The Man on Hackpen Hill Read online

  ‘I said, where are you taking me?’

  Jim’s voice has no power, no conviction. Both men stare impassively ahead, as if they’re sitting in the fuselage of a plane, waiting to parachute. There is no sign of a hospital stretcher or trolley, just a steel filing cabinet to his right. A large syringe has been strapped to its surface with a strip of masking tape – they had threatened Jim with it earlier, when he’d refused to get into the ambulance and wear the straitjacket. They must know that injections terrify him. There were too many at Harwell.

  A phone starts to ring, breaking the silence. The man on Jim’s left – shaved head, goatee beard – takes the call. He says nothing but glances occasionally in Jim’s direction. After hanging up, he unbuckles himself and walks over.

  ‘You should have come quietly,’ he says, peering at Jim as if he’s checking to see if anyone’s at home. The man pulls out a small pencil torch and shines it into his eyes. Jim can smell garlic on his breath and turns his face away but the man grabs Jim’s chin, forcing him to look forward again. There’s nothing Jim can do. And he knows he should comply. It will only make things worse for Bella. He prays that she managed to get away and file her story.

  ‘We’ve been trying to ask you some questions in recent days,’ the man says, moving back to his seat, one hand braced against the ambulance ceiling for balance. ‘But you haven’t made it easy. We still need you to provide us with answers.’

  Do they know about the USB stick? They must suspect that he’s given Bella something, breached the Official Secrets Act that everyone has to sign at The Lab.

  ‘I need to see a lawyer,’ Jim says. He faces certain imprisonment for what he’s done and needs legal representation. ‘Where are you taking me? Thames House?’

  He walked past MI5’s London headquarters once, on a stroll down the Thames with his dad, who pointed it out to him. He remembers the bars on the windows, how secure they were, a bit like the building at Harwell where he worked.

  ‘We really need to know how you met Bella,’ the man says, swaying to one side in his seat as the ambulance takes a corner too fast.

  ‘Does it really matter now?’ Jim asks, trying to make light of the question, but it’s still troubling him too. Why did Bella come to his pub? And sit at his table? ‘She happened to come along at the right time,’ he says.

  The two men exchange glances. ‘Do you think someone sent her? To meet you?’

  Jim manages a smirk. ‘Of course.’ Another look flashes between the two men like an electrical charge. ‘Someone who clearly shares my concerns about Porton Down.’ He pauses, flexing his ankles against the leather straps. ‘What are you going to do with me? Lock me up and throw away the key? It’s too late, you know. The story’s already out.’

  He’s bluffing now, putting on a brave face. Has Bella managed to access all she needs on the USB?

  ‘What do you know about the crop circles?’

  Still the same man asking the questions. The other watches Jim with undisguised disdain. He was the one that Jim had hurt most on the beach. If Jim squints, he can just make out a patch of satisfying bruising above one eye.

  ‘The patterns were very interesting,’ Jim says. ‘It’s a while since I’ve seen anything so complex. But I had nothing to do with them. Or the bodies they found.’

  He doesn’t want to be charged with murder as well as leaking national secrets. And it’s no bad thing if the state realises that there’s more than one person unhappy with what’s going on at The Lab.

  ‘Clearly I’m not the only employee who’s trying to draw attention to the abuses at Porton Down and its affiliated sites,’ Jim continues, trying desperately to maintain an air of bravura. ‘It will all come out eventually, you know. Just as it did with Ronald Maddison. You can’t cover these things up for ever.’

  The ambulance bumps over a pothole, throwing the two men around in their seats. Jim lurches in his wheelchair too but is unable to steady himself. The man with the goatee leans over and raps his knuckles on the steel partition behind Jim, expressing his disapproval to the driver.

  ‘What did you tell DI Hart when he interviewed you?’ he continues.

  Jim’s confused. Don’t the police and MI5 talk to each other?

