The Man on Hackpen Hill Page 3

  ‘I wish you weren’t leaving, like,’ Erin had said on that last day, her Dublin brogue more pronounced. It always was when she was upset. She was slouched on a beanbag in the corner of Bella’s college room, watching her take down sheets of paper from the walls – funny headlines, overheard quotes around college, story ideas.

  Bella looked over to her, surprised. Neither of them had been very good at expressing emotion in their time there. Small notes slipped under each other’s doors asking if they’re OK, but seldom open gestures of affection. She knew she would miss Erin too, her tartan pyjamas and tattoos and crazy stories of busking with her dad in Dublin. It made Bella’s own upbringing feel so sheltered.

  ‘I’m only going to London,’ Bella said, picking up her overstuffed rucksack and a bulging blue Ikea bag. ‘Mum wants me to stay at hers for a few months – until I find a place of my own.’

  ‘Sounds nice.’

  There was no envy in Erin’s voice, no self-pity, but Bella felt bad.

  ‘Your mam’s here already, by the way,’ Erin added. ‘Talking to Haslam.’

  ‘You sure?’

  Erin nodded, cocking her head sideways. Bella was about to ask her why she hadn’t told her sooner, but she knew. She didn’t want Bella to leave.

  ‘Haslam’s laying on the charm with a shovel,’ Erin added. ‘Better get down there quick before you have a wee sister.’

  Bella looks up and down the London street, smiling at the memory. Despite their different backgrounds, they seemed to click from day one. Erin taught Bella to stand up for herself, to unbutton a little. And Bella went along with it, particularly the drugs in her first couple of years. It’s what students did at uni, after all. Anything to shake off the lanky librarian moniker. But in the end, she wasn’t brave enough to be like her friend. Erin’s defiance of authority, the college porters, Dr Haslam. Bella chose to acquiesce. To study hard. And now she’s left her behind.

  6

  Silas

  Silas and Strover get back into his car and set off down towards the scene of crime, past the white horse. At the bottom of Hackpen Hill, they are waved through a police roadblock and park up beside the field. In the distance, on the road to Royal Wootton Bassett, Silas can see a convoy of camper vans congregating behind another barrier.

  ‘Make sure those croppies don’t get any closer,’ he says to a uniform, gesturing down the road towards the vehicles. He’s had dealings with croppies in the past, usually after complaints from farmers, and isn’t in the mood for a long conversation about ley lines and why his mobile phone might suddenly stop working in the middle of a crop circle. He hasn’t got the energy – unlike the circles themselves. As any self-respecting croppie knows, they are notorious for interfering with electronic equipment.

  Silas and Strover don white disposable suits and shoes, sign the crime scene attendance log and enter the tent. He’s seen plenty of dead bodies in his career but it still shocks him every time he encounters one. The day it doesn’t will be the day he retires. The young man lying on the flattened wheat is in the centre of one of the hexagons, and for a second Silas wonders if he really has fallen from the sky. Everything about the scene feels staged. The body is on its side, almost as if in the recovery position, and seems peaceful. It’s not Conor but Silas’s relief is tempered by the knowledge that another father will soon be grieving.

  Silas peers closer. It’s the victim’s face that most interests him. His complexion is pallid, as Silas would expect, but he appears to have two black eyes. Something about them is not quite right, though: they are darker at the top of the socket than below, where there is no bruising. And then he notices the left wrist. It’s been lacerated but the cuts don’t appear fresh. Nor is there any evidence of blood on the flattened wheat below him.

  ‘Don’t even begin to ask me the cause of death,’ a familiar voice says behind Silas. It’s Malcolm, his old friend and forensic pathologist, who has followed them into the tent. Malcolm has been in the business for thirty years, his manner an odd mix of posh academic and car mechanic. He should have retired by now but he lost everything in a messy divorce and needs the money. Possesses an impish sense of humour too, but not now, not here.

  ‘Before you ask, I’d say he died elsewhere from a severed radial artery and was subsequently brought here,’ Malcolm begins, matter-of-factly.

  ‘How long after he died?’ Silas asks. Pathologists hate being asked time of death. Unless the victim’s wearing a watch that stopped at the exact moment they died, they’d rather not say, which is infuriating, given it’s the first thing that an SIO wants to know.

