The Man on Hackpen Hill

by J. S. Monroe

  Earlier, she’d looked Jim up on LinkedIn, where it says he’s been employed as a chemical analyst with the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory – The Lab – for the past four years. His degree in chemistry at Warwick is also included, but there’s no mention of any secondment to Harwell Science and Innovation Campus. It sounds like his sort of place, though. Once home to the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, it discovered one of the world’s highest prime numbers in the 1990s. And it currently houses the UK’s national ‘synchrotron’, the Diamond Light Source building that scientists use to study anything from viruses and vaccines to jet engines and fossils.

  Bella’s phone rings beside her bed. She doesn’t recognise the number.

  ‘It’s me,’ Jim says. His voice is familiar but quiet, as if he doesn’t want to be overheard.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Bella asks, relieved that he’s finally rung her. He hadn’t given her his number earlier in return.

  ‘Not really.’

  She sits up, her chest tightening. ‘What’s wrong?’

  They should be having this conversation face to face, not on the phone.

  ‘I’m upstairs, in my bedroom,’ Jim says. ‘I was about to go to sleep when I heard someone moving around downstairs.’

  Is he drunk? Maybe there was vodka in his ginger beer and he was drinking a Moscow mule, Helen’s favourite cocktail. He sounds sober, but what does she know? She’s only just met him.

  ‘Do you live alone?’ she asks.

  ‘Apart from my cat, who’s with me on the bed. She never comes upstairs but must have heard something. Cats sense danger earlier than humans.’

  She can imagine Jim with a cat, stroking it with his long fingers.

  ‘Is the Range Rover still there?’ His voice is a whisper now. ‘In the car park?’

  ‘I’ll check,’ she says, getting out of bed. ‘It was there a minute ago.’

  Bella blanches as she looks down onto the empty space.

  ‘It’s gone,’ she says. ‘Must have just left.’

  Jim doesn’t say anything for a while. ‘If they take me away, you’ve got to write about this. Not me, but the truth.’

  ‘What truth?’ Bella asks, her heart racing now. ‘You haven’t told me.’

  He doesn’t answer immediately. ‘It wasn’t a coincidence you turned up in the pub today. The same day that the crop circle appeared. Someone meant us to meet.’

  ‘Who?’ Bella asks, thinking again about the typed letter, the PS urging her to talk to the man in the corner of the pub. The lurid reports of the dead body found in the field.

  ‘There are some good people at The Lab but bad things are happening there right now. In the country at large. Don’t bother going to the police. They are in on this too.’

  In on what? It’s all so frustrating. Too many questions, not enough answers. The line has gone quiet. ‘Jim?’ she asks. ‘You still there?’

  She can hear his breathing, fast and shallow.

  ‘There’s definitely someone in the house,’ he whispers.

  ‘Where are you? I’ll walk round.’ She senses time is running out.

  ‘Don’t – for your own safety. They’ll come after you too.’

  Who? The people in the Range Rover? MI5? ‘Jim, please, tell me what’s going on here. You’re scaring the crap out of me.’

  A noise on the line and then it drops.

  24

  Silas

  Silas and Strover stand still in the car park, straining to listen for another noise. The cry of pain was unmistakable but there’s only silence now. As they start to head over to where the original sound came from, a man emerges from the pub. Another familiar local. He lights a cigarette but Silas knows he hasn’t just come out for a smoke. It’s instinct more than anything, the way the man is trying not to look at Silas.

  ‘Got a light?’ Silas says, nodding at Strover as he walks across to the man. Silas has quit but he keeps a packet on him for emergencies.

  The man offers him his lighter and they stand together, smoking. Strover heads back to the car. She knows Silas’s game.

  Silas rides the silence, waiting for the man to speak. When he does, his Wiltshire accent is broad and measured.

  ‘It was parked up over there,’ he says, gesturing towards Strover. ‘Where your lady assistant is.’

  ‘The Range Rover?’

  The man nods. A moment later, a young woman runs down the fire escape staircase at the back of the pub and crosses the street.

  ‘She’s in a hurry,’ the man says. Silas watches her disappear. Strover has clocked the woman too. ‘So was the Range Rover. Left here ten minutes ago in a rush. I was having a ciggie. Nearly ran me over! But I took its number plate. Just in case, like.’

