The Man on Hackpen Hill Read online

  She pulls out her phone and calls Jim but it goes straight to voicemail.

  ‘Hi, it’s me,’ she says. ‘Hope you’re alright and it went OK with the police. Call me when you get this and I can pop around again if you like. Just seen the detectives drive away.’

  She daren’t say any more in case her phone’s being bugged. Jim’s paranoia is contagious. If only he’d elaborate, at least give her a clue about Porton Down and its possible connection with the crop circles.

  She doesn’t want to worry her mum so instead she tries Helen in Australia. This could be her big break in journalism and she’d like to share it with her older sister. It’s now morning in Sydney and Helen should be at home, but the call also goes to voicemail.

  ‘Hey, big sis, it’s me.’ Bella pauses, fighting back a second wave of tears. She’s always called her ‘big sis’, even though Bella’s been taller than Helen for as long as she can remember. ‘Ring me when you get this. Not sure if you’ve seen the news from here, but a body’s been found in a crop circle in Wiltshire. It’s a mystery but your intrepid reporter is on the case – I think I know who’s behind it. Dad would be proud, I hope. It’s my chance, Helen. A potential splash. I just need to persuade my main source to tell me more.’

  28

  Silas

  ‘Well, that wasn’t what I was expecting,’ Silas says, as he drives out of the village with Strover. ‘Sounds like Jim was followed by the Range Rover – on his way home from his day job at Porton Down.’

  ‘Porton Down?’ Strover asks, surprised. ‘Bella never mentioned that.’

  ‘It’s all we need,’ Silas says. ‘A chemical analyst, apparently,’ he continues. ‘And an amateur mathematician.’

  ‘Interesting combination,’ Strover says, pausing. ‘I think she quite fancies him actually. Can’t say I blame her.’

  ‘Really?’ Silas gives her a sideways glance, thinking back to the oddball he’s just interviewed.

  ‘Like a young Jeff Goldblum,’ Strover says, looking out of the passenger window.

  Silas shakes his head. No accounting for taste.

  ‘Either that or she was just protecting her source,’ Strover continues.

  ‘What if he’s a croppie, worked with Noah in some way?’ Silas asks.

  ‘You think he’s a suspect?’ Strover looks at Silas with surprise. ‘I thought we were interviewing them about possible domestic abuse.’

  ‘We were,’ Silas says, pausing. ‘But something wasn’t right about him.’

  He thinks again about the book on Jim’s floor.

  ‘He had an unhealthy interest in mathematical crop circles – formulas. Which is too much of a coincidence, don’t you think, given he was followed by the same Range Rover that visited Noah’s house? And he’s certain the first circle contains the formula for an incapacitating chemical warfare agent called BZ. Also known as Agent 15.’

  ‘My Cambridge mathematician would have picked that up,’ Strover says, but she makes a note of BZ and Agent 15 and underlines them both in her pad.

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ Silas says, backing off. ‘Jim seemed so bloody paranoid, worried that he might lose his job because he’d met a journalist in the pub.’

  ‘Is that such a crime?’ Strover asks.

  ‘To be fair, it didn’t exactly do David Kelly much good.’

  ‘David who?’ Strover asks.

  ‘A scientist who used to work at Porton Down,’ he says. ‘Before your time. He made the mistake of speaking to a journalist about the sexed-up dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Two months later, Kelly was found dead on a hillside in Oxfordshire.’

  ‘You going to call this incident in to Control then?’ Strover asks.

  ‘I should flag it up with the MOD Police at Porton,’ he says, ‘in case Jim doesn’t report it himself, but I’m going to leave it for a while. It might buy us some time with Ward. I don’t want him all over this, telling us what we can and can’t investigate.’

  It’s a risk and Silas can tell from the silence that Strover’s not happy with his decision. She’s still early in her career, playing by the rules. They drive on through the darkness towards Swindon, home for both of them. Strover lives in a terraced house close to the train station. He and Mel have moved out to Blunsdon, a quiet village that looks north to the Cotswolds and offers the promise of escape from Swindon.