  ‘Impossible to say. The body temperature is unnaturally low. I’ve got a funny feeling about this one.’

  Silas has got a funny feeling too. And he hates funny feelings. ‘What about the two black eyes?’ he asks.

  ‘You noticed them?’

  Silas nods.

  ‘You’ll be putting me out of a job,’ Malcolm continues, smiling. His own eyes are deep set, his grey eyebrows bristling and unwieldy. ‘I hope they’re paying you well.’

  ‘They look unusual,’ Silas says, ignoring the comment. If they start talking salaries, they’ll never stop. Malcolm’s always going on about his workload, how there are not enough forensic pathologists in the UK any more. ‘Do we know what might have caused the bruising?’

  ‘Too early to say, but they’re definitely irregular.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Silas asks.

  Malcolm turns to grab Silas by the shoulder. Age has stooped him but he’s still a tall, imposing man.

  ‘If I were to punch you in the eye,’ he says, holding his clenched fist inches from Silas’s face, ‘you would expect burst capillaries and bruising in the fatty tissue all around the socket. But in this case, the only haemorrhaging is above the eye, which, as you rightly say, is unusual.’

  ‘So what could have caused them?’ Silas asks, pleased that Malcolm has let him go. He can get carried away, theatrical. Loves his amateur dramatics. And cricket. Never ask him about cricket.

  Malcolm looks around, checks that no one else is within earshot. Strover is still with them.

  ‘She’s with me,’ Silas says, sensing Malcolm’s reluctance to talk in front of her. He’s not sure whether it’s because Strover’s young or a woman. Probably both. Malcolm can be a bit unreconstructed at times, makes Silas seem positively woke.

  ‘In the 1940s and 50s, psychosurgery was all the rage,’ Malcolm says. ‘Operating on the brain to cure mental illnesses. It was pretty crude, barbaric stuff. Suspected schizophrenia? Sever the prefrontal cortex.’

  ‘A lobotomy, you mean,’ Strover says.

  Malcolm nods, wrong-footed by Strover’s intervention. Silas is pleased. He’s trying to encourage her to be more confident, speak her mind. ‘The frontal lobes – personality expression, will to live, organisation of thoughts, moderating behaviour, that sort of thing – were effectively destroyed,’ Malcolm continues. ‘At first they went in through holes bored into the side of the head. But then they discovered they could access the brain less intrusively by going in through the back of the eye sockets.’

  Silas closes his own eyes. He dreads where this might be heading.

  ‘I’ll spare you the details,’ Malcolm continues. ‘Let’s just say it involved a sharp surgical instrument called an orbitoclast and a mallet.’

  ‘Thanks for that,’ Silas says. For the first time in weeks he doesn’t feel hungry.

  ‘Known as a transorbital lobotomy,’ Strover chips in.

  Both men turn to her in surprise. Silas doesn’t even want to guess how she knows about such things.

  ‘Bedtime reading,’ Strover adds, flashing a thin smile at them both.

  ‘Developed by a physician in the States called Walter Freeman,’ Malcolm says, regaining the upper hand. ‘He used to practise his technique with an ice pick and a grapefruit.’

  ‘And you think our victim might have been given one of these…’ Silas asks, keen to move on
.

  ‘A transorbital lobotomy?’ Malcolm says, still looking at Strover with curiosity. ‘Quite possibly. It’s a while since I’ve seen one. I’m pleased to say psychiatry has progressed. We just need to establish if it was carried out before or after the poor man slit his wrist.’

  7

  Bella

  ‘I think I saw Dr Haslam today,’ Bella says, sticking another page of her notebook up on the wall of her bedroom.

  ‘In town?’ her mum asks, leaning against the doorway with her arms folded. It’s early evening and sunlight is streaming into Bella’s book-lined room, which has remained unchanged since she went up to Oxford. A map of Africa above her desk in the corner, snapshots of old school friends on the wall beside her wooden bed from Mombasa. A framed photo of her dad on the dressing table.

  ‘At least, he looked just like Dr Haslam.’