  The man passes him a crumpled bar receipt with the number scribbled on the back of it.

  ‘Thanks,’ Silas says, pleased to see it begins with RO. ‘Any idea where it went?’

  ‘Straight up the hill, towards Marlborough way,’ the man says.

  Another pause. The conversation could go in one of two directions. More useful titbits or time-wasting.

  ‘Something else,’ the man says. ‘That body being found in the crop circle.’

  Silas nods. The man wants information in return, some gossip to take back to the bar, but Silas is in no mood to trade. News of the second body found tonight would send shock waves through the pub but its discovery has yet to be announced. No doubt leaks will soon start to appear on social media. It’s become a problem in the force. He walks over to Strover, leaving the man to slink back into the pub.

  ‘The Range Rover was here, left ten minutes ago,’ he says, passing Strover the receipt as he opens up their car.

  ‘I think we should take a look across the street,’ Strover says, hesitating at the passenger door.

  Silas pauses. It’s a distraction from their investigation but he knows she’s right.

  25

  Bella

  Bella runs through the pub’s archway and out onto the high street. No house is directly opposite the pub but several are set back, up the hill on the left. She crosses the road and runs down the drive of the first house. The lights are all off and she stops and listens. Silence. Doubling back, she runs down the drive of the second house, trying to get more air into her tight lungs. Should she ring the police, despite Jim telling her not to? They can’t be in on it too. He’s just being paranoid, ridiculous.

  Someone meant us to meet.

  Bella slows as she approaches what she assumes is Jim’s house. Ahead of her is a small red-brick cottage, surrounded by a well-tended garden, and the front door is ajar. A cat greets her with a plaintive miaow as she pushes it open. She should definitely call the police. But a voice inside her – her dad’s? – tells her to take a look around first and then make the call.

  She gasps as she walks into the small kitchen. The table has been upended, the cupboard doors opened. She peers into the empty sitting room – a belly-flopped TV on the floor, a sofa on its side – and walks upstairs, barely able to breathe. Would MI5 really do all this? Are they still here? She looks around her. A closed door on the left with a light showing under it, bathroom straight ahead and a small bedroom to the right.

  ‘Jim?’ she calls out, in case she’s got this all wrong. ‘Jim? You still here?’

  She pushes open the door on the left. It’s like a bomb has gone off. The mattress is on the floor, ripped down the middle; the drawers of a wardrobe are open, clothes hanging out like entrails. No sign of Jim. She walks around, careful not to disturb anything. A desk in the corner has been ransacked. The only things untouched seem to be an upright piano in one corner and a glass cabinet in the other. It’s full of vegetation and what looks like a green lizard of some kind, staring at her. She didn’t have Jim down as a pianist, or a reptile person.

  She should go back to the pub but instead she returns to the landing and peers into the bathroom, where a cupboard beside the mirror has been wrenched off the wall, its
contents littered across the floor.

  ‘Bella?’

  She spins round. Jim is standing behind her, his face covered in blood, shirt ripped.

  ‘Jesus, Jim! What happened? Are you OK?’

  The downstairs doorbell rings. They both freeze. Jim puts a finger to his bloodied lips, signalling for her to be quiet. The bell rings again.

  ‘We should answer it,’ Bella whispers, still shocked by the sight of Jim. ‘Your front door’s open anyway.’

  ‘Hello?’ a male voice calls from downstairs. ‘Anybody home? This is the police. DI Silas Hart, Wiltshire CID.’

  ‘Do not tell them anything,’ Jim whispers, eyes dancing. ‘I’m fine, it’s a superficial injury.’

  ‘OK,’ Bella says.

  The cut on his forehead looks far from superficial. And why can’t she tell the police what’s happened? Jim would get on well with Erin. She had a similar distrust of authority, regaling Bella with stories of being chased through the back streets of Dublin by the Gardaí.

  ‘Please,’ Jim says, still whispering. ‘Leave this one to me.’

  26

  Silas

  Silas’s first thought, as the bloodstained man appears at the top of the stairs, is that they were right to investigate. The tall young woman at his side seems unharmed, but the house has been turned upside down.

