he’d buried her in the same plot as his father. Harrison had gone to the funeral to help him say goodbye.
Andrew was a Professor of Religions and Sacred Traditions, at Kings College, London. He’d joined the University when Harrison was in his first year of his psychology degree there, and they’d met in the library where Harrison had been indulging his favourite research - spiritualism and its impact on behaviours and the mind.
They had debated with fervour, alternating sides in the question, ‘Is religion superstitious barbarism or spiritual enlightenment on our way to a greater purpose?’ Andrew had guided Harrison to expand on the well-known positions of Freud and Jung, to consider all manner of ancient and modern theological and atheist theories, and the results and catalysts of both external and internal factors on the self. As Harrison’s interest and knowledge grew, he had introduced him to colleagues with expertise in Sanskrit and Ancient Greek culture, Franciscan thought and Judaism. He had helped on research projects that compared modern day cases of those who reported speaking with God and other spirits, to the revered oracles of the old world whose revelations helped form both Christian and Ancient Greek and Hebrew societal foundations. Harrison had written a thesis questioning whether Moses, Abraham, Jesus and his followers, would have been committed to psychiatric institutions by modern society, labelled as having psychotic or schizophrenic disorders, for saying they’d heard the voice of God or seen prophetic visions.
Andrew had also introduced him to the Harry Price library at the University of London, where he had worked prior to Kings. That began years of research into its more than 13,000 documents relating to the paranormal, occult and magic, and a lifelong obsession with man’s need for spiritual enlightenment and how, when it went wrong, or was used incorrectly, it resulted in murder and crime.
Tonight, Harrison wanted to focus on his friend, rather than their shared theological passions. The last time he’d seen him, he had seemed a little distracted, as though something was preying on his mind. If Andrew needed help, Harrison wanted to make sure he was available to be there for him.
There was just enough room in the road outside Andrew’s house to be able to pull the Harley up and park while he went and knocked on his friend’s front door. The fa
miliar tring of the bell sounded inside the hallway, quickly followed by the switching on of a light which illuminated the stained glass window of the door, and he heard approaching footsteps. Harrison could imagine Andrew walking across the black and white parquet tiles to let him in.
Andrew was a big man, tall and well built. It was only in the most recent years, as his hair had greyed around the edges, that Harrison had noticed his paunch starting to expand. He had the natural athletic physique of his Caribbean heritage, and the richly coloured skin which seemed to defy the years. He was always smartly dressed. While most modern office workers seemed to have foregone ties and buttoned up shirts, Andrew was rarely seen without them. This evening, the tie had been left in the drawer, but his shirt was perfectly pressed.
‘Harrison,’ Andrew’s face beamed at him, closely followed by a warm hug. Harrison wasn’t a man who usually did hugs, but with Andrew he always made an exception. ‘Looking forward to some pasta tonight,’ Andrew said. Half question, half statement.
‘Looking forward to the company more,’ Harrison replied, as he watched his friend punch in the code for the house alarm. The keypad beeped at him, and he tried again, but got the same result.
‘Damned button keeps sticking,’ he said to Harrison. ‘Hang on while I get the panic alarm pad.’
Andrew quickly went into his study, where Harrison saw him reach into the top drawer of his desk and retrieve a small black keypad.
‘Must get the alarm engineers out to fix that keypad,’ he said as he returned to the hallway, punched in the numbers, and they both walked out the front door to the sound of the alarm setting itself.
Andrew climbed on the Harley behind Harrison, and they headed off towards Wimbledon, albeit with a little less acceleration capability than when he’d arrived.
Dinner was relaxed and enjoyable. A perfect combination of familiar surroundings, nice food, and good company. The restaurant owners fussed over Andrew, who they were on first-name terms with, betraying just how often he treated himself to his favourite food. Harrison suspected that was one reason Andrew’s waistband was getting tighter, but in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t an issue. If you couldn’t indulge yourself a little in your sixth decade, then when could you? They’d brought complimentary aperitifs, which Harrison didn’t of course want, and so Andrew had drunk both, before ordering a bottle of the Barolo for himself and some sparkling water for Harrison.