  ‘So what do you reckon the connection is between our apparently “handsome” government scientist and the Range Rover?’ Silas asks, still baffled by Jim’s attractiveness to women. He enjoys his time in the car with Strover, the chance to share his policing experience, the way she keeps him young, in touch. It’s why they’re a good team, the envy of the station.

  Silas’s phone rings before Strover can answer. It’s the Control Room with news he doesn’t want to hear at any time, let alone at this hour of the night.

  ‘Sir, we’re getting reports of a third body found in a crop circle.’

  29

  Bella

  Bella stands outside Jim’s house and knocks on the door, moving back to look up at the landing window. The curtain’s closed but there’s a light on inside. She can also hear a piano being played. Jim hasn’t returned her calls and she wants to talk to him about the police interview, how much he told them. Did they turn up tonight because he’d met a journalist in the pub and they thought he was leaking a story? If that was the case, surely Strover would have asked Bella more questions about her evening with Jim, his work. Her work.

  She knocks again but there’s no response. Jim’s piano is upstairs. She saw it when she came to the house earlier. He won’t hear her if it’s him playing. She stops to listen. A classical piece, formal, ordered. Glancing around her, she walks down the side of the house to the back garden. The light is on in Jim’s bedroom, a net curtain hanging across the closed window. She walks further away from the house to get a better view, picking her way carefully through a tidy rockery. Everything is in its place, neat patterns of brick paving and circular flower beds.

  If she stands on tiptoe, she can see Jim’s silhouette at the piano. He’s playing with controlled passion, back ramrod straight, hands moving fast. She pulls out her mobile and tries him again. Voicemail. He must have turned off his phone. Should she try to throw a stone up at the window? He was jumpy earlier, nervous. It might alarm him too much. Instead, she watches him play, listening to the beautiful music drift out into the summer night. Jim seems so rational, systematic – it must be the scientist in him – but there’s an artist’s passion about him too. He’s also calm, reassuring company, until something slips and he’s on edge like a wild animal: wide-eyed, alert.

  After five minutes, Bella begins to feel cold. She should head back to her room, try Helen again. A deer barks in the woods behind her, a deep, guttural sound. There are no cars on the road and the village is still. Too still.

  Jim stops playing and the silence is almost deafening. It’s hard to see him clearly through the net curtain, but she can make out his profile, standing now. What’s he doing? She blinks, barely believing what she’s just seen. Jim seemed to walk forward and hit his head against the bedroom wall, stumbling backwards from the impact. Did that really just happen? She looks up again, watching as he walks towards the wall for a second time and smacks his head into it, the blow so hard he falls over.

  Bella turns away, sickened by the sight, but she can’t help but look back up at the window again. Jim’s up on his feet, approaching the wall for a third time.

  ‘Jim!’ she calls out into the night sky. ‘Please, it’s me, Bella.’ But Jim doesn’t hear her. Somewhere a sash window slides open. She braces herself for abuse from a neighbour, but there’s only silence. Jim approaches the wall for a fourth time, moving like a malfunctioning automaton. She can’t bear to watch any more and slumps down onto an ornate wrought-iron bench, holding her head in her hands.

  Erin used to bang her head like that at college, when she was really out of it. Over and over un
til the porters came. Bella begged her to stop but she would never listen, too high on whatever she’d taken that day. She’ll text Erin when she gets back to her room, try to cheer her up – assuming she is at least receiving her texts and voicemail messages. Remind her friend of the time they summoned a porter to Erin’s room on the pretext that she had an intruder. As soon as he arrived, Erin slipped out the door and they managed to shut him inside.

  It was the first bad thing that Bella was involved in at college. They stood outside for ten minutes, giggling as they listened to him knocking on the door, politely at first and then more urgently. He was a nasty piece of work, cruel to all the students. Bella let him out in the end – Erin would have thrown away the key. Silly high jinks.

