The Man on Hackpen Hill Page 6

  Bella doesn’t know a lot about Porton Down except that it’s a secretive government site in Wiltshire. She glances around the pub. This is what she dreamt of. Her dad would be so proud. Just don’t go mad with the bar bill. She takes a sip of her tomato juice and smiles to herself, remembering Mark’s words when she asked if she could have a go at the ‘Overheard’ column.

  The pub door swings open and a young man wearing thick black-rimmed glasses walks in.

  ‘Palmer will know,’ one of the locals says, making room for the new arrival at the bar. ‘Won’t you, Palmer?’

  ‘Know what?’ the man says tersely. He is tall and broad-shouldered – a rower’s frame. Bella never did get to try that at uni. His young face is smooth, his gait a touch clumsy. Maybe it’s his feet, which are big and point outwards, like a penguin’s. He glances around the pub, notices Bella in the corner and turns away, pushing his glasses back with one finger. Shy too.

  ‘You must know what that coded crop circle means in the field where they found the dead body,’ Sean says. ‘Got to be something to do with your lot. Got to be.’

  Bella watches as the barman serves Palmer. He’s about to leave the bar with his drink when another man, further down, leans over in his direction and addresses Palmer in a thick Wiltshire accent:

  ‘Come on, Palmer, it was more than a coincidence that the first ever nerve agent attack on UK soil happened just down the road from Porton Down, where novichok’s been kept for years.’

  The tone is confrontational, almost angry, and the whole bar falls silent.

  ‘Are you asking or telling me?’ Palmer says, taking a sip of his drink. He seems nervous, eyes darting around the room.

  ‘I’m asking you to put our minds at rest, given you work there. Tell us what’s really going on. I’ll bet my house the corpse in that field’s another bloody Russian agent taken out by Putin.’

  ‘Leave the poor man alone,’ the landlord says, winking at Sean. ‘One conspiracy theorist in my pub is quite enough.’

  Bella reaches down for her bag as Palmer comes across to her corner, stepping over a couple of sleeping black Labradors.

  ‘I’m sorry, is this your table?’ she asks, getting up from her chair.

  ‘It’s OK, please,’ he says. ‘In fact, you’d be doing me a favour if you stayed.’ He nods at the bar, where the locals have resumed their discussion. ‘Might give them something else to talk about for a change.’

  One of the locals looks over in their direction. Bella stares him down and the man turns away. She’s still standing, torn between leaving and talking to this man who appears to work at Porton Down. The same man she was told to ‘overhear’ by the anonymous letter writer. No self-respecting journalist would walk away from such an opportunity. He also happens to be quite cute, in an awkward sort of way. Nicely dressed in a crisp white shirt and blue jeans. And elegant, long fingers.

  ‘What you having?’ he asks, gesturing at her half-empty glass. They are both still standing.

  ‘I’m fine, honestly,’ she says, noticing a scar on his forehead.

  ‘Come on. Bloody Mary, is it?’ he asks.

  ‘Just a tomato juice.’

  ‘On the hard stuff,’ he says, spilling some of his drink on the table as he raises his glass in solidarity. ‘Me too.’

  Bella watches as he mops up the spillage with a paper napkin. He makes a mess of it, knocking his glass again.

  ‘Anyone would think I’ve been drinking,’ he says, laughing. ‘It’s only ginger beer. Honestly.’

  Bella smiles. Why’s he so nervous? ‘Let me get mine,’ she says. ‘Save you having to run the gauntlet again.’

  He looks over at the bar. ‘OK, but put it on my tab. I insist. Jim Matthews.’

  Bella looks surprised. ‘Not Palmer, then?’

  ‘No,’ he smirks. ‘Palmer’s just a nickname. You know, because of the glasses.’ He looks down, embarrassed. Bella stares blankly at him. She has no idea what he’s talking about. ‘Harry Palmer?’ he continues. ‘The Ipcress File? Michael Caine?’

  ‘Right,’ she says, bluffing. ‘I’m Bella.’

  ‘Nice to meet you, Bella,’ he says, shaking her hand. And very nice to meet you too. ‘You’re not a cop or a spook, are you?’ he adds, finally sitting down.

