The Man on Hackpen Hill Read online

  Bella casts her eyes downwards. Erin’s death still hasn’t sunk in, become a real event, something that she can look back on. Not yet. It seems to take so long for her to assimilate deaths into her life, to add them to her timeline. Many years, in her dad’s case.

  ‘A part of me still hopes it might not be her,’ she says, shielding herself from the afternoon sun as he scans the car park, his eyes flitting from side to side. ‘Is something wrong?’ He’s anxious again.

  ‘I checked all the cars before you arrived,’ he says. ‘They don’t seem to be here. Unless someone followed you?’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ she says. ‘I kept looking, didn’t see anyone. But the police turned up at my mum’s work, where I was helping out. I left before they could ask me any questions.’

  Jim shakes his head. ‘The police in this country are unbelievable,’ he says. ‘I did warn you. Any word about her?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she says, tearful again. She so wants to trust this man who has stumbled awkwardly into her life.

  They walk over to the ticket machine, where she pays for two hours. She has no idea if it will be enough, whether Jim’s in the mood to share his story, help her to discover what might have happened to Erin. She senses they don’t have long together.

  ‘I wanted to talk to the police, ask them about Mum,’ she says, as they walk back to her car. ‘But I couldn’t trust them. Not after what you said. And that female detective who interviewed me last night?’

  ‘What about her?’ Jim asks conspiratorially.

  ‘She rang back today and left a message. I’m scared, Jim. What these people did to Erin. You saying Porton Down’s involved.’

  ‘The police are up to their necks with MI5 in this,’ Jim says, putting an arm around her. ‘Trust me, you did the right thing by not talking to them. If they think I told you state secrets last night, they’ll want to interview you as well as me. Bring us both in. You work for a national newspaper. You’re a threat. Shall we walk down to the beach? We’re safer in crowds.’

  That’s what her dad had thought too. Bakaara Market had been busier than usual that day, heaving with people buying everything from maize and fine gold to fake passports and petrol. But it didn’t stop his killers. For so long, Bella refused to believe that he was part of the country’s grim roll call of murdered journalists, but it was here on this beach that Helen had finally put her right, set the record straight about him.

  63

  Silas

  ‘You’ve really got to make your mind up, Silas, think hard where your priorities lie in life,’ Mel says, as they walk through the car park of the acute mental health facility in Swindon. ‘Or this isn’t going to work. You and me. Our marriage. Our family.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Silas says. ‘I came as quickly as I could.’

  ‘I’m not sure why you bothered, to be honest,’ Mel says.

  ‘Come on, that’s harsh.’

  ‘Is it? Is it really? When that nice consultant was going through the options – options that will decide the future quality of life for your own son – all you were thinking about was your bloody work.’

  There’s no point in arguing. She’s right. The consultant had dropped a bombshell in the middle of his conversation with them, likening the effects of antipsychotics to a chemical straitjacket, and Silas had struggled to concentrate thereafter. The second victim, Erin, had been found tied up in one. Could the circumstances of all three crop circle victims relate to different medications?

  He had tried to park the idea when they went to see their son afterwards. Conor was heavily sedated and didn’t look well, but he’d managed to smile for them both, which made Mel cry again. It had brought a lump to Silas’s throat too and both of them hugged him as he lay there between them in his hospital bed. Later, Emma joined them as well. It’s her that gives Silas hope. She seems to understand their son, believes that he can live a meaningful life, one day perhaps without any meds.

  ‘The case I’m involved in, it’s taking a toll,’ Silas says. ‘I can’t deny it. I was thinking about it when I fell asleep last night and it was the first thing that popped into my head this morning. It’s eating me up. You’ve seen the papers, the news. It’s caught the public’s imagination. And they want results. Ward does too. So do I. Four people have died now and there could be more.’

  ‘I know it’s not easy,’ Mel says, more conciliatory as she turns to open her car door. He’d driven over from the station in his own car and this is their only chance to talk.

  ‘At least I left my phone in the glovebox,’ he says, risking a smile.

  ‘That’s something, I suppose,’ she says. ‘Call me later.’