  Bella has begun to doubt it was her tutor, but the man she confronted on the street… She’d definitely seen him before.

  ‘It can’t have been him,’ her mum says.

  ‘Why not?’ Bella asks, turning around. Her mum’s wearing one of the silver African necklaces that Bella’s dad gave her, strung with big amber beads.

  ‘Because he rang me this afternoon from Italy, wondering how you were,’ her mum says, fingering a bead.

  ‘Rang you?’ Bella asks. ‘I’ve been trying to speak to him for bloody weeks.’

  ‘I know. He’s concerned – worried you’ve taken the news about Erin very badly.’

  ‘How else was I going to take it?’ Bella snaps. ‘She’s my best friend.’

  ‘Erin’s going to be in hospital for a long time, Bel.’ Her mum’s tone has changed, become more serious. ‘Dr Haslam will contact you as soon as you are allowed to visit her. He’s promised me. In the meantime, it’s best you stop ringing him. And all those hospitals.’

  Bella turns back to sticking sheets of paper up on the wall. She wonders if Erin has received any of her messages. And then she thinks about Dr Haslam again. Short and gnomic, but with an unmistakable air of authority. Strange that he rang on the same day she thought she’d seen him. Is he really in Italy? He was always talking about visiting John Keats’s grave in Rome, located outside the city walls because the poet wasn’t a Catholic.

  ‘I just don’t understand why I can’t visit her,’ Bella says, tears welling as she rips out another page of her notebook. ‘It’s been two months.’

  ‘No one can, sweetie. She’s very poorly.’

  Her mum walks over to hug Bella as she starts to sob. They stay like that for a while, her mum stroking Bella’s hair, the smell of jasmine perfume faint but familiar. The smell of her childhood. Of happier times. Bella looks across at her desk, where there’s another framed photo of her dad in his beloved Somalia. Helen on his shoulders, her in his arms. His hair is long and flowing, and he’s wearing studious glasses.

  Her mum follows Bella’s gaze and her hug tightens. Her dad died when Bella was eight and Helen was ten. She never had the chance to know him adult to adult, like she has with her mum.

  ‘You lit up his life,’ her mum says. ‘He was so earnest until you two came along.’

  Her mum’s being kind. Helen was the sunny one.

  ‘What are all these anyway?’ her mum asks, breaking off to walk around the room, reading the pages on the walls.

  ‘Ideas for headlines,’ Bella says. ‘It’s just the way I work. I like to see everything laid out.’

  ‘“The Joy of Ceps”?’ she says, pulling a funny expression.

  ‘Foraging for mushrooms.’

  ‘He would have liked that one.’ She pauses before continuing. ‘And he would have been so proud of the way you’re following your dreams. When you and Helen were very young, in our house in Mombasa, you used to sit in the attic at two separate tiny desks, the old wooden ones with inkwells. Your dad had made a sign above Helen’s that said “Big Cheese Editor”, and one above yours that said “Intrepid Reporter”.’

  Bella’s memories are faint but she can picture Helen at her desk. Or is she recalling a photo?

  ‘I’ve been thinking a lot about Dad since I came down from Oxford,’ she says. ‘I want to do something for him. Make him really proud by breaking a big story. One that counts. It might be environmental, but it doesn’t have to be.’

  ‘I’m sure you will,’ her mum says, but she doesn’t sound very convinced.

  ‘I’ve been going through more of his newspaper cuttings,’ Bella continues. ‘Human rights abuses in Zimbabwe, government corruption in Somalia. Big pharma trials in Kenya. Illegal oil drilling in Nigeria. And there I am filing press releases for bidets.’

  ‘You’re just starting out,’ her mum says. ‘And it wasn’t always easy.’

  ‘For you?’ Bella asks. She loves to hear stories of her childhood, even if they’re not all happy ones.

  ‘For us. As a family.’ She pauses, fingering the amber necklace again. ‘Sometimes I feared he’d never come back.’

  Bella remembers the long periods her dad was away on an undercover story, the empty place at the kitchen table. The night before he left, he would always tell Bella and Helen that he’d be gone by the morning. Bella would fall quiet but Helen would quiz him, ask if he was going to wear secret disguises.