  ‘I explained about Bella, how she’d approached me in the pub,’ Jim says. ‘And how your colleagues nearly made me crash on my drive home. We also discussed the crop circles – and Euler’s Identity. It’s a beautiful mathematical—’

  ‘Did you talk about your time at… Harwell?’ the man asks, interrupting him.

  Jim shakes his head. ‘I just said I worked at Porton Down.’

  ‘Have you discussed your time there with anyone?’

  ‘Only Bella. She’s got the full story, I’m afraid. I’ve written a diary, you see. It’s all in there.’ Jim starts to feel stronger at the thought of someone else reading his account of what went on at Harwell. ‘About my work. The experiments I conducted – and the ones I took part in.’

  The man nods, as if he already knows.

  A wave of fear passes over Jim as the magnitude of what he’s done suddenly hits him. ‘I’m in trouble, aren’t I?’ he asks quietly.

  ‘Not necessarily.’ The man pauses. ‘Did you enjoy your time at Harwell?’

  ‘Enjoy?’ Jim asks, taken aback by the question. ‘I’m not sure that’s the word I’d use. Things got better towards the end. Why?’

  ‘Because you’re going back there.’

  77

  Silas

  ‘I want to know everything we can about this Jed Lando,’ Silas says, addressing a small team of detectives in a meeting room on the first floor of Gablecross. ‘Where he lived, if he had family, his social media profile, who he met regularly and – most importantly – where he travelled for work.’

  Silas nods at Strover, standing next to him. He’s asked her to co-host the briefing for the first time. It’s a big step up but he’s keen to bring her on in his depressingly male-dominated team of detectives. ‘We know he worked for AP Brigham Inc, a large American firm that was starting to run NHS-funded mental health facilities, mainly in the north-east,’ she says. ‘There are some further south too. And there might be ones we don’t yet know about. They’ve been acquiring a lot of UK care groups in recent months, ever since the government allowed US investment in our health service.’

  A murmur of disapproval rolls around the room like a Mexican wave. Silas was shocked to discover that US companies already provide almost 15 per cent of all mental health care inpatient beds in the UK. Even more surprised when Strover told him that the figure’s as high as 60 per cent in her home town of Bristol.

  ‘How can we be sure that Lando is responsible for placing the first two bodies in the crop circles?’ someone asks.

  Strover turns to Silas. Not unreasonably, given it’s his hunch about Lando.

  ‘There’s no real evidence at this stage,’ he says. ‘What we do know is that Lando was a pathologist in his previous life in the UK before he apparently retrained as a psychologist in the States. The first two victims were frozen and one of them had been given a transorbital lobotomy, which suggests a person with at least some experience of a mortuary. Or possibly access to one.’

  Strover glances at Silas before taking up the presentation again. ‘As you know, we’ve yet to identify the first and second crop circle victims,’ she says, eyes moving confidently around her colleagues. ‘It’s possible that both of them might have passed through one of these mental health care facilities at some time in their life.’

  ‘Has there been any progress with breaking the codes of the crop circles?’ someone else asks.

  Silas nods at Strover, encouraging her to answer. She’s been the one liaising with the eggheads on Zoom. Swindon team captain.

  ‘We’ve had an update this afternoon,’ she says, gaining in confidence all the time. ‘It looks like the binary/ASCII code for each circle represents the molecular formula for a different chemical compound. We’re not
sure what they are – there are no direct matches yet – but we’re currently working on two theories: either they’re antipsychotic meds or chemical warfare agents.’

  ‘Not messages from little green men, then,’ another detective, the station joker, says. A ripple of laughter. Despite the deaths of four people, the crop circle element of the case has led to inevitable wisecracks at Silas and Strover’s expense. Silas waits to see how Strover will respond.

  ‘No surprise you’re asking about little green men,’ she says, turning on the joker, ‘given you’re on another planet most of the time.’ More laughter, this time at the joker’s expense. The noise quickly dies down, though, as the door to the meeting room opens and everyone looks up.

