The Man on Hackpen Hill Read online

  ‘That was done in 2010, in a field near Wilton Windmill in Wiltshire,’ she says.

  ‘What is it?’ Silas asks, looking at the complex pattern, a circle divided up by twelve radial spokes, each one sprouting short concentric spurs, and carved out of vivid yellow oilseed rape. The overall effect is not dissimilar to twelve sails of a giant windmill.

  ‘It’s a binary representation of Euler’s Identity – one of the most beautiful and profound mathematical equations known to man. Apparently.’

  Silas looks up at Strover and then at the photo. ‘Binary? That?’

  Strover seems genuinely puzzled by Silas’s response. In keeping with the police’s new recruitment policy, she is a graduate, studied forensic science at the University of the West of England in Bristol.

  ‘You can see here that each spoke has up to eight little arcs coming off it,’ Strover says, pointing at the photo. ‘And eight’s quite a significant number when it comes to binary and computers. Does eight-bit extended ASCII code mean anything to you?’

  Silas shakes his head.

  ‘You know how computers work in binary – one is on, zero is off,’ Strover says, not waiting for an answer. ‘Well, ASCII is a character encoding standard that was developed in the 1960s and converts those binary numbers, or bits, into more familiar text – letters, symbols and numbers.’

  She points again at the photo of the crop circle pattern. ‘When there’s a short arc coming off one of these main radial spokes, that represents a one. Where there’s a gap, an arc missing, that’s a zero.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Silas says. He wishes he’d paid more attention at school.

  ‘While we’re at it, a string of eight bits make a byte,’ Strover says. ‘And some people reckon this circle represents how data is arranged on a computer hard drive.’

  ‘Can we move on?’ Silas asks. He should be home by now, having dinner with Mel, like any ordinary couple.

  ‘Sure,’ Strover says, but she’s hit her stride. ‘This particular crop circle attracted a lot of interest from mathematicians around the world. One pointed out that when the binary was translated into text using ASCII, what should have been an “i” had become “hi”, which was either someone’s idea of a joke or a reference to Planck’s Constant, the elementary quantum of action that’s depicted with an “h”.’

  ‘Planck being…?’ Silas asks, thoroughly baffled.

  ‘Max Planck. A German theoretical physicist. And a reference to planks of wood, of course, which we all know are used by the people who make these crop circles,’ Strover adds.

  ‘Of course. Very funny.’

  In a niche sort of way. It’s not exactly Silas’s sense of humour. He prefers his jokes more earthy.

  ‘This one caused an even bigger stir,’ Strover says, taking another photo off the printer. ‘Possibly the most complex crop circle ever seen in Britain. Until now.’

  9

  Bella

  Bella lies in the darkness, listening to the sounds of east London. It feels strange to be back in her old room, as if her time at Oxford never happened. The luminescent stars that her dad once gave her in Mombasa are still stuck on the ceiling, glowing faintly, a fading reminder. After his death, they moved back to the UK and this house in Homerton. Her mum had bought it cheaply in the 1990s when she was left some money. In those days, crime rates in the area were high – Clapton Road, round the corner, was known as ‘Murder Mile’ – but it’s become gentrified in recent years. And the schools are getting better. Bella went to Clapton Girls’ Academy, where she was one of several students in her year to win a place at Oxford, but she’s drifted away from all her old friends.

  A shame, given she’d like to take someone with her when she visits the Slaughtered Lamb. Erin would shake things up in a genteel pub in rural Wiltshire – and blow Bella’s cover as a journalist. She’d be useless! Her friend wasn’t really into pubs or drinking at uni. Being out of her head on drugs in her room was more her thing. If she came along with Bella, she’d be asking the barman for Q-balls.

  A siren wails up the Chatsworth Road. Did an ambulance come for Erin? Bella can’t stop thinking of what might have happened to her after term finished. Another lonely bender but this time more serious, trying to block out the pain of her past. She was never hospitalised before. Erin finally slipped through the cracks. Haslam went on about the importance of pastoral care but the number of students who dropped out because of drugs and mental health issues was shocking.