  Bella glances up at the window to see Jim walking past as if nothing has happened. Did she imagine the whole thing? She looks around, soothed by the fragrance of philadelphus behind the bench. Their garden in Mombasa was full of scented flowers: bougainvillea, frangipani and orange jessamine. Her mum used to get her and Helen to draw them and write their names underneath. She misses Helen so much. Erin too. Why can’t she see her friend?

  She turns to walk back to the pub. Maybe Jim will answer his phone now that he’s finished playing the piano. And stopped banging his head against the wall. What was that about? In the distance, a roosting bird flies up into the night sky, angry and incongruous, its dark body silhouetted in the moonlight.

  30

  Silas

  Thirty minutes after the call from the Control Room, Silas walks up a field outside Stanton St Bernard with Strover, holding an old station flashlight that he keeps in the car. It belonged to his dad, who was also in the force. Ahead of him is a single uniform. It might be the fading light from the old torch, or the cold that’s descending on the summer night, but the young officer looks like he’s seen a ghost.

  ‘You alright?’ Silas asks, glancing at the flattened wheat behind him.

  ‘Not really, sir,’ the officer says.

  Silas flashes the torch across the field, fixing the beam on a figure slumped on the ground. This body hasn’t been carefully placed, like the others. The person has clearly been involved in a struggle of some sort, legs splayed at an awkward angle, arms flung wide.

  ‘Who found it?’ Silas asks, walking towards the body.

  ‘Dog walker,’ the officer says. ‘My colleague took her back to the station.’

  And left him here on his own, the poor sod. He looks young enough to be at school.

  Strover hangs back, chatting to the officer as Silas approaches the body. Above him, a spill of stars illuminates the big Wiltshire sky.

  ‘Sir,’ Strover calls out, but Silas ignores her, tries to ignore a rising fear in his stomach.

  The body is lying on its back, head turned away from him. He keeps the flashlight trained on the figure as he moves around and squats down to see the face. The victim is male and he’s wearing dark trousers and a loose T-shirt.

  ‘Sir,’ Strover calls out with more urgency.

  Strover should know better than to disturb him when he’s inspecting a corpse. Silas shines the light on the body’s ashen face and starts back in shock. Part of one cheek has been chewed away, revealing an upper row of teeth. A deer maybe. Or a fox. He’s used to dead, violated bodies, shouldn’t be feeling the coldness that’s crept up his spine like a fast-rising tide, but something is different. What is it, apart from the flesh wound? He’s much older than the other two victims, a similar age to Silas, and the dead eyes are wide open, staring ahead with an empty finality that he’s seen in the deceased too many times before. And then he realises. There’s a pulse at the man’s neck, the grey skin twitching faintly.

  ‘Sir,’ Strover calls out again. ‘The victim’s still alive.’

  Silas stands up and backs away, the light of his torch still on the man’s eyes. Jesus Christ. He looks around at the flattened wheat, which has been ruffed up in several places near the body. What the hell’s happened here? The other scenes were disturbing but they were places of calm too. Of final rest. He forces himself to walk back over and kneel down beside the body again. Just to be sure, he puts his hand on the victim’s neck, looking at the open wound, the congealed blood. The pulse is slow but steady.

  ‘Can you hear me?’ he asks, leaning down to speak in the man’s ear. ‘My name’s DI Silas Hart. Swindon CID.’

  The man stares ahead, his face expressionless. Is he in a coma? On spice, perhaps? The synthetic marijuana that’s become so prevalent in the UK can induce a similarly catatonic state.

  ‘Blink if you can hear me,’ Silas says, watching for a reaction. Nothing.

  ‘An ambulance is on its way,’ Strover says, now at his side.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like this,’ Silas says, but Strover has turned away. She too is struggling to cope.

  Silas reaches out to touch the man’s forehead with the back of his fingers. Cold as ice. The wound is shocking but it’s the man’s eyes that are troubling him. A wide-open look of fright, frozen in time. What did he see? Can this man really be alive? The neck is still pulsing, a distant echo of life. He must be close to dying of hypothermia. Silas takes off his jacket and lays it across the man’s torso, checking his legs and arms in case there is any blood or injury. And then he notices a gash on his left arm. It’s not on the underside, but on the back of the forearm, a deep angry slash of a wound. Fresh too but maybe not as recent as the cheek wound.

