The Man on Hackpen Hill Page 2

  Afterwards, as they make their way to the car, Silas’s work phone vibrates in his pocket. He promised Mel he’d leave it in the glovebox but he’s brought it with him, on silent. Should he answer it? The plan now is to drive over to Bath for a sauna and rooftop swim at the Thermae spa, followed by a light lunch of a few salad leaves. All part of their new life. Silas can’t even begin to imagine how hungry he’ll be feeling by dinner. The phone stops vibrating – and starts again.

  ‘Damn, I’ve left my towel inside,’ Silas says, turning to walk back to the leisure centre.

  ‘Answer it,’ Mel says, clicking open their car. ‘You didn’t bring a towel.’

  She knows him too well.

  ‘Won’t be a sec.’

  He raises his eyebrows in apology, as if it’s not his fault. It must be DC Strover, his young colleague. She knows not to contact Silas on his ‘date days’, as Mel insists on calling them, but she also knows to ring him twice if it’s urgent.

  ‘Sorry to bother you, sir,’ Strover says in her soft Bristol accent. He’s told her countless times that he prefers ‘guv’ or ‘boss’ to ‘sir’, but she can’t seem to make the switch.

  ‘Luckily for you I’m “chilled”, having just done an hour of hatha yoga,’ he says, waving at Mel, who’s now in the car, waiting for him. In the past, she would have bitten his head off for taking the call, but he’s in credit after the yoga and she smiles back. She’s a good woman, had to put up with too much from him over the years. ‘What is it?’ he asks.

  ‘The boss has been over, wants you to be SIO on a new case that’s just come in.’

  Silas has a fluctuating relationship with their recently promoted boss, Detective Chief Superintendent Ward.

  ‘And it can’t wait until tomorrow?’ he says, glancing at his watch. 10 a.m. His day off has hardly started. It must be a homicide for Ward to ask him to be senior investigating officer. ‘What’s the case?’

  ‘A crop circle’s appeared, below Hackpen Hill.’

  Silas pulls a face at his phone, glancing over to Mel for sympathy, to let her know how ridiculous the call is, that it’s not his fault he’s been contacted on a date day about something so trivial. ‘You are kidding me, Strover.’

  It’s Ward, getting his revenge by asking him to investigate aliens and angry farmers.

  ‘A rambler found it,’ Strover continues. ‘It’s a really strange pattern, no one knows what it is.’

  ‘I don’t care if it’s the Shroud of bloody Turin, why’s Ward giving it to us?’

  ‘Because the rambler also found a dead body in the middle of the circle. A young man.’

  Silas freezes. A young man. Could it be Conor? He’s just being paranoid. Their son’s better now. Admittedly, he was a bit edgy when he came home last night. Furtive. But that’s because he said he’d be back for dinner and then came in late with Emma, his new girlfriend. It wasn’t a problem. He’d texted them. So why was he so jumpy? Was he starting to feel unwell? It’s happened before. They both know the signs.

  He glances over at Mel, whose own demeanour has changed. She must have detected Silas’s anxiety.

  ‘The body was naked,’ Strover continues. ‘Looked like it had fallen from the sky.’

  3

  Bella

  Bella stares at her screen, wondering which restaurant to ring on her list. Her first task this morning is to book somewhere for her boss to have lunch. It’s not exactly going to win her the Pulitzer Prize. Maybe Dr Haslam was right and she’s wasting her time in journalism. But she knows he’s wrong. She’s destined to be a journalist, wanted to be one for as long as she can remember. Just like her dad.

  She glances over at her boss, who’s on the phone. Mark’s nice enough, in an old-school sort of way – likes his long liquid lunches, quick with the witty one-liners. He knew her dad from years back, when they were both foreign correspondents in Nairobi and her mum was working with an aid agency in Mombasa. It was her mum’s idea to write to Mark and he replied at once, offering work experience.

  A man from the post room stops by Bella’s desk with a trolley and dumps a load of mail in front of her to distribute around the department. He winks and Bella manages a smile in return.

  ‘Anything for my dinner?’ he asks, sniffing the air. The food desk in the corner is always being sent free samples.

  ‘Vegan custard?’ she says, reading from the label of a tin on her desk.