  Silas watches as she accelerates away, lifting a hand in a half-hearted wave. He so wants to make it work with Mel, wants their son to get better. He also wants to crack the case – and he can’t help feeling that the two are somehow related.

  Five minutes later, he’s chatting to Strover on the phone as he drives back to Gablecross. It feels strange not to be talking to her in person. She understood he had to leave the office for family reasons and she won’t pry on his return. They give each other privacy, their conversations never crossing the domestic threshold.

  ‘Get on to your boffin friends and ask them to consider the possibility that these coded messages might have something to do with antipsychotics,’ he says, driving through Swindon Old Town. ‘And look up a famous psychiatrist called Thomas Szasz,’ he adds, spelling the unusual surname for her. ‘He once referred to these drugs as chemical straitjackets. See if he was talking about a particular one or just antipsychotics in general.’

  ‘There are loads of them,’ Strover says. He can tell she’s already on the case, searching online as they speak. ‘First generation, second generation.’

  ‘Let me know what you find,’ he says. ‘Any news from your ring-round about missing frozen corpses?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Strover says.

  It was always a long shot. There are hundreds of mortuaries in the UK registered by the Human Tissue Authority to carry out post-mortems. And then there are the hundreds of private mortuaries run by funeral directors. But mistakes do happen – the HTA recently recorded 250 serious incidents at hospital morgues over a three-year period, including wrong bodies being released to families and, in one case, two brains being mixed up.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ he says, noticing an incoming call. ‘Malcolm’s on the other line.’

  And Malcolm only ever calls when he has something important to say.

  64

  Bella

  ‘It’s just not like Mum,’ Bella says, as they walk onto the sand and drop down to the water’s edge. ‘Leaving a note with no explanation.’

  She looks around. Still no fear, no rising dread. She should have come back sooner. The beach is scattered with happy families on their summer holidays, sheltering behind bulging windbreaks, eating ice creams before they melt. Up by the dunes, a dreadlocked guy is flipping somersaults on a slack line, watched by a large crowd. And beyond him lie the beach huts. She’d forgotten about them. They were unsettling three years ago and they still send a shudder through Bella now. Something about the joyless, dark brown colours, the way the low-pitched roofs blend into the brooding pine trees behind them.

  It was here where it happened. For a moment, Bella is eighteen again, reading Iain Banks on her towel in the sun, Helen lying next to her. This time, she does feel a twinge of something, a sudden twist in her stomach, like the snapping of a twig.

  ‘You OK?’ Jim asks, glancing at her.

  She takes off her shoes and paddles in the shallow blue water.

  ‘Maybe I should call the police,’ she says. ‘Report Mum missing.’

  ‘Wait until I’ve gone if you do,’ Jim says, taking his own shoes off to join her. His feet are pale and huge, like a pair of bloated fish. She holds out her hand and he takes it. ‘They’ll trace the call, work out where you are, who you are with.’

  ‘Where
are you going?’ she asks, surprised by his sudden talk of leaving.

  ‘Away from here, from them,’ he says, looking out to sea. ‘Maybe to France. I don’t know yet.’

  They keep on walking in the cool water, hand in hand, towards Middle Beach. It had all been going so well that day with Helen. She had made Bella laugh like a drain with her impersonation of two elderly male naturists – hands in the small of her back, pushing out her ‘wrinkly tackle’. And then Helen had got mad with her about their dad and everything changed.

  ‘Before you go, you need to tell me about Porton Down and the crop circles, how my friend ended up dead in one,’ she says, keen to bring things back to the present.

  ‘That’s why I asked you down here,’ he says quietly, slipping his hand out of hers.

  It’s the first hint of tension between them and she doesn’t like it. She wants them to be friends, allies. Maybe something more.

  ‘You know they found her body trussed up in a straitjacket?’ she asks.

  ‘I read that. I’m so sorry. Sometimes they use those for the less willing “volunteers”. I saw one with my own eyes – when I was at Harwell. If the crop patterns relate to different drugs that they test on humans, then Erin must have been a participant, willing or otherwise.’