  Silas doesn’t believe in a God but as he rises unsteadily to his feet, he offers up a quiet prayer for this man’s soul, if it hasn’t left the body already. Noah had raised two fingers. He must have meant two more crop circles. At least there are no more. It’s the only consolation as he joins Strover and talks to the officer, who still looks like he’s going to pass out. In the distance, the sound of a solitary ambulance driving up through the moonlit vale.

  31

  Jim

  Jim has tidied up the mess in his house, practised the piano, made himself a hot chocolate and fed his pets, but he still can’t sleep. Not after what’s happened tonight. First the discovery of the crop circle and then the visit from DI Hart. His head’s sore too after the intruder. The detective seemed to have no knowledge of the Range Rover that had followed him back from work, but it was too much of a coincidence: him just turning up at the house with his female colleague like that.

  Maybe they’d been following Bella, knew that she was going to approach him in the pub. A part of him thinks the encounter might have been a set-up, a classic spy sting, to see if he would tell all about Porton. In which case, Bella is also in on it and can’t be trusted either. She’s certainly attractive enough to be a honeypot, as they were once quaintly known. The Russians call them swallows – intelligent women who use their beauty to encourage betrayal.

  She’s rung a few times but he’s let the calls go to voicemail while he makes up his mind about her. It was good to meet someone again but he doesn’t trust himself, the speed of their blossoming friendship. The last time he went out with anyone was at Warwick, in his final year, and she broke his heart.

  He turns on his bedside light, reaches across for his laptop and searches again for news of the crop circle. An article on what the coded symbols might mean catches his eye and he pulls up an aerial photo, studying the distinctive hexagonal patterns and the adjoining binary wheel. Various theories have been put forward by armchair pundits around the world but they’ve all missed what they depict: BZ.

  Jim hasn’t tried to decipher the circular pattern properly. It’s been divided into cake slices of eight units – each one depicted by a small patch of flattened or standing wheat. Which suggests eight-bit binary sequences that he’s sure will convert into ASCII-generated text – and the chemical formula for BZ.

  As for the adjacent collection of hexagons and other shapes, they clearly represent its molecular structure. Two in particular – big flattened areas of wheat with double-lined borders along several sides – lo
ok suspiciously like benzene rings. It could be something else, of course, but he’s got the same feeling of confidence that saw him through his finals at uni. Even Dad was chuffed with his first, one of the highest the university’s ever awarded. Porton Down was impressed too – offered him a job on the spot.

  He looks again at the adjoining circle and its binary sequence. Someone out there is sending him a message, encouraging him in his mission to expose the truth about Porton Down. He thinks of all the classified information he’s managed to access since being transferred back from Harwell at the end of last year. BZ, also known as ‘buzz’ as well as Agent 15, was originally developed as an ulcer therapy but it proved unsuitable. The smallest dose could induce a severe psychological storm, total mental mayhem, which appealed to the American military, who were looking for incapacitating agents, or ‘humane’ weapons, in the 1960s that could disorientate rather than kill the enemy. After being used against the Vietcong in the Vietnam war, BZ was allegedly stockpiled by Saddam Hussein in Iraq and, according to Syrian rebels, deployed by the Assad government against them in the siege of Homs. More controversially, the Russians claimed that BZ, rather than novichok, was used to attack the Skripals in Salisbury.

  The powerful hallucinogen or ‘zombie gas’, as it’s been dubbed, is still stored at Porton Down, officially for defensive rather than offensive purposes, but Jim knows better. He tilts the screen of his laptop, admiring the strange symmetry of the hexagons, their relationship to each other. Downstairs his dad’s grandfather clock strikes one. It’s late. He needs to sleep. But he can’t resist a quick search on Twitter. No one appears to have made the connection with BZ yet. It was a mistake to have told DI Hart earlier. Too much of a risk. He hasn’t even told Bella.