  He was more playful than usual the last time he went away. ‘Maybe I need a false moustache,’ he said in a Poirot accent, grabbing one of Helen’s crayons and drawing a ridiculous line across his upper lip. ‘How do I look?’ He puckered his mouth as Helen rolled around laughing on the bed. ‘So, you know who it is, do you? Hmm, maybe I need a beard too,’ he added, scribbling all over his chin.

  When the laughing stopped, he looked across at Bella on her bed.

  ‘Are you going to come back, Daddy?’ Bella asked quietly, twisting her tiny fingers in her lap.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, coming over to sit next to her.

  ‘Promise?’ Bella asked, looking up at him.

  ‘Promise. Haven’t I always come back?’

  It was true. He did return, usually with presents, not expensive ones but toy prams and hula hoops made by local kids out of wood and wire, and bought on the roadside.

  A hint of a smile broke across Bella’s face as she contemplated her dad’s silly beard.

  ‘Can I have a disguise?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course you can,’ he said, cradling Bella’s serious face in his hands as he kissed her forehead.

  A minute later, her cheeks were a riot of squiggles and twirls.

  ‘There we go,’ he said, admiring his handiwork. ‘Mummy won’t recognise you at breakfast.’

  ‘You OK?’ her mum asks, breaking into Bella’s thoughts.

  ‘Fine,’ she says, but it’s obvious that she’s not.

  ‘Come here,’ her mum says, arms outstretched, as loud African funk music starts to boom out from downstairs. It’s the Dur-Dur Band from 1980s Somalia, recently reformed. Her mum rolls her eyes. She’s renting the front room of the house to lodgers, a pair of handsome Somali refugees who are helping out at the migrant centre that she runs.

  ‘We’ve got two choices,’ she says, holding Bella’s hands. ‘Either we go downstairs and tell them to turn it down…’

  ‘Or…?’ Bella asks, knowing what the answer will be.

  ‘We join them and dance!’

  Her mum loved to dance when they were little, usually with Helen. Bella had needed more persuading. Not any more. She follows her mum downstairs but as she passes the landing window, something catches her eye in the street below. She stops to look. A car has pulled up and a man gets out. She only sees him for a second before he disappears but she’s sure it’s the same person she confronted on the street today. Same jet-black hair and hunched shoulders.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ her mum calls up the stairs. Bella lingers a moment longer at the window. Maybe she’s wrong, imagining things.

  ‘Coming,’ Bella says, but her feet are no longer quite so keen to dance.
>
  8

  Silas

  ‘No one can say we haven’t got the best brains working on the crop circle pattern,’ Strover says, coming off the phone. ‘That was a professor at the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at Cambridge.’

  ‘Does he have any idea what it means?’ Silas asks, sitting back in his chair. They are in their favourite corner of the Parade Room at Gablecross, where the talk is of nothing else. The crop circle killing is already headline news and TV crews are parked up outside the police station, waiting for an official statement.

  ‘It’s a “she”,’ Strover says, throwing Silas one of her looks. ‘And she doesn’t know yet but she seemed to relish the challenge when I briefed her. Apparently, it’s in a different league to previous coded patterns. A unique combination of mathematics and chemistry.’

  ‘Meaning it will take time,’ Silas says, sighing. It’s the last thing he wants to hear.

  ‘I’m setting up a Zoom call with her and an associate professor of chemistry at the Molecular Sciences Research Hub at Imperial,’ Strover adds.

  Silas hates Zoom, the difficulty of reading someone’s expressions and body language.

  ‘Can’t wait,’ he says.

  It’s been busy since they returned from the crop circle at Hackpen Hill and he knows that they need all the help they can get. And not just because of the media interest. The boss is on their case too. The golden hour had long passed by the time the body was found, but Silas has been on the front foot all day, aware that time is still of the essence. He’s been pushing the CSI manager for any leads, however small, while trying to fast-track a DNA sample. He’s also called Malcolm every half hour for news on the autopsy, while Strover’s chased boffins. She’s on a mission too, fired up by the case’s unusual semiotics. Her word, not his.

  She picks up the photo that’s just spewed out of the printer and passes it over to Silas.