The Man on Hackpen Hill Page 10

  A new tweet appears and his eyes start to blink. Rumours are circulating of a second crop circle that’s been discovered by police – with another body in it. The police are shortly to make an announcement. Jim searches in vain for photos. It’s too late, too dark, for anyone to have taken pictures.

  He doesn’t need to see it though. He can guess exactly what the second pattern will depict. Lysergic acid diethylamide. Otherwise known as LSD. Acid. He’s sure of it. Another message of encouragement to him. Another substance interwoven with the grim history of human experiments at Porton Down. Most famously, a troop of Royal Marine commandos were given LSD in December 1964 as part of an experiment to see if it too could be deployed as an incapacitating agent. The marines were sent out on exercise on a nearby firing range – ‘happy valley’, as it’s since become known – but within the hour, they had dissolved into a bunch of giggling fools.

  What no one seems to realise is that such unethical experiments are not confined to Porton Down’s controversial past. After his three years at Harwell, Jim knows the truth, and now someone else on the inside does too. Someone who seems to be encouraging him to act.

  32

  Silas

  It’s 1 a.m. by the time Silas slides the key into his front door. The house smells of flowers – Mel has a big wedding tomorrow at Rockley, a hamlet outside Marlborough, and the kitchen floor is covered with buckets of freshly cut tuberoses. Polianthes tuberosa. She’s been teaching him their names, Latin ones included. He pours himself a whisky and inhales the sweet scent all around him. It couldn’t be a better antidote to the mutilated body in the field he saw tonight, the dank miasma of death. Except that it wasn’t.

  He’s about to creep upstairs when he notices the light on in the sitting room. Mel usually goes to bed early if she has a big day coming up but she’s in the armchair beside the fireplace, an empty whisky glass in her hand, eyes closed.

  ‘I thought you’d be in bed,’ Silas says quietly, leaning down to kiss her on the lips.

  She opens her eyes and smiles, noticing the glass on her lap. She puts it on the table, her actions slow and sleep-heavy.

  ‘I wanted to wait up for you,’ she says.

  ‘But you’ve got a fancy wedding in the morning,’ Silas says, sitting down in the armchair opposite.

  ‘You only get back this late when something really shit’s happened at work,’ she says. ‘And when it’s that shit, you need to talk about it.’ She pauses. ‘That was our problem in the past.’

  Silas closes his own eyes – he’s lucky to have Mel – and takes a sip of his whisky.

  ‘Want another one?’ he asks. She nods.

  A minute later, after fixing her a whisky and topping up his own, he tells her about the body in the field, the half-eaten cheek, the look on the faces of the paramedics who took the man away. He’s never told her the details of cases before and he’s not sure it’s the right thing to do now, but it feels good to talk.

  ‘They were so shocked he was still alive,’ Silas says. ‘Everyone was. The low body temperature made no sense, there was almost no blood pressure, a barely beating pulse.’

  ‘He’s still alive now?’ Mel asks.

  Silas nods. ‘The hospital rang me on the way home. No improvement but at least he’s breathing. God knows how. We just need to find out who he is.’

  Noah is still at the Great Western Hospital too, yet to regain full consciousness. He’ll visit him in the morning. Silas pauses, thinking again about the man in the field. ‘It was like he was a zombie, or something.’

  ‘A zombie? You’ve been watching too many films with Conor.’

  Conor is out tonight with Emma. It’s the first time he’s been in a relationship for years. When he’s at home and not with her, he’s watching horror movies. Religiously. Silas has tried to sit through a few of them with him, all part of what the counsellor calls ‘reconnecting’, but it’s not the best way to unwind after work. He prefers comedy horror. Shaun of the Dead, that sort of thing.

  They say nothing for a while, but Silas doesn’t mind. The quiet is soothing, far removed from the accusatory silences that used to hang above them like storm clouds.

