The Man on Hackpen Hill

by J. S. Monroe

  ‘How long ago was this?’ Silas asks, still despairing as he takes in the crowded scene. He doesn’t blame the doctor. He should have come straight here, met the two occupants of the Range Rover as they arrived by ambulance, but Ward wanted a quick chat to find out how the investigation was going.

  ‘About fifteen minutes ago,’ the doctor says. ‘If you’ll excuse me…’

  ‘Of course,’ Silas says, glancing at Strover, who stands back to make way for an elderly patient being pushed past in a wheelchair. ‘Did they sign anything?’

  ‘We got them both to sign the usual legal forms to say that they were leaving against medical advice and that we could no longer be held responsible for their health.’

  Forms mean signatures, which mean names. Probably false ones, but at least it’s something.

  ‘Can I see them?’ Silas asks. ‘The forms?’

  The doctor shakes his head in disbelief.

  ‘Take a look around, inspector,’ he says. ‘Does it look like I’ve got time to dig out the paperwork for a couple of people who suffered whiplash, maybe mild concussion, and some minor cuts? They weren’t even meant to be here – the ambulance should have taken them to Salisbury District.’

  ‘Why didn’t it?’ Silas asks. He’d forgotten that the hospital in Salisbury was nearer to the accident site than Swindon.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ the doctor says, exasperated. ‘And at this point I really don’t care. That patient over there’ – he gestures at an elderly woman – ‘is eighty-seven years old. She had a fall at home and has been on a trolley for thirteen hours.’

  Silas has nothing but admiration and respect for the staff here. It’s where Mel used to work as a nurse. They also looked after his father in his last days with care and love that was beyond the call of duty. But he needs to find out everything he can about the occupants of the Range Rover that crashed today. It’s no coincidence that the accident occurred so close to Porton Down. There are also reports from a local farmer that another vehicle was responsible for the incident and drove off at speed.

  ‘I appreciate that,’ Silas says. ‘Maybe we could return at a quieter time.’

  The doctor laughs. ‘Let me know when that is – I must remember to come in to work that day. If I haven’t retired by then. Or died.’ He pauses. ‘Give me your number and I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Silas says, glancing around him again. These are good people working here.

  Ten minutes later, Silas and Strover are at the entrance to the intensive care ward, waiting to see the man they found alive last night in the crop circle at Stanton St Bernard. Silas feels like a doctor on his rounds. He’s tried to visit Noah but he’s still not fully conscious. Maybe later.

  A nurse ushers them into a small family room off the main ward. Was it in here that Silas sat down with a consultant and nurse to discuss turning off his father’s life support? This room or the one next door. Those days are a bit of a blur.

  ‘Two teas,’ the nurse says, placing a couple of mugs in front of them. ‘One with, one without. Biscuits are in the tin.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Silas says, glancing at Strover and then the tin. He’s going to have a biscuit even if she isn’t. It might be his only chance of decent food today. He’d dropped off some wine and shortcake after his father had died – a thank you for the care the staff had shown him – so it’s not all one way. At least, that’s what he tells himself as he tucks into a chocolate digestive.

  ‘He’s a popular man today,’ the nurse says.

  ‘Who?’ Silas asks, flashing a look of concern at the nurse.

  The nurse nods in the direction of the ward. She knows they’re police, rather than relatives, and her manner is more gossipy than compassionate.

  ‘Bit of a medical curiosity,’ the nurse continues. ‘We’ve had them all in – consultants, surgeons, the lot of them.’

  Silas sighs with relief. In his chat with the boss, he had floated the idea of asking for an officer to stand guard at the door, in case the man became a target, but it hadn’t gone down well. Not a good use of resources. Hospitals are secure places these days, cameras everywhere.

  ‘The doctor’s finished, you can go in now,’ the nurse says, watching as a man in a white coat walks past her and down the corridor. ‘Don’t recognise half the people who work here these days,’ she adds.

  Silas tenses again. He’d clocked the doctor too. Was there something a little too rushed about him, even for a busy medic? A hint of overstretch in his stride?

  39

  Bella

  Bella sits back on the train with a sigh of relief, pleased to be out of the village and on her way up to London. Her carriage is busy but at least she’s got a seat. By the window too. For the first time she sees the canal, running parallel with the train line. She should have gone down there for a walk, enjoyed the country air, but she hasn’t had a moment. The last hour has been frantic.

  She’d left Rocky and his vivarium on the back doorstep of Jim’s house, after ringing the pub to say that she was running late for the train. She’d even remembered to leave out a pot of live locusts, after the landlord had asked about Rocky’s food. Checking the timetable, she’d chosen her moment carefully, rushing down from the house to arrive at the station just as the train was about to leave. No one saw her, as far as she knows, and she didn’t see the Range Rover or the man who had come to the door.