  ‘No,’ she says, taken aback by the sudden change of tone. But she is a journalist. Her face blushes. Should she sit down too or go to the bar?

  ‘Not that you’d tell me if you were, of course,’ he laughs, unaware that Bella’s stomach has just flipped.

  ‘Why would I be?’ she asks. She blushes again, certain that her embarrassment must be obvious.

  ‘Someone followed me back from work tonight,’ he says. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘From Porton Down?’

  He looks up, fixing her in the eye for a second, and nods. Why’s he telling her this?

  ‘Maybe it was the Russians,’ she suggests, trying to disguise her interest as a joke.

  ‘It wouldn’t have been them,’ he says, taking her comment way too seriously. ‘They want me to live. This person tried to drive me off the road.’

  16

  Silas

  Silas walks across the field with a heavy heart and his head ducked low as the blades of the helicopter spin down. He’d hoped there wouldn’t be another body, but he’d feared they’d find one as soon as Noah told him about a second crop circle.

  The victim, a young woman, is lying on her side, but it’s the clothing that draws Silas’s eye. She is trussed up in a white canvas straitjacket, secured at the back by five webbing straps and buckles. The arms are crossed at the front of the body and secured with a further vertical strap to the collar. No wonder he couldn’t see her arms from the air. Another strap passes under the crotch. Her legs are bare, covered in dust and mud.

  ‘Jesus,’ Silas says, looking at the woman’s bloated face. The rooks have been busy, pecking at her eyes. He shoos away a fly. At first glance, the scene has all the hallmarks of a sexual crime.

  ‘What do you think?’ Silas asks Strover, squatting down to take a closer look at the jacket.

  ‘Poor woman,’ Strover says, shaking her head.

  Silas reaches out and touches the victim’s cheek with the back of his hand.

  ‘Cold,’ he says, turning to look at the muddied fabric of the jacket. What exactly’s happened here? In his experience – professional, not personal – straitjackets used for sexual gratification tend to be black and made of faux leather. This is definitely tough white canvas.

  Strover squats down beside him.

  ‘The medical profession stopped putting people in these years ago,’ Silas says, nodding at the jacket. ‘Magicians still use them – I once saw a video of Houdini escaping from one, suspended upside down from a crane. And they’re popular in the BDSM community.’

  They both stare at the body in silence. ‘This isn’t BDSM,’ Strover says. ‘There’s no O-ring – on the collar.’

  Silas turns to Strover, puzzled. ‘O-ring?’

  ‘For the leash,’ she says, standing up.

  Silas stands up too, feeling slightly queasy. She’s right. This is the real deal, the stuff of asylums, a crude restraint designed to prevent psychiatric patients from harming themselves or others. A legacy of a bygone era in psychiatry.

  ‘The first victim was lobotomised and the second is trussed up in a medical straitjacket,’ Silas says. ‘They’re both—’

  ‘Barbaric,’ Strover interrupts.

  Silas glances up at his colleague as she turns away. In the two years they’ve worked together, she’s proved herself remarkably resilient, untroubled by the various homicides they’ve investigated. But something about this case has gone to the core.

  ‘There’s also another code to crack,’ Silas says, looking around at the flattened wheat as Strover walks away. ‘You OK?’ he asks.

  She raises one hand, just needs a moment.

  Silas has learnt when to give Strover space. He turns back to the
body, thinking of the earlier victim. Each crime scene appears to have been staged, freighted with meaning, but it’s not an obvious case of serial killings, of a real-time murder spree. He suspects that this body, like the first one, came from a morgue and has been long dead. Bending down, Silas touches the back of his hand against her cheek again. Definitely too cold for a corpse that’s been lying in a field in summer.

  ‘Whoever commissioned Noah to make these circles is also responsible for the bodies,’ Silas says.

  ‘For killing them too?’ Strover asks.

  Silas looks up, intrigued by her tone of doubt.

  ‘Presumably,’ he says, pausing, but he doesn’t want to shut her down. ‘Maybe not?’

  Strover takes her cue. ‘What if the people who placed the body here weren’t responsible for her death?’ she asks, walking back over to Silas. ‘The way both bodies have been positioned, they seem to be part of the overall design of the crop circles. The vision. And if the lobotomy was carried out just before the circle was made – that would seem to be part of the same process too. Ditto the straitjacket.’