  ‘Maybe that’s the intention,’ Silas says after a while. ‘The final part of the message. First a lobotomy, then a straitjacket. And now a…’

  He can’t bring himself to say the word again. The Hollywood portrayal of zombies, even the darkest ones, doesn’t bear any resemblance to what he saw – and felt – tonight. The surprise of seeing the man’s teeth, not where they should be, glinting in the torchlight high up in his torn cheek. The pale stillness of his skin. The empty, unlit eyes. This man’s soul was troubled, had wrestled with something awful.

  ‘You alright?’ Mel asks. Silas realises the whisky glass in his hand is trembling.

  ‘I’m OK,’ he says.

  Ten minutes later, Mel holds him tight in bed as he tries in vain to switch off and sleep.

  ‘It’s good about Conor, isn’t it,’ Mel says. ‘Where he’s at now.’

  ‘He’s done well,’ Silas says, feeling guilty that he hasn’t given their son’s turnaround much thought recently.

  ‘We must be prepared for a relapse, not panic,’ she says, almost asleep. ‘If it happens, we deal with it. Together.’

  ‘He’s good now,’ Silas says, but his mind is wandering. Jim’s confident pronouncement that the first circle was a chemical warfare agent has rattled him, particularly after Ward’s visit to the crime site and his warning about Porton Down. Strover’s checked the symptoms of BZ too, which include sedation leading to stupor – not so different to how it must feel after a lobotomy, the procedure that the first victim was subjected to. He should check in with the MOD Police at Porton Down tomorrow, ask them about Jim, but that will mean telling the boss what he’s up to, risking the entire investigation. Ward’s closed him down before.

  He thinks again about the latest victim, his age. So much older than the other two. Who is he? There was no fingerprint match. DNA results will come back tomorrow. He had no ID on him either. The only possession they found was a single old key in his pocket. CSI have sealed off the site and will continue to comb the surrounding area at daylight. They need to establish how he got there. The location is even more remote than the one at Chute Causeway.

  ‘Silas, you need to sleep,’ Mel whispers. ‘I can hear your brain whirring.’

  He closes his eyes but a nagging thought won’t go away. Whoever placed the first two bodies in the crop circles knew they were dead, knew they couldn’t talk or reveal anything about how they got there. The third man was left alive in the field. He might die, but he might also survive – and disclose how he got there. That’s a big risk. Too big a risk for someone else to take. Which makes Silas think that the man they found tonight was meant to be found alive. And the key was left on purpose too.

  Silas listens for Mel’s breathing. It’s regular and shallow, the sleep of someone at peace. She’s become a different person since retraining as a florist, found her thing. And become much nicer to Silas. He lifts up the duvet and slides out of bed, careful not to wake her as he tiptoes from the bedroom.

  Downstairs, he pours himself another whisky. There’s no way he’ll sleep tonight without more alcohol in his blood. Unless he can explain why the third body was left alive on the hillside. It’s driving him mad. He walks through into the sitting room in his striped pyjamas – a recent present from Mel – and looks out onto the lawn through the French windows. Mel teases him but the edges definitely need trimming. A tiny bit of order in a chaotic world. His dad’s lawn always had tidy edges.

  Silas turns away, sipping from his drink. Why would someone leave a man like that, with the risk of him surviving? Everything about him is different from the first two victims. They weren’t just dead – they’d been dead for a long time. Possibly at the hands of someone else, if Strover’s right.

  And then he understands.

  ‘I think it’s him,’ Silas says
, slipping back into bed. He shouldn’t wake Mel but he can’t help himself.

  ‘What?’ Mel asks, surfacing from sleep.

  ‘He placed the first two bodies as messages. And then he left himself.’

  33

  Jim

  Jim turns up the music as he drives out of the village, first over the railway and then the canal, wrapped in a light veil of mist beneath him. It’s dawn and he’s hardly slept but he’s worried about staying at home. The crop circles are dominating the news following the discovery of not one, but two more bodies in the middle of elaborate patterns.