  She still can’t work out the message on Jim’s answerphone. According to Google, Porton Garden Aquatic and Pets is around the corner from the secret government site. Just checking to see if you’re coming in to work today. She assumes Jim visits the shop – for locusts – during his lunch break at work or before he starts his working day. That text message is still troubling her too. If you are in my house, you need to get out of there now. Forget all I said and go.

  She pulls out her phone. She hasn’t texted him back yet – she wanted to get her head around everything that’s happened – but she decides to send him a message, tell him she’s left the house and sorted Rocky. But then she overhears the conversation starting up further down the carriage and her blood runs cold.

  ‘Apparently her arms were covered in feathers,’ a woman is saying. ‘And she had a rook right behind her ear. Spooky or what.’

  ‘I wouldn’t like that,’ another woman says. ‘If I got a tattoo, I’d want a pretty little rose on my arse.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want my dead body left in a crop circle overnight, thank you very much.’

  Bella wants to be sick. The carriage starts to spin and she steadies herself against the window with a hand.

  40

  Silas

  The nurse pulls back the blue curtain and lets them stand by the man’s bed in the intensive care unit. Silas is shocked all over again by his appearance. The zombie victim’s skin is still a sickly white, as pale as pallor mortis, the waxy, telltale colour of recent death. Except that he’s alive. Head tilted back, he’s on a ventilator, a tube running into his nose, his wrist connected to a drip. The only obvious sign of life is the heart monitor behind him, a green pulse tracking across the screen. Silas is not sure why he’s here. He needs to reassure himself that the man is still of this world. And he doesn’t want last night’s image of him to be his last. The scene before him is almost worse.

  ‘There is one thing that might be helpful,’ the nurse says.

  ‘Go on,’ Silas says. He could do with some good news.

  ‘He stirred in the night,’ the nurse says, glancing down at the patient.

  ‘Stirred?’ The man looks as if he hasn’t moved for years.

  The nurse nods. ‘I came over straight away. He was trying to say something but I couldn’t hear what it was.’

  ‘He tried to speak?’ Silas asks, checking with Strover, who is equally surprised.

  ‘I leant right in close to him but I couldn’t make out what he was mumbling. Sounded French to me. So I called over Françoise – she’s from Marseilles,’ the nurs
e adds, pronouncing the town like ‘Ma says’.

  ‘Is she here?’ Silas asks, desperately hoping this isn’t going to lead to nowhere.

  ‘Her shift’s over but she thinks she knows what she heard.’

  ‘And?’ Silas asks, failing to conceal his impatience.

  ‘My French isn’t great but he might have said “folie à deux”.’

  Silas looks at Strover again. ‘Madness of two?’ she offers. That’s what he thought. Give or take.

  ‘Thanks,’ Silas says to the nurse, making a note in his phone. ‘That’s very helpful.’

  ‘I’ll leave you to it, then,’ the nurse says. ‘Au revoir,’ she adds, stepping outside the curtain.

  ‘Folie à deux,’ Silas repeats, trying not to butcher the French language any further. ‘What the hell’s that about?’

  ‘Maybe there’s a connection between the first two victims?’ Strover offers. Silas nods. He’s already told her his theory that the man lying in front of them was responsible for placing the two dead bodies in the first two crop circles.

  ‘They were both young, could have been lovers, I suppose,’ Silas says. It doesn’t sound right and they both know it.

  ‘What about the blood tests?’ Strover asks.

  ‘Should be back shortly,’ Silas replies, still mulling over the implications of folie à deux. He’s amazed that the man before them could even speak.

  ‘Think they’ll find any tetrodotoxin?’ Strover asks.

  ‘If I was a betting man, I’d put my house on it.’ As it happens, Silas has become a betting man, but Strover doesn’t need to know about his recent flutter on the horses.

  A moment later an alarm goes off on one of the monitors behind the patient.

  ‘What’s that about?’ Silas asks. An image of his father on a ventilator comes and goes. The alarm had sounded for him too.

  ‘His oxygen levels,’ Strover says, looking at the bank of monitors. ‘Dropping like a stone.’

  The nurse rushes back in, checks a reading on one of the screens and calls for assistance, an unmistakeable sense of urgency in her voice.

  ‘I must ask you to move away, please, into the corridor,’ she says.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ Silas asks, stepping back from the patient. They hadn’t been able to save his dad but his passing had been a mercy in the end.

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ she says, adjusting a dial. ‘Please, we need space.’

  Silas and Strover step further away as two other medical staff join the nurse around the bed. And then they are wheeling the patient out of the ward through swinging doors, the air filled with shouted instructions and orders.

  ‘Nurse, who was that last doctor who saw him?’ Silas says, as she rushes back into the ward to collect a clipboard.

  ‘No idea,’ she says. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I don’t think he was a doctor.’

  41

  Bella

  Erin’s dead. Bella stares ahead in the train carriage, stunned, trying to come to terms with what she’s overheard. The second victim had a rook tattoo behind her ear – just like Erin. How’s