  ‘Ignore me,’ Ward says, slipping into the back of the room. The boss leans against the wall, arms folded.

  Ignore him? As if everyone will just pretend that the most important man in the building hasn’t joined their meeting. It’s not a good sign. Silas uses the interruption to glance at his phone. It’s been buzzing with messages throughout the meeting. Mel’s worried about a change in Conor’s care team at the psychiatric unit.

  Jonathan, our nice psychiatrist, has vanished. When I asked, they said the whole place is under new management… American.

  78

  Bella

  Bella watches the steam train pull away from Wareham station and jogs back to the car, ignoring the guard, who is still muttering about the dangers of running alongside moving carriages. He has no idea that she was attaching a tracking device to the locomotive’s old metal bodywork. And she has no idea what the men in the Range Rover will think when they see the car tracker making its way down the narrow-gauge railway line to Swanage. She hopes her dad’s smiling somewhere.

  She hasn’t got long, whatever her pursuers conclude. Has Jim put all the information she needs on the USB, including the link between the crop circles and Porton Down? She hopes he’s OK. All she needs now is somewhere to read the contents of the USB – password 15071950 – and write up her story as quickly as she can, before emailing it through to the newspaper. They don’t use copy-takers any more.

  Bella drives north, through pine trees and isolated Purbeck countryside, looking for somewhere suitable to pull over. A sandy track into the woods catches her eye and she turns down it, parking where she can’t be seen from the road. For a moment, she just sits, trying to process all that’s happened. Jim’s been taken away by people who’ve been following him – it now seems certain they’re MI5. The same people were also following her, before she went down to Wiltshire on her newspaper assignment. Have they been following her mum too? She made no sense on the phone, telling her not to run away from these people. Where is she? She didn’t sound herself. Should Bella ring the police? Tell them about the phone call, how distressed her mum sounded? Again, she hears Jim’s words of warning.

  She fetches her laptop from the boot of the car, takes the USB out of the glovebox and slides it in. An icon called ‘Modern Maddison’ appears, as before. Prompted for a password, she enters Jim’s mum’s date of birth with shaky fingers. It’s so sad that Jim never really knew her. She can’t imagine growing up without her mum. The password doesn’t work. She must have made a mistake. Resisting the urge to panic, she glances around the deserted woods and tries again. This time she’s in.

  She breathes a sigh of relief, checking the rearview mirror. The track is deserted, the silence of the woods broken only by the sound of a distant car driving down the main road. The USB is divided into lots of different files – ‘LSD’, ‘VX’, ‘BZ’, ‘Novichok Poisonings’, ‘Large Area Coverage Trials’ – but one in particular, ‘Harwell Diary’, catches her eye. She clicks on it, remembering that Jim mentioned his three-year secondment to a secret unit at Harwell Science and Innovation Campus. In a short intro, Jim explains that he wrote the diary recently, based on recollections of his time there.

  Some days are just a blur – we all worked so damned hard there – but other days come back to me out of the blue. I keep waking up in the night with a vivid memory of a particular incident or experiment and I write it down immediately, in case it goes.

  Bella glances around the woods again and starts to read.

  Week one

  I am no longer on the Porton Down site in Wiltshire, but the spirit of that famous place is alive and well at this affiliated facility at Harwell in Oxfordshire, where I’ve been seconded. It’s a relatively small unit – no more than thirty of us – and we’re all here to help each other with proof-of-concept research into developing antidotes and countermeasures to emerging chemical and biological threats.

  In keeping with the traditions of Porton Down, the on-site scientists at Harwell test a lot of the substances on themselves first, at less than lethal doses, of course. It’s an approach that we, as new recruits, are encouraged to adopt from the moment we arrive. In many respects, it makes perfect sense, given that we are the ones who know exactly what chemicals we are working with. But it’s still a shock when, on our first day, we are asked to queue up and are handed small phials of VX, one of the most lethal synthetic substances known to man.