  ‘Rather stick pins in my eyes,’ he says, starting to push his trolley away. She knows what he means. ‘There might be a story in that lot, you never know,’ he adds, nodding at the pile of post he’s just delivered.

  If only. In her original letter to Mark, she’d expressed her passion for the environment, how she hoped to write about green space and ghost nets, her desire to expose carbon crimes and climate criminals. Instead, she’s sorting press releases on clementine sorbets and mood lighting. She looks again at the can of custard, takes a picture on her phone and sends it to Erin. Her best friend’s a vegan and has tried to persuade Bella to follow suit. As a card-carrying veggie, Bella’s all for veganism – if it wasn’t for the invention of cheese. She just can’t live without Brie. Or scrambled eggs, for that matter. And maybe the middle of a pain au raisin… Any patisserie, if she’s honest.

  Her tummy rumbles as she remembers a drugged-fuelled night in the college kitchens. Erin was making vegan custard slices for Bella in a final bid to convert her. Except that she’d overdone the turmeric and the slices were disgusting. Bella and Erin ended up throwing them at each other – just as a porter walked in. He almost took one in the face and didn’t find it funny.

  Bella smiles at the memory, turning the can in her hands. And then a tear rolls down her cheek. She hopes her friend’s OK. Dr Haslam rang Bella on her first evening home from uni, to say that Erin had been taken very ill and was in hospital. He wouldn’t say where or what was wrong with her, only that she was too unwell to receive visitors.

  Two months later and Bella’s still trying to get some answers. Despite her repeated requests, Dr Haslam won’t tell her anything else – patient confidentiality, apparently – and he has started to ignore her messages. Bella has rung every hospital within a hundred-mile radius of Oxford and argued with her mum, who insists Erin’s in good hands and just needs time to recover. She wipes away the tear, sadness replaced by anger. It makes Bella so vexed. What right has Dr Haslam to deny her access to her friend? He’s aware how close they were at college, used to joke they were like sisters. Birds of a feather.

  In his last email, almost a month ago, he’d promised to let Bella know when Erin was well enough to be visited. How kind of him. Erin’s own phone keeps going straight to voicemail. Maybe she’s too unwell to check her messages? It would be peak if she thought Bella wasn’t concerned, had ghosted her as soon as she’d left uni. She’s texted her so many times, tried to ring. If it were Bella in hospital, she’d expect her best friend at least to make contact.

  She glances around the office as she sifts through the post, sorting piles of press releases. Bella’s not ungrateful, knows how lucky she is to have work experience. On a national newspaper too. For the first two months at home, she helped her mum at the migrant centre, went for long walks in Victoria Park, adjusted to life outside college, talked about Erin. Healing time, her mum called it.

  ‘Hold up, darlin’, this one’s for you,’ the post man says, glancing at Bella’s name on the envelope as he returns with his trolley.

  ‘For me?’ Bella asks, flattered that someone knows her name. She takes the letter and opens it. It’s been written on an old typewriter – ‘always a bad sign’, Mark had said when he was briefing her about readers’ letters, the vast majority of which come via email, but Bella’s impressed that someone’s gone to such trouble. She’s always preferred sending old-fashioned letters, particularly to Helen.

  The newspaper has a column called ‘Overheard’ about community pubs and the ‘loyal reader’ is suggesting that it should feat
ure a place called the Slaughtered Lamb in a village in Wiltshire. The column comprises snippets of bar chat and the reader insists there’s lots of ‘seriously interesting stuff’ to be overheard at this particular pub.

  Bella puts down the letter, thinking about the pub’s gruesome name. Why not call it the Pampered Lamb? Meat is the one thing she knows she and her dad would argue about if he were still around. Apparently, he loved nothing better than tucking into a steaming bowl of beef suqaar, his favourite Somali stir-fry.

  Bella assumes the letter has been sent in anonymously by the landlord as a way to get publicity. But why’s it addressed to her? She’s yet to have a byline in the paper. She rereads the letter, noticing a PS on the back: ‘Make sure you “overhear” the man sitting on his own in the corner.’