  Somehow, TV news stations have managed to get early morning photos too. The second circle, as he suspected, looks suspiciously like the molecular structure of LSD. And the third circle bears more than a passing resemblance to VX, one of the world’s most deadly nerve agents, a supply of which is also kept at Porton Down. Most recently, VX was used to murder Kim Jong-nam, the brother of North Korea’s ruler, in a very public assassination at Kuala Lumpur international airport.

  Jim tries to relax as he heads along the Fair Mile, an old Roman road that’s a favourite part of his morning commute. When he did snatch some sleep, it was light and his dreams were of Bella. For some reason known only to his deep, unconscious mind, she was naked and riding a giraffe. He shakes his head, smiling at the memory. Eat your heart out, Freud. He’s been dreaming a lot of weird stuff recently. And then he thinks of Bella in the pub last night, blue-grey eyes beneath a stern fringe. And glasses almost as big as his own. Bookish but less awkward than him. One minute studious and detached, the next all blushes and warmth. But he senses that good humour isn’t her default demeanour. It has to be earned. Maybe he’s flattering himself.

  He’ll phone later, apologise for not returning her calls last night. He’s decided that their encounter in the pub wasn’t a sting. There are, however, some unanswered questions. Why did her arrival in the village coincide with the discovery of the crop circles? And why did she choose to sit at a corner table in the pub – his table? But his normally cautious self has overruled them and he’s listened instead to his heart.

  He turns up the music on the car’s sound system, conducting with one hand. Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’. And Glenn Gould, his idol, is at the keyboard. Effortless, lucid, pristine playing. Listen closely and his humming is audible too. One day Jim hopes to play Bach’s masterpiece as well as Gould. He likes the work’s mathematical symmetry, the way the second voice in each canon kicks in a note higher until the eighth canon, when it drops to an octave lower, creating circular patterns – geometric shapes in sound.

  The fourth aria is interrupted by his mobile ringtone. No caller ID. He ignores it as he turns right at the Shears Inn and cuts down towards the A338 to Salisbury. The anonymous caller rings again. This time Jim answers it.

  ‘Who’s this, please?’ he says, waiting to join the main road.

  ‘The car behind you.’

  Jim shoots a glance in the rearview mirror. On cue, a black Range Rover appears around the corner. It must have followed him at a distance on the Fair Mile, hidden itself in the dips, or he wasn’t checking.

  Jim hangs up and accelerates away at the junction, heading south towards Tidworth. His mobile phone rings again. Damn it, should he take the call, speak to these people? It’s better than being driven off the road. They must be MOD Police and want to talk to him, that’s all. He shouldn’t have sped away yesterday. He’d nearly crashed. Besides, they can’t pin anything on him.

  ‘Can I help you?’ Jim says, trying in vain to sound calm.

  ‘How did you meet Bella?’ the man on the phone asks. No introduction, no manners. Just a straight question. Dad always taught him the importance of good manners. Has he heard the voice somewhere before? Jim glances again at the mirror. The Range Rover is three cars back.

  ‘I thought you might have sent her,’ Jim says, doubts resurfacing. He’s still certain he and Bella didn’t meet in the pub by chance.

  ‘Did she approach you?’

  Jim thinks back to how they met. Maybe she did. She was sitting at his table, waiting. He checks the mirror again. No need to land her in trouble. He likes Bella, quite fancies her, if he’s honest. He just wishes he could know for certain that he can trust her. At least she came clean, told him she was a journalist. She wouldn’t have done that if it had been a sting.

  ‘Someone made a mess of my house,’ Jim says, changing the subject.

  ‘What sort of mess?’

  ‘Come on, guys, you’re wasting my time here,’ Jim says, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. He doesn’t need to put up with this. ‘One of you sat in the car park while the other trashed my place, looking for something. I never bring classified work home with me. What you did was pointless. And I told her nothing. I’ve explained all this to your colleague, DI Hart, if that’s his real name.’

  ‘Who’s DI Hart?’ the man asks. For the first time there’s a tone of surprise in his voice. Maybe concern too.

  ‘You tell me,’ Jim says. ‘Swindon CID, apparently.’