  Later in the week, I am injected with a low dose of a rare Russian incapacitating agent, a chemical derivative of fentanyl. It knocks me out for the rest of the day. Not everyone is so willing to participate. One of my fellow new recruits has to be physically restrained for the injection and placed in a straitjacket. He’s screaming and shouting and almost bites clean through a senior scientist’s finger. We are all too out of it to care but that night I fall asleep with an unfathomable sense of fear.

  79

  Silas

  Silas feels sorry for Strover, making her first presentation in front of the boss. This is exactly what he feared would happen if he went to Ward about Jim Matthews. But he can’t concentrate, not after the text from Mel. Jonathan, the psychiatrist they’ve been seeing, had given them hope and now he’s gone. Mel’s on the case, doing all she can for Conor – and still complaining that Silas isn’t doing enough.

  ‘What about Porton Down?’ one of the team of detectives asks. ‘There’s been a lot of media speculation about a possible link.’

  Silas winces at the mention of Porton Down and glances over to Ward, whose expression remains implacable. Did he get the question planted? Silas wouldn’t put it past him.

  ‘At this stage, we’re not ruling out anything,’ Silas says, pausing. He refuses to kowtow to the boss and pretend Porton Down isn’t on the table. ‘There remains a strong possibility that the crop circle codes might be related to military nerve and incapacitating agents, but right now I want you all to focus on Jed Lando. You should be aware though that Jim Matthews worked for two summers as an intern at Porton Down while at Warwick University.’

  Silas glances over at Ward, still standing at the back, inscrutable as ever, and points at Jim’s name on the flow chart behind him.

  ‘Matthews seems to be of considerable interest to the driver and passenger of the Range Rover, who were linked to the fake doctor, who in turn we believe killed Jed Lando, the third victim, at the Great Western Hospital.’

  He illustrates the complex chain of connections on the whiteboard, moving from one name to the next. ‘What we don’t know is why they wanted Jed Lando dead. Or indeed what their interest is in Jim Matthews, but it appears to be significant.’

  After the meeting has ended, Silas walks downstairs to the Parade Room with Strover. The boss had left without comment when the discussion about Porton Down was over.

  ‘You did well,’ Silas says, sitting down.

  ‘You think so?’ Strover asks. ‘I’m not sure the boss was impressed.’

  ‘He had no right turning up unannounced like that,’ Silas says.

  ‘Was he there to put us off pursuing a Porton Down connection?’

  ‘Without question. I’ll look into Jed Lando, liaise with the team, you have another go at Jim Matthews.’

  Silas can’t shake off the feeli
ng that Jim’s more involved than they originally thought. Which means Porton Down might be too, whatever the boss thinks.

  Twenty minutes later, Strover comes up trumps.

  ‘HMRC have excelled themselves and replied promptly for once,’ she says, turning to face Silas.

  ‘And?’

  ‘The boss is right. The last time Jim Matthews was listed as a civil servant was four years ago, when he was due to join Porton Down as part of its graduate development programme but never showed up – and was never paid. There are, though, several payments relating to two previous summer internships.’

  ‘Anything since then?’ Silas asks.

  ‘Nothing for three years,’ she says, reading from her screen. ‘But get this: for the last few months, he’s been working at a pet shop.’

  ‘A pet shop?’ Silas repeats, spitting out the words as if he’s just swallowed a wasp.

  Strover angles her laptop so Silas can see. ‘Porton Garden Aquatic and Pets. I’ve looked it up on Google Maps – it’s just around the corner from Porton Down, in the village.’

  Silas stares at the screen in disbelief. It doesn’t make any sense. Unless it’s a cover story of some sort. Animal experiments are still carried out at Porton Down’s laboratories, something that’s not denied but not exactly shouted about either. Maybe Jim works in the animal labs, and has been given an alibi in case he’s targeted by animal rights activists? It sounds unlikely but Silas has learnt that anything’s possible when you’re dealing with Porton Down. ‘What was he doing in the three years before then?’ Silas asks.