  Will he be wearing a red carnation too? It’s not exactly subtle. She checks the envelope again. No postmark. Perhaps it’s from her mum, matching her up with someone. She’s always going on about Bella’s need to find Mr Right. Or maybe she’s trying to get Bella out of the house so she can have time on her own with Dr Haslam.

  She glances around her colleagues and googles the pub. The Slaughtered Lamb is in a village an hour on the train from London. She could go down there at the weekend. Nothing to lose and maybe the only way she’ll get a byline around here. Eavesdropping is right up her street too. She’s also been looking through her dad’s old journalism cuttings. In the early years, before he started filing front-page exclusives from Africa for The Washington Post, he wrote about pension relief for an accountancy magazine in Bracknell. Everyone has to start somewhere.

  She gets up from her desk and checks her watch. 11 a.m. in the UK, 9 p.m. in Sydney. Helen will be out partying, won’t wait to chat. Standing at the window, she looks down on the street below. A normal summer morning in central London, tourists mingling with office workers on the coffee run. And then her eye is caught by someone, talking to another man in a shop doorway. He glances up in her direction. His face is in shadow but she’d recognise that corduroy jacket anywhere. Dr Haslam.

  4

  Silas

  Silas pulls over at the top of Hackpen Hill and gazes down on the golden wheat fields below. Crime Scene Investigators in white body suits are moving around the centre of the crop circle, where a tent has been erected. As soon as he was notified about the body, he put in a call to the coroner, asking for a Home Office forensic pathologist to attend the scene. His old friend Malcolm is on duty and Silas has already texted him a photo of Conor. Malcolm replied a few minutes ago, shortly after arriving on site. He doesn’t think the dead man is Conor, thank God.

  ‘Jesus,’ Silas says, as he and Strover get out of the car and look down on the field below them. The crop circle comprises two distinct hexagons and various other geometric shapes, and a much larger – and dramatic – spiral-patterned disc beside it. In total, the pattern must be about 100 metres long and 50 metres wide. ‘Someone’s been on the cider,’ Silas adds.

  Crop circles are a pain in the arse, as far as he’s concerned. Dreamt up in the pub over a pint or three by people with nothing better to do and then hailed as extraterrestrial messages by the croppie community – the believers.

  ‘Isn’t it incredible?’ Strover asks.

  Silas glances at Strover. He’d picked up his junior colleague from Gablecross after yoga and headed straight here. Mel was understanding. They’ll go to Bath another day.

  ‘“Incredible” isn’t the first word that springs to mind,’ Silas says. ‘What you’re looking at is a criminal offence that causes damage to crops and a loss of revenue to the farmer.’ His words hang in the summer air. If Mel were here, she’d be telling him to be more open-minded and less grumpy. ‘You know each circle costs the farmer up to a grand in lost revenue,’ he continues without much conviction, looking again at the intricate patterns spread out below them. ‘The combine can’t pick up the flattened wheat.’

  Strover remains silent. She doesn’t need to speak. They both know that this circle is different from the ones that have been appearing recently. It’s spectacular.

  ‘What’s it about, then?’ he asks grudgingly, as his eyes trace the beautiful swirling patterns where the wheat has been compressed. ‘ET trying to phone home?’

  Strover shakes her head, deep in thought.

  ‘I thought you were good at puzzles,’ Silas adds.

  ‘There’s quite a history of this type of circle around here,’ Strover says, eyes still fixed on the field below. ‘Coded messages, complex mathematical equations.’

  It’s the last thing he needs. The media will be all over this in no time. As senior investigating officer, he should be down at the crime scene now, but he wanted to come up here first to get a feel for the setting, try to understand the unusual context. He’s aware that some crop circles can only be ‘appreciated’ from the air, but this location is visible from the road that winds down the side of Hackpen Hill, a scenic back route from Marlborough to Royal Wootton Bassett. Whoever left the body in the middle wanted it to be spotted by drivers. It’s also overlooked by a popular local landmark – a sleek white horse carved into the hillside.

  ‘Someone from the Crop Circle Exhibition and Information Centre will be here shortly,’ Strover adds.