  On one particularly heavy night in her first year, Bella was in Erin’s room and both of them were pretty dosed. Erin was on her bed, knees drawn up, head rocking. Bella lay flat on the floor, room spinning like a dervish.

  ‘Did you really sleep rough on the streets in Dublin?’ Bella asked, trying to get her bombed brain around Erin’s childhood.

  ‘With my da. Sure we did. In the summer. Danced all day, happy to sleep anywhere, I was so knackered.’

  Erin used to busk for the tourists on Grafton Street, step dancing to her dad’s Irish fiddle playing, but she didn’t like to talk about it. She was self-conscious, no longer the cute slip of a girl that used to pull in the crowds.

  ‘How old were you?’ Bella asked. ‘When he died?’

  ‘Ten.’

  The same age as Helen when their own own dad died. Maybe that’s why they got on so well. They had little else in common but sometimes it only takes one thing for a friendship to form.

  ‘We were sleeping in a tent in Phoenix Park,’ she said. ‘I tried to wake him – the Gardaí were outside, arresting people. It was never easy in the mornings, because of his boozing, but this time…’

  ‘Did you see him?’ Bella asked, propping herself up on one elbow. ‘His dead body?’

  ‘What kind of a question’s that? Sure I saw him dead. We were sharing a feckin’ tent.’

  Bella closed her heavy eyes and lay back down again, feeling dizzy.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But I envy you. The certainty of what you saw.’

  ‘You’re more out of your box than I thought,’ Erin replied.

  ‘It took me years to accept my dad was dead,’ Bella said.

  More silence, except for a lone rook outside, disturbed by something in the night. ‘Did you get on with him OK, like?’ Erin asked.

  An image of Bella’s dad, dancing around the kitchen table with her mum in Mombasa. ‘I loved him,’ she says.

  Erin didn’t speak for a while. And then Bella heard her sobbing. She’d never known Erin cry before. Or show any real emotion. Bella stood up, unsteady on her feet, and trudged over to her bed.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Bella said, slinging an arm around Erin as she flopped down next to her, the room still spinning.

  ‘I loved my da too,’ Erin said. ‘Overlooked all the shite stuff. We do, don’t we? As daughters.’ Bella nodded. She was sure that her own dad had lots of faults but she couldn’t think of any right then. ‘He kicked my mam out when I was six – after she’d tried to kill us both. I never saw her again. She was drunk and gave him a proper beating – he wouldn’t hit her back. And then she turned on me with a kitchen knife and he knocked her clean out. I miss the stupid fella every day.’

  10

  Silas

  ‘It’s a geometric representation of the first ten digits of pi,’ Strover says.

  Silas shudders at the mention of pi. He rotates the photo in his hands, hoping to make better sense of the pattern of concentric circles. It’s like a cross between an archery target and a spiralling maze, with three smaller circles floating on the perimeter, flat and smooth, echoing the bullseye.

  ‘Found in a field of barley in 2008, near Barbury Castle,’ Strover adds.

  ‘Not so far from Hackpen Hill,’ Silas says, thinking back to the naked body in the field, the bruised eye sockets. The Parade Room is almost empty. Most sensible people have gone home to their families by now.

  ‘No one knew what it meant until an American called Mike Reed, an
associate professor of astrophysics, made the link,’ Strover continues. ‘Each angular segment represents a digit. That little dot here’ – she points to a tiny circle next to the centre – ‘represents the decimal point. The tenth digit’s even been rounded up properly.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Silas says, bluffing. God, how he hated maths at school. ‘Not made by time travellers then.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Strover asks.

  ‘Didn’t you know? They leave crop circles as navigational aids,’ Silas says. ‘Just one of the many batshit explanations I’ve been given today for how they’re formed. Along with plasma vortices, balls of light, ley lines and UFO landings.’

  If the case wasn’t so urgent, the theories would be funny. But Silas needs to find out who created the circle at Hackpen Hill and establish if there’s any link with whoever placed the body at its centre. Unfortunately, the crop circle world is not so simple. The people – and Silas is in no doubt that it is people – who make these things don’t like to break cover, not for fear of upsetting the croppies – or cereologists, as the believers also call themselves – but because they might get sued by the farmers for trespass and criminal damage. Having said that, some of the more savvy farmers cooperate with the croppies, charging the public for access to circles that appear in their fields.