  Two minutes later, after Strover has accompanied Bella, the woman, back across to her room at the Slaughtered Lamb, Silas sits down in the kitchen to talk to the man: Jim Matthews, aged twenty-five. Silas hasn’t called the case in to the Control Room yet. The timing of the incident, so soon after the sighting of the Range Rover in the village, is bothering him.

  ‘Are you here because of Bella?’ Jim asks.

  ‘Should I be?’ Silas says, surprised by the question. Jim’s cleaned up the cut on his forehead, revealing what looks like scarring from a previous injury.

  ‘Because she’s a journalist?’ Jim adds, as if he should know. Silas doesn’t like his tone.

  ‘And?’ Silas asks. It’s sounding less like a domestic by the minute.

  ‘You do know where I work?’ Jim says, seemingly put out that Silas doesn’t.

  ‘It seems as if I should,’ Silas says, checking his notepad. ‘All I have is your name and age.’

  ‘How come you’re here then?’ Jim asks.

  ‘We heard a noise,’ Silas says, looking around at the small kitchen, the pots and pans on the floor, the open cupboards. ‘Someone crying out in pain.’

  Something’s not right. It reminds him of the ransacked scene they found in Noah’s house, but it feels different, almost as if it’s a film set.

  ‘And you just happened to be passing?’ Jim asks.

  ‘That’s right,’ Silas says.

  Jim smirks. Why’s he so bloody suspicious of him? Most people around here complain there are not enough police in the countryside.

  ‘Tell us about this woman, then,’ Silas continues, checking his notebook again. ‘Bella. The journalist.’

  ‘She approached me in the pub tonight. Everything I told her was OSINT.’

  Silas looks up, intrigued by Jim’s choice of words. ‘You better tell me where you do work,’ he says. ‘OSINT’ is the language of spooks and means open source intelligence – unclassified information that can be found in the public domain.

  Jim looks around the room, seeming to enjoy the suspense before he turns back to Silas. ‘Porton Down – I’m a government scientist. Chemical analyst by day, amateur mathematician by night.’

  Silas’s expression remains unchanged, but alarm bells are already ringing. Not because of any potential breaches of national security but because of Ward’s earlier words, warning him to tread carefully with Porton Down. If Jim’s in some way involved with the crop circles, Silas’s life has just got a whole lot more complicated. A nightmare of paperwork and Official Secrets Act protocols, Ward breathing down his neck at every turn, liaising with the funny brigade at MI5. His eye is caught by a book on the floor. Oh Christ.

  ‘We just had a drink,’ Jim continues. ‘Then she told me she was a journalist. I was pretty shocked – we’re warned regularly to watch out for approaches from the media.’

  ‘But you still invited her back here?’ Silas asks, mustering a tone of surprise. He glances again at the book.

  Jim shakes his head. ‘She was staying at the pub. I called her when…’

  Jim pauses, flustered for the first time in their chat.

  ‘When what?’ Silas asks.

  ‘When I heard someone in the house. She kindly came over to help. I asked her not to but she did and found me like this. She’s innocent. I’ve told her nothing of consequence about the work I do at Porton.’

  Silas sits back. What’s really going on here?

  ‘We happened to be in the village because we were looking for a car – a Range Rover,’ he says. ‘Don’t suppose you saw it this evening?’

  ‘I didn’t, but Bella did. In the pub car park. We’d gone our separate ways – after she’d told me she was a journalist – and then she returned, said there was a Range Rover outside. She wanted to warn me.’

  ‘Warn you?’

  Jim nods. ‘I’d told her that it had nearly driven me off the road earlier, on my way home from work. It’d been on my tail for a while.’

  ‘And you think the same people were responsible for what happened here?’ Silas asks, unable to disguise his scepticism.

  ‘What I do at Porton is sensitive work, inspector. I heard someone in my house tonight. Just as I was going to sleep. It sounded like they were searching for something. When I went downstairs to investigate, they must have hit me on the head. I’ll report the incident tomorrow to my team leader, when I get into work. Nothing’s been stolen. I never bring back classified documents from the office anyway. Some do, not me. I’ll also declare that I was approached by a journalist. No doubt security and the press office will be informed.’