  ‘Unlike their earlier deaths, you mean,’ Silas says. According to Malcolm, the first victim died a month ago.

  ‘I just think we should consider that whoever commissioned the circles, and placed the victims in them, might be trying to draw attention to the manner in which they originally died, that’s all,’ Strover says.

  It’s a plausible theory. And he’s pleased that she feels confident enough to put it forward, to challenge Silas’s interpretation of events. It’s what makes them a good team. The coded patterns of the crop circles, the lobotomy and the straitjacket – they’re all signs, not causes, of death, part of the same cryptic message. More semiotics, as Strover might say. Establishing where the bodies came from should help to decode that message.

  They’re still checking the first victim against missing person records, which might throw up a match. Maybe this woman has been missing too? Hundreds of people disappear each year, some more missed than others. Conor vanished for a while, the worst six weeks of his and Mel’s lives. If this woman’s disappearance wasn’t reported, there’s little chance of identifying her.

  ‘Did you get a good photo of the pattern from the helicopter?’ Silas asks.

  Strover nods. ‘I’ve already sent it over to Cambridge.’ She doesn’t hang around. ‘And to Imperial, the chemistry professor. We’re talking in the morning.’

  ‘Tell them the body was found in a straitjacket. It’s important your boffins know all the details. There must be a connection between the symbols and what’s been done to the victims. And get CSI down here now.’

  Silas looks around at the patterns again, the hedgerow in the distance, sniffing the summer air for clues. Dizzy midges are dancing in the evening sunlight. A solitary buzzard twists and turns above them in the warm thermals. Someone would have had to park up on Chute Causeway and carry the body through two fields – maybe drag it, given the dirt on the victim’s bare limbs. He can’t see any other way to approach the field.

  He walks back over to the body. She too looks as if she’s fallen from space and is now hugging the earth’s surface for comfort, her cheek pressed against the ground, hands clutching at the flattened wheat. And then he realises that it’s not dirt that’s covering her arms but tattoos. He bends down and studies them more closely. A fine pattern of dark feathers.

  17

  Bella

  ‘You’re not tempted by the local beers, then?’ Jim asks, as Bella returns from the bar with her tomato juice and sits down opposite him on a low stool, not sure what to do with her legs. Helen used to get her to cross them twice, a trick Bella could do with worrying ease.

  ‘I don’t really drink, to be honest,’ she says, tucking them under her as best she can. ‘My nickname was Gerald at school,’ she adds, noticing that Jim’s clocked the manoeuvre.

  This time it’s his turn to stare blankly at her. ‘The tall giraffe in Peppa Pig?’ she asks, but he shakes his head and they both laugh.

  She wonders how much to tell this man whom she’s known for barely five minutes. But something about him, his open face and honest eyes, makes her want to say more than she should. She also feels a certain unspoken kinship with him. By her reckoning, they’re the only two in the pub who are under fifty. Palmer and Gerald. The odd couple.

  ‘I’ve just finished at uni,’ she says.

  ‘Drying out, then,’ he says, arpeggioing his fingers on his glass. ‘Where were you?’

  Bella hesitates, watching his fingers until they stop. She was once told that someone reveals they’ve been to Oxbridge within fifteen minutes of meeting them. She’s determined not to be that sort of person. Her time at Oxford is her secret, not a source of bragging rights.

  She takes a sip of her tomato juice.

  ‘Let me guess,’ Jim continues, sensing her hesitation, drumming his fingers again. ‘English at Oxford.’

  Bella almost chokes on her drink. Is she that easy to read?

  ‘Am I right?’ he asks, slapping his thigh as Bella puts down her glass. ‘I am right, aren’t I? I knew it.’

  ‘And you?’ she asks, but before she has time to guess, he looks at his phone buzzing on the table. His smile disappears.

  ‘I got a friend to check out the number plate – of the car that tried to drive me off the road,’ he says, reading a text. His left leg starts to bounce beneath the table. ‘Black Range Rover. Tinted windows. Asked him to find out who it belongs to.’