  Silas’s phone rings. It’s Malcolm.

  ‘The body’s been in a morgue,’ Malcolm says. ‘Before it was left in the field.’ Silas likes it when people cut to the chase, but he’s not so sure in this case. His life has just got a whole lot more complicated.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asks.

  ‘Some of the internal organs were still frozen,’ Malcolm continues. ‘It’s been kept in a negative temperature storage facility – which usually run at minus 50 to prevent decomposition. If you want a speculative timeline, and I know you always do, I’d say he died from a slash to the left wrist, most probably self-inflicted, at least a month ago. Maybe longer. Within the past twelve hours, the fibrous matter that connects the cortical tissue of his brain’s prefrontal cortex to the thalamus has been transected. The procedure – a transorbital lobotomy, as your young colleague rightly said – was carried out by accessing the victim’s brain through the top of both eye sockets.’

  ‘Hence the black eyes.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Why would someone do that?’ Silas asks, thinking aloud. ‘Perform a brutal operation that was discontinued more than seventy years ago?’

  Strover looks up.

  ‘That’s for you to find out, not me,’ Malcolm says. ‘A transorbital lobotomy is quite a specialist procedure, not immediately obvious to the layman. Although you did spot the bruised eye sockets.’

  Silas signs off and pushes back on his chair, checking his mobile. A text from Mel, asking if he’s coming back for dinner. No chance. He must remember to reply.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ he sighs, before filling Strover in on what Malcolm’s told him.

  Silas’s phone rings again. The National DNA Database. He takes the call, listens, hangs up.

  ‘No matches.’ Strover’s already checked the victim’s face against the UK custody image database and his fingerprints have been run through IDENT1 and IABS, the criminal and immigration databases. The Vulnerable Persons Database and Missing Persons DNA Database have also come back with nothing.

  ‘Our man who fell to earth is a ghost,’ Silas continues. ‘We need to put a message out to every mortuary in the country, see if they’ve had any slit-wrist suicides in the past two months and then ask them to check their chillers. Make sure no cadavers have gone walkabout.’

  11

  Bella

  The phone rings downstairs. Bella’s mum takes the call and walks back up to her bedroom, talking quietly. Maybe she has got a new man after all. Bella hopes her mum finds love again one day. She gets out of bed and tiptoes to the landing, where she can just hear her voice.

  ‘She’s still very upset about Erin,’ her mum’s saying. Who’s she talking to? Dr Haslam? ‘And she’s not stupid – it wasn’t a mistake when Oxford offered her a place, you know… She was the brightest in her year at Clapton… I wish we could tell her the truth… Of course I won’t… It’s just that sometimes I wonder if we’re doing the right thing.’

  A long pause as Haslam, if it is him, talks. The truth? What aren’t they telling her about Erin?

  ‘I get that,’ her mum says. ‘I just find it incredibly hard to lie to my own daughter. I know it’s for the best, but you must understand how difficult this is for me?’

  More from Dr Haslam before her mum speaks again. ‘She’s just working as a secretary on the lifestyle desk… I really can’t see the harm… It’s good for her, keeps her mind busy… Well, I disagree.’ Her mum’s agitated now, angry. ‘She’s not actually a journalist… It’s an amazing opportunity. A chance to find her feet after three years at that wretched institution.’

  Her mum really didn’t like Oxford. After another brief exchange, she signs off, clearly troubled by their conversation. Bella is too as she slips back into her bed. Just working as a secretary… not actually a journalist. She’ll show her mum, prove Dr Haslam wrong.

  Half an hour later, Bella creeps downstairs. She can’t sleep, not after what she has overheard. Her mum’s lying on the sofa in the sitting room, eyes closed, a book on her lap. Everything You Have Told Me is True: The Many Faces of Al Shabaab. She’s promised to take Bella to Somalia one day, but she thinks it’s still too dangerous. They used to live in the safety of Mombasa while her dad travelled to and from Mogadishu in Somalia. Bella hovers in the doorway, wondering whether to wake her. Instead, she turns off the main light. Her mum’s always got too many lights on. The darkness seems to stir her.