  Bella shakes her head. ‘But she’s never—’

  ‘She might not have known, Bella.’ His tone is urgent now, full of passion, as if he’s possessed. ‘Ronald Maddison died in agony as part of a research experiment in 1953. When they dripped a liquid onto his arm, he thought he was helping government research into the common cold – he had no idea it was sarin, a lethal nerve agent.’

  Bella came across Maddison’s case when she did some research at the pub last night. The only volunteer ever to have died at Porton Down. Apparently.

  ‘It doesn’t make his death any better,’ she says, ‘but at least Maddison knew he was being tested for something.’

  ‘You know they’d offered him fifteen shillings to take part in the experiment,’ Jim says. ‘Money he was going to use to buy his girlfriend an engagement ring.’

  They stop and look out to sea, watching as a pair of paddleboarders make their way down the coast towards Old Harry Rocks. On the horizon, dark clouds are rolling in from the Isle of Wight, bruised and threatening. She reaches out for his hand and holds it again.

  ‘You see over there,’ Jim says, pointing out to sea with his other hand. ‘That’s where a plane dispersed a large amount of toxic particles into the air, back in August 1959. Zinc cadmium sulphide. Part of a Cold War simulation to predict how an attack would play out if communist forces released a biological warfare agent off the south coast with a prevailing wind.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ Bella asks, looking back out to sea. It’s hard to imagine on such a sunny day.

  ‘They did loads of air and seaborne dispersion trials in the 1950s and early 60s,’ Jim continues. ‘Almost five thousand kilos of the stuff was released. The test in ’59 seems to have gone wrong. For some reason, the Valetta aircraft dumped more than a hundred kilos in one go, ten miles south of Swanage. The sampling point at Dorchester recorded a whopping 4,300 particles. Places like East Lulworth were hit even harder as the cadmium cloud passed through on its way to Dorchester, but there’s no record. Just a subsequent history of birth defects in the village. Cadmium gets into the lungs, kidneys and liver, you see. It’s also carcinogenic.’

  ‘That’s awful,’ Bella says, making a mental note to include the incident in her article.

  ‘Par for the course for Porton. Are you certain Erin never volunteered for any drugs trials when she was at college?’ Jim asks, glancing down the beach behind them again. His vigilance is making her nervous.

  ‘Why would she do that?’ she asks, looking behind them too.

  ‘A lot of students do. I had a hard-up mate at Warwick who used to alternate between the sperm bank and phase one clinical trials – in between the odd lecture.’

  ‘Not that I’m aware of,’ Bella says, thinking back to the last time she saw Erin at college, how rough she had seemed.

  ‘But you say she took a lot of recreational drugs,’ Jim says.

  Bella closes her eyes, pictures Erin stumbling into her college room, semi-conscious, mumbling incoherently.

  ‘Sometimes I thought she had a death wish,’ Bella says. ‘She could be in a stupor for days. I didn’t notice in my first year. We were all so out of it. But in recent months… It was like she wasn’t there. Like she was a zombie.’

  65

  Silas

  ‘Speak to me,’ Silas says, taking the call from Malcolm as he pulls into the staff car park at Gablecross. Mel had every right to be angry with him at the hospital but he’s pleased to be back on the case again.

  ‘It appears your fake doctor injected his victim with a lethal overdose of anaesthetic,’ Malcolm says, ‘500mg IV bolus of lidocaine, which led to hypotension, bradycardia, seizures and, sadly, cardiac arrest.’

  ‘Sounds like he didn’t stand a chance,’ Silas says.

  ‘The team fought hard to save him,’ Malcolm says. ‘But it turns out the lidocaine in his system, let alone the tetrodotoxin, was the least of his problems. His chest and abdomen were riddled with cancer – rapidly enlarging tumour masses on his lymph and spleen. I’d say he had a month to live at most. Maybe less.’

  ‘Nothing to lose then,’ Silas says.

  ‘Exactly,’ Malcolm says. ‘Which has made me think more about who he might be.’

  ‘Go on,’ Silas says, turning up the volume on the call.