  ‘Sign of the times,’ Silas says. A truckers’ café on the road to Calne used to double up as the croppies’ HQ during summer. Much to Silas’s dismay, Wiltshire has become the epicentre for crop circles in the past thirty years – as many as a hundred can appear in a summer – and it’s now a global business. Two years back, a Chinese movie star arrived in Wiltshire with a forty-strong entourage to open the Exhibition and Information Centre at Honeystreet, later chartering a helicopter to fly over a nearby crop circle for a prime-time TV show back home.

  ‘They’re very concerned,’ Strover says. ‘There’s never been a death in one.’

  ‘Just tell me it’s got nothing to do with novichok,’ Silas says. ‘Social media’s awash with possible Russian involvement.’

  ‘Didn’t know you were on social media, sir?’ she asks, suppressing a smile.

  It’s true, Silas has left social media to her in the past, but he’s recently taken to it to follow the horses.

  ‘I’ve been known to twitter,’ he says.

  The last thing he wants is the Met’s SO15 swanning down from London again. Four months after the original novichok attack in Salisbury in 2018, a crop circle had appeared outside Amesbury in Wiltshire, a day before a local woman called Dawn Sturgess had died from the nerve agent. She’d inadvertently sprayed novichok on herself, after her partner had found what he thought was a discarded perfume bottle in a charity shop bin. The crop circle depicted the international symbol for chemical weapons, prompting conspiracy theorists to have a field day, as it were.

  Wiltshire police should have investigated the case, but SO15 had taken over from the ‘carrot crunchers’, just as they’d done in Salisbury earlier.

  ‘The specific novichok compound used in Salisbury is known as A234,’ Strover says, reading from her phone, ‘and has the chemical formula C8H18FN2O2P. Whether that equates to that,’ she says, nodding down at the pattern, ‘is anyone’s guess.’

  ‘Christ, let’s hope not.’ Silas knows Strover is good at maths. She’s clearly useful at chemistry too.

  ‘We can’t rule out Covid-19 either,’ Strover adds. ‘All those protein spikes would make a great pattern, but I can’t see it in that thing.’

  ‘You’re in the wrong business,’ Silas says.

  The world is still recovering from the pandemic, the personal tragedies, the recalibration of everyday life. Mel lost her mother, who’d always been a fan of theirs as a couple, kept them talking during the bad days, persuaded Silas to go to counselling. They’re both making an effort for her.

  ‘I hope that’s one of ours,’ Silas says, gesturing at a drone hovering over the site. It’s almost at the same level as them on top of the hill.

  ‘CSI are taking
aerial photos,’ Strover says, as the drone’s blades flash in the morning sunshine. ‘The crop circle appeared during the night. We’re assuming the body did too.’

  5

  Bella

  Bella tries not to run through the open-plan office as she heads for the escalator at the entrance. Cars hoot at her as she zigzags through the slow London traffic to the opposite pavement, where she stands, hands on knees, breathless. Dr Haslam has vanished, but the man he was talking to is still there, on his phone, turned away from her.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Bella says, stepping around to face the man. ‘Sorry to bother you, but was that Dr Haslam you were talking to just now? From Oxford University?’ She needs to ask him about Erin.

  ‘Sorry?’ the man says, putting one hand over his phone. Has Bella seen him before? Something about him – his hunched shoulders, jet-black hair, sharp suit – is familiar.

  ‘Was that Dr Haslam? Just now? Right here?’ Bella asks again. ‘Talking to you?’

  ‘I’m sorry, do I know you?’ he says, his tone more aggressive now.

  ‘Were you with Dr Haslam?’ Bella repeats, her own voice growing louder. ‘Fuck sake, just tell me. Please?’

  Passers-by stop to look. Others give her a wide berth. She shouldn’t have sworn, lost control. The man shakes his head, eyes still fixed on Bella’s. Does he know her?

  ‘I’ve never heard of him in my life,’ he says.

  The man walks away and glances back, almost as if he’s afraid of her. She stands on the pavement, watching him disappear into the crowds, and looks around again, into the nearby shops, down the street in both directions. She should have been a better friend to Erin, not left her on her own at college. The signs of drug abuse had been there for a while. Her apathy, short attention span, wanting to withdraw from the world. But Bella had been too fixated on herself, losing weight, passing her final examinations.