  ‘Hi, sweetie,’ her mum says, looking around. ‘You OK?’

  ‘Who was that on the phone?’ Bella asks.

  Her mum hesitates before standing up and walking barefoot into the kitchen.

  ‘We have to give each other space, you know, if we’re going to live together like this,’ she says, her back to Bella at the sink. ‘I’m trying to give you yours and I’d appreciate it if you gave me mine in return.’

  ‘What did he want?’ Bella asks, watching as she washes a couple of plates and stacks them on the drying rack. ‘Dr Haslam?’

  Her mum spins around. ‘So you were listening.’

  ‘I just need to know if Erin’s alright.’ She pauses. ‘If she’s alive. No one’s telling me anything.’

  Her mum takes time to answer, drying her hands on a tea towel. ‘She’s still not well.’

  Bella sighs with relief and turns off the main kitchen light, leaving a solitary lamp on above the sink – more than enough to see.

  ‘And will you please stop turning off all the lights?’ her mum snaps, throwing down the tea towel. She turns on the main light again, clicks on the kettle and opens a cupboard above her.

  ‘It’s a waste of energy,’ Bella says. ‘And as you’ve still not converted to a green supplier—’

  ‘I like having the lights on,’ her mum interrupts, dropping a herbal teabag into a mug. She pauses and gets out another mug and teabag. ‘Particularly at night. When it’s dark.’

  ‘There’s still plenty of light in here,’ Bella says, nodding at the lamp.

  Her mum turns and leans back against the sideboard, arms folded like a schoolteacher. She’s no longer cross, even though she has every right to be. Bella’s pushed it and this is her mum’s house, her electricity bill. Instead, she smiles and wipes away a trace of a tear.

  ‘I love you, sweetie. Your mission to save the planet. But sometimes you need to stop and think a little about others. Particularly when you’re sharing a space with someone. A home. I like having the lights on because I couldn’t sleep that first night I heard your dad had been killed. There was a power cut – there were a lot in Mombasa in those days – and the house was dark. Too dark. So I like having the lights on now. OK?’

  Bella stares at the f
loor, flooded with guilt as she bites her lip. She remembers that night so well, the candle in their room. Why hasn’t she mentioned this before?

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mum,’ she says, walking over to hug her. ‘I didn’t realise.’

  They move back into the sitting room and settle down on the sofa with their herbal teas.

  ‘There’s a lot you don’t know about me,’ her mum says, a hand on Bella’s knee. ‘About us. Life. But that’s OK. You’ve got an inquisitive mind. And your dad hoped more than anything that you’d both grow up curious about the world.’

  ‘So why doesn’t Dr Haslam want me to be a journalist?’ Bella asks, leaning forward to take a sip of her tea.

  ‘You really were listening to me on the phone, weren’t you?’

  ‘It’s not his business what I do now anyway,’ Bella continues. ‘I don’t understand why he’s still ringing us.’

  Perhaps Dr Haslam is her mum’s boyfriend. The effort she’d made to look nice when she picked her up from college. Is that what her mum meant about having to lie to her own daughter? She’s an attractive woman and he’s a good-looking man. Not Bella’s type, but her mum wouldn’t be the first to fancy him. Some of his male students even started to dress like him in their final year, complete with small, round reading glasses, skinny jeans and corduroy jacket.

  ‘Because he cares about you,’ her mum says. ‘And cares about Erin. He was responsible for your well-being for three years. Head of pastoral care, or whatever it’s called.’

  ‘But he’s not responsible now.’

  ‘No, he’s not.’ Her mum gets up from the sofa. ‘I’m tired, sweetie. Time for bed.’

  Bella watches as her mum climbs the stairs.

  ‘I’m not just a secretary, by the way,’ she calls up after her. ‘I think I’ve got my first story. My first byline.’

  Her mum stops and turns to look back down at her.

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ she says. ‘If you really believe you’re a journalist, then maybe that’s enough.’ She pauses. ‘Show Dad what you can do.’