  ‘Working on my theory that he’s one of us,’ Malcolm says, ‘and your hunch that he was responsible for the condition, if not the death, of the other two victims, I’ve been looking at possible options.’

  Silas nods, even though he’s on the phone. He likes it when Malcolm gives him options. He’d like it more if he gave him simple answers, but Silas has learnt that’s never going to happen. Malcolm’s a forensic pathologist.

  ‘He could be a mortuary technician,’ Malcolm continues. ‘But that doesn’t narrow it down much. Or he could be a forensic pathologist. I know all the Home Office approved suspects – I used to arrange an annual dinner, in the days when we were valued for what we do – and he’s not one of them. Or he might be a regular hospital pathologist. And this is where it gets interesting, given he carried out a lobotomy on the first victim and possibly infected himself with tetrodotoxin. Are you still with me?’

  ‘I’m all ears,’ Silas says, sitting up in his seat. He looks around the station car park, his car engine on to keep the air conditioning running.

  ‘It’s been nagging me ever since I saw the bruised eye sockets of the first victim,’ Malcolm continues. ‘A pathologist was struck off thirty years back for interacting unprofessionally with human tissue. I couldn’t remember the details but I looked up the case and it seems that one of the charges against him, never proven, was that he’d performed a transorbital lobotomy on a deceased patient before carrying out a full autopsy. It was all a bit odd, given he subsequently removed the entire brain for examination. If a hospital colleague hadn’t reported him, I’m not sure if it would have ever come to light, but it opened up a can of worms.’

  ‘Where is this person now?’ Silas asks.

  ‘No idea. Struck off by the General Medical Council for a litany of other professional failings that were subsequently discovered. Most likely abroad, if he’s still working as a pathologist. The Russians aren’t fussy. Might be worth checking that key you found on him against all the morgues in Moscow.’

  ‘Do you have a name?’ Silas asks, wishing Malcolm wasn’t so xenophobic. Silas once went to St Petersburg and found the Russian people to be welcoming and friendly. ‘And does he look like our victim?’ he adds.

  ‘There’s no photo, but he was called Steven Caldicott – that’s Steven with a “v”. And he used to work in the south. That’s all I could find.’

  ‘Is there any chance he could
still be working in the UK?’ Silas asks.

  ‘Not officially, no.’

  ‘Porton Down wouldn’t employ him, for example, for some of their more dubious testing programmes?’

  Malcolm lets out a long sigh. ‘You really mustn’t believe all you read about Porton Down, my friend.’

  Silas doesn’t, but it was worth a try. He looks around the car park. It’s almost empty today. Everyone’s on their summer holidays. He should be too, with Mel and Conor and Emma. Somewhere warm and sunny, with a medieval quarter that he can slip away to and explore when the beach gets boring.

  ‘You didn’t find anything else in his bloodstream, by any chance?’ he asks, turning off the engine. He needs to get on, follow up on the forensics lead, brief Strover about Steven Caldicott.

  ‘Like what?’ Malcolm asks.

  ‘Antipsychotic medication.’

  ‘Not as far as I know. There were some unusual chemical traces in the first two victims – the toxicologist is still trying to establish what they are, but the fact that the bodies had been frozen for several months is making things more complicated.’

  ‘Let me know if you find any meds,’ Silas says.

  ‘Can I ask why?’

  ‘Just another hunch.’

  66

  Bella

  ‘Can we sit down here?’ Bella says, gesturing at a patch of sand up near the dunes on Middle Beach. ‘I’m not feeling so good.’

  ‘Sure,’ Jim says. ‘You look pale.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Bella says, sitting down before her legs give way. It’s all starting to come back to her, along with a rising nausea and dizziness. Where have these memories been hiding for the past three years? Why has she never confronted them until now, that day when Helen told her the truth about their dad?

  ‘Here, have some water,’ Jim says, passing her a bottle of Evian from his knapsack.

  ‘Thanks,’ she says and takes a sip. Jim squats on his haunches, unable to relax, eyes restless. ‘Do you want to sit down?’ she asks, patting the sand beside her. ‘You’re making me nervous.’