He deserves it – remember? And Harris deserves it, too. This whole stinking place does. It’s real – the loneliness, the humiliation, the shame – so why shouldn’t this be, too?

‘Ready?’ said Lance, from behind him.

Ben reached into the open drawer, and turned back to face Lance empty-handed.

‘Ready,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

Saturday 26 October 2019, morning edition

Second murder linked to ‘boy in the crypt’ killing

• TV star Callum Richardson knew both victims
• Questions raised over police bias
• Elite private boarding school faces parent backlash

A murder enquiry has been launched after a second former pupil of Beaconsfield College was found dead, less than a week after the remains of Ben Draper were discovered on the school’s campus.

The body of Lance Wheeler, 38, was found in a one-bedroom flat he was reportedly renting, on Wednesday afternoon. Sources say suicide was initially suspected, but an autopsy report obtained by this newspaper states categorically that Wheeler was murdered, prompting police to reclassify the investigation.

The two victims – killed twenty-two years apart – are rumoured to have been friends during their time at Beaconsfield, and police refuse to rule out the possibility that the crimes are linked.

‘It is clearly too early to draw any firm conclusions,’ a spokesperson said. ‘At this stage we are very much keeping an open mind.’

Pressed to comment on fears that others associated with the school may be in danger, the spokesperson declined to respond directly.

‘There are absolutely no grounds for public concern, or for undue scaremongering,’ the spokesperson said.

Television presenter Callum Richardson, himself a former acquaintance of both victims, has in the meantime criticised the leaking of the report on Wheeler’s death, calling into question its timing.

‘You have to ask yourself, why now?’ Richardson said. ‘I’m on the brink of launching a movement that promises to shake the political establishment in this country to its core. And all of a sudden a story is concocted – before the facts of each case are fully known – that is almost perfectly engineered to engulf me in scandal.’

It has long been widely known that Richardson was a pupil at Beaconsfield at the time of Ben’s disappearance. It was only after Ben’s body was discovered last week, however, that information emerged suggesting Richardson was one of the pupils who’d been playing with Ben in the moments before he went missing.

Richardson has since admitted that he was also friends with Wheeler during his time at Beaconsfield, and that both he and Wheeler were among the last people to see Ben alive.

At an impromptu press briefing held outside the studio of his television production company, Richardson did not pull any punches. In a typically combative performance, he accused Manish Apte, the Conservative-backed police and crime commissioner for the police force that is running the two murder enquiries, of directly engineering what Richardson described as a ‘smear campaign’.