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘Same as you. This conversation is over.’ Jim leans forward, his finger hovering to end the call. ‘I’m going to work and will report what happened last night to my team leader. End of.’

  ‘If you can pull in to the lay-by up ahead, we just want a chat,’ the man says, making a pathetic stab at friendliness.

  Jim hangs up and puts his foot down. The road ahead is clear. At the A303 roundabout, he turns left, instead of continuing down on the Salisbury road, and takes the first right towards Palestine and the Wallops. Hampshire does a good line in village names.

  The road narrows but he knows it well and maintains his speed, checking the mirror every few seconds. Has he lost them? The distinct profile of the Range Rover appears in the rearview mirror again. Jim gives the steering wheel another smack. And then he sees a tractor in a lane to his left, trundling down to join the road on the corner.

  Jim often comes this way when the main Salisbury road is busy. Slowing, he lets the Range Rover draw close. On cue, his phone starts to ring again. He glances over at the tractor, now within twenty yards of the road. A quick calculation and he flashes his lights, ignoring the phone. The tractor driver assumes Jim is letting him turn and pulls out in front of him, but at the last moment Jim nips through the gap between the tractor and the hedge.

  A loud blast on the tractor’s horn. Jim speeds off on the far side, glancing in the mirror to see the Range Rover slide into the nose of the tractor. It too had tried to accelerate through the gap but must have failed – as Jim had hoped. He slows, still watching, a sickening feeling in his stomach. The driver jumps down from the tractor but no one else is moving. Airbags have deployed in the stationary Range Rover. Before the scene disappears around a bend, Jim can just make out the tractor driver on his phone, gesticulating frantically in the road.

  34

  Bella

  Bella’s not big on breakfast, but as it’s included in the price of her stay at the Slaughtered Lamb, which she might be paying for herself, she settles down in the bar and tucks into a bowl of Bircher muesli. The corner table, where she sat last night with Jim, is empty, but she can’t bring herself to sit there. Instead, she glances over at it, wondering if any of last night actually happened.

  She tried calling Jim first thing this morning but his phone rang and rang. And when she went round to check on his house, it was shut up and his car had already gone. The image of him banging his head against the wall still haunts her, partly because she can’t be sure it happened. It was almost like a ghastly puppet show, his silhouette barely visible through the diaphanous curtain.

  ‘Another coffee?’ the waitress asks, as Bella glances through her notes from last night.

  ‘Thanks,’ Bella says. ‘Are there any newspapers?’

  ‘Which one you after?’ the waitress asks. If she’s surprised that a twenty-one-year-old wants to read a newspaper, she doe
sn’t show it.

  Bella asks for a copy of the paper she works for, glancing at the other guests who are eating their breakfasts. A retired couple in the corner has the same paper on their table.

  ‘Here we go,’ the waitress says, lingering as she looks at the front-page headline. ‘Nasty business, these crop circle killings.’

  Bella glances at the image. It’s an aerial photo of a crop circle with a police forensics tent in the middle.

  ‘Apparently they found two more bodies overnight,’ the waitress adds. ‘Just near here.’

  ‘Two more?’ Bella asks, looking up.

  ‘So they’re saying on the news.’

  ‘Are they linked to Porton Down, do you think?’ Bella asks, skimming through the text.

  ‘Who knows anything these days?’ She pauses. ‘Saw you having a drink with our foxy Palmer last night. He’d know if anyone does.’

  Bella blushes as the waitress walks away. She hopes she and Jim will meet again, and not just because he’s got a story to tell.

  ‘You’ve an eye for the loo-lahs, for sure,’ Erin had once joked, after Bella had kissed a crazy boy at college. A porter had caught him running around First Court naked in the snow – one of many college rituals – and he was being escorted back to his room in a blanket, singing Nick Cave’s ‘Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow’. The relationship never came to anything – he dropped out of uni shortly afterwards.

  Bella starts to read the paper when her mobile rings. It’s Jim.

  ‘Hello?’ Bella whispers, glancing around the pub. She doesn’t want the waitress to know she’s talking to ‘foxy Palmer’.