Episode 3: The Woods

Many miles from home two men make a chance discovery. Vishu gets a call at work, the media descend – and life for this family will never be the same again. Presented by Suchin Mehrotra Series written and produced by Satiyesh Manoharajah Audio production, sound design and original music: Steve Urquhart Executive producer: Alistair Jackson A BBC Studios Production

Om Podcasten

29th July 1981. Prince Charles marries Lady Diana Spencer and the eyes of the world are on London. In the crowd an eight-year-old boy watches the celebrations. An hour later he is missing. Despite a huge police search young Vishal Mehrotra is never seen alive again. Forty years on, and despite the emergence of new evidence, no-one has been brought to justice for what happened to Vishal and the police appear to have exhausted all their leads. Then one day, as the world is going into lockdown in 2020, a BBC local reporter receives a secretive message from a person who says they have worked within the police – they tell the reporter they’ve seen something extraordinary that could blow the case wide open. That call sets in motion an epic true story - an astonishing podcast investigation, three years in the making, which has consequences no-one could have imagined. The child’s family have one last chance to find out what happened to their boy and put decades of grief and guilt to rest. This is their story. The disappearance of Vishal Mehrotra is a case that haunts our age. It has fallen through the cracks so many times in the past 40 years – the cracks of our justice system, of our collective attention, of who we choose to listen to and who we don’t. In this extraordinary podcast series Vishal’s 30-year-old half-brother Suchin Mehrotra and investigative reporter Colin Campbell will finally set out to gather the pieces and try to get some answers. What they uncover takes them deep into the disturbing underworld of what appears to be a completely separate crime - and sends them halfway across the globe in a search for the truth. Alongside a deeply moving personal story of the effect of this tragedy on one family across generations, what also emerges is a picture of all of us and the world we live in now.