  ‘And?’

  Jim looks up as someone walks into the pub. Bella looks too. She’s no longer as relaxed as she was. Her head is swimming with images, of cars crashing in the night. Headlights. Headlines.

  ‘Going back to your choice of drink,’ he says, pointedly changing the subject. ‘I may be wrong, but I don’t think you’re the type who spent three years getting off their head at uni.’

  If only he knew. Her first year was the worst. ‘We haven’t even established where you were yet,’ Bella says. Why doesn’t he want to tell her about his friend’s text? Who owns the Range Rover? She decides to play for time.

  ‘OK, fair enough,’ he says. ‘Your go.’

  Jim sits back, eyes flicking across at the locals, who seem to have lost interest in him.

  ‘I’m guessing you studied a science, given you work at Porton Down,’ Bella begins. ‘Chemistry at Cambridge?’

  ‘Not bad. The chemistry bit’s right.’

  ‘Imperial?’

  Jim shakes his head.

  ‘Warwick?’ she asks.

  ‘Bingo.’

  ‘And you’ve just graduated?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ he asks.

  He’s obviously sensitive about how young he looks.

  ‘You’ve recently finished a PhD,’ she adds, hoping to flatter him by adding a few more years.

  ‘I graduated four years ago.’

  ‘OK.’ He really does look young for his age.

  ‘And you’ve been at you-know-where ever since?’ she asks, smiling.

  ‘A three-year secondment – or “deployment” – to an affiliated facility at Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, but basically yes. I’m a government scientist – high-functioning, mind – and the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down – we call it “The Lab” – is my life. For my sins. I am allowed to tell everyone that much. It’s all on LinkedIn anyway – apart from Harwell. That’s a bit more…’

  ‘Hush-hush?’ Bella offers.

  ‘Exactly. Hush-hush.’

  Jim breaks into a smile at the sound of the words, as if he’s trying on a suit for the first time and likes the cut of it.

  ‘And do you enjoy it?’ she asks.

  ‘Enjoy? It’s a pain to get to – Porton’s in the middle of nowhere – but they lay on lots of social stuff for employees. And we breed like lab rabbits as a result. There must be at least three hundred couples on site – out of a workforce of more than three thous
and. Quite the family business. And I reckon at least 20 per cent of us are on the spectrum. The Lab’s very enlightened like that – big on neurodiversity.’ He pauses, grinning. ‘If I tell you anything else I’ll have to shoot you. And I don’t want to do that. I’m rather enjoying our chat.’

  ‘Me too.’

  They look at each other, smiling awkwardly. And then she’s overcome with a sudden need to share with this stranger the real reason she’s off the booze.

  ‘I’m not drinking because…’ She pauses. ‘I’m working,’ she says, feeling uncomfortable that she hasn’t already put her cards on the table, revealed to Jim that she’s a journalist.

  ‘Nice work if you can get it,’ he says. ‘Sitting in the corner of a country pub on a Friday night. Who do you work for? The Good Pub Guide?’

  She takes a deep breath. Maybe she should tell him?

  ‘I’m a journalist,’ she says. ‘For a national newspaper.’

  Jim pauses, drink to his lips, as if he’s just tasted poison. After what seems like an age, he puts down his glass.

  ‘I should have known,’ he says.

  It’s like his body’s suffered a puncture, collapsed in on itself. He shifts in his seat, half turning away from her, his eyes looking upwards, indicating that he’s through with their chat.

  ‘It’s probably best you go now. I could lose my job,’ he adds, checking his phone again. ‘It was nothing serious on the way home – just a bit of careless driving on my part.’ His tone is cold, indifferent. ‘I’ve been very tired recently. It’s been nice meeting you.’

  The conversation is clearly over. Bella reaches down for her bag and stands up, caught off guard by a surprising wave of emotion. Her love life at Oxford was a non-starter, no memorable romances, no connections that meant as much as her friendship with Erin, but there’s something about Jim that’s touched her. The mix of confidence and vulnerability, his goofy charm and obvious intelligence. Those flattering eyes that seem to widen with wonder when he looks at her. Maybe she’s deluding herself and it’s just the heavy prescription on his glasses.