  Silas has no interest in the journalist, hasn’t got time. He needs to focus on a possible link with the Range Rover and the crop circle victims. There are too many echoes of what happened to Noah.

  ‘One last question.’ Silas picks up the book from the floor. The glossy cover is an aerial shot of a circular geometric pattern in a field of golden wheat. This time it’s his turn for a dramatic pause. ‘What’s your interest in crop circles?’

  Silas scrutinises Jim for a telltale reaction as he hands him the book, but he seems unfazed by the question. ‘I enjoy the mathematical ones,’ Jim says, flicking through the glossy pages.

  ‘Like Euler’s Identity?’ Silas offers.

  ‘You know it?’ Jim is more delighted than surprised, a sudden childish smile lighting up his face.

  ‘The crop circle that depicted it had an exquisite beauty,’ Silas says, bluffing. He’s out of his depth and should stop. Right now. ‘So I’m told.’

  ‘Like the equation itself,’ Jim enthuses. ‘In technical terms, it shows a deep relationship between the trigonometric and complex exponential function.’

  Silas nods but he hasn’t a clue what Jim’s on about. ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ he says, pulling out a police drone photo of the first crop circle killing. Happy to be on more familiar territory, he hands the photo over to Jim. ‘And what do you think that is?’ he asks, again scrutinising Jim for a reaction. ‘Not quite so beautiful.’

  It’s a while before he answers. ‘Why are you showing me this?’ he asks, looking up at Silas.

  ‘You’re a scientist. I thought you might know what it means.’

  Again, Jim takes his time before he replies. ‘Isn’t it obvious?’

  Silas looks up. Jim’s tone is more baffled than patronising, as if he genuinely can’t understand why Silas doesn’t know what the crop circle means. Silas takes the photo and pretends to give it a second look, but he’s desperate to know more. ‘Not to me, it isn’t.’

  ‘The binary wheel is an encoded chemical formula,’ Jim says, hesitating.
‘And the hexagons – that’s its molecular structure.’

  ‘Structure of what, exactly?’ Silas prompts.

  ‘3-Quinuclidinyl benzilate, otherwise known as BZ or Agent 15, an incapacitating chemical warfare agent stored in the vaults of Porton Down.’

  27

  Bella

  ‘Thanks for your time,’ DI Strover says, standing at the door of Bella’s room in the Slaughtered Lamb.

  ‘No worries,’ Bella says. The detective has been gentle with her, once she’d established that Bella wasn’t responsible for Jim’s injuries.

  They trade farewell smiles, but Strover lingers at the door.

  ‘Sure you’re OK?’ she asks.

  ‘I’ve got a friend,’ Bella says, blinking back hot tears, ‘Erin. Her dad was beaten up by her mum.’

  ‘It does happen,’ Strover says.

  ‘She was very young at the time,’ Bella says, more together now.

  ‘Your friend?’

  Bella nods, turning away. ‘Six, I think.’

  ‘You’ve got my number if anything else comes up,’ Strover says. ‘Look after yourself.’

  Bella smiles but as soon as the detective has gone, she sits down on the edge of the bed and the tears flow freely. It’s been a crazy few hours, culminating in the sight of Jim appearing on the landing of his house, covered in blood. She hopes he’s OK. As Strover led her away, Jim gave her a reassuring smile from the kitchen sink. Hart was less friendly, his eyes full of accusation as she left the house. Did he really suspect her of attacking Jim?

  Bella gets up from the bed and looks down on the almost deserted car park. Strover and Hart appear to her left, walking across to their unmarked vehicle in the corner. Strover glances up at her room and a sudden chill runs through Bella. She turns away from the window. The only other time she’s been interviewed by the police was pre-Oxford, another life.

  She wants to go around to Jim’s house and see how he is, compare notes about their interviews, reassure him that she didn’t say too much to the detective. After she’d realised that Bella was an innocent party, Strover seemed more interested in the Range Rover, kept asking about its appearance in the pub car park, why she’d warned Jim. Bella didn’t reveal that she knew he worked at Porton Down, or that he thought MI5 was following him. She didn’t want to get him in trouble – or do anything that might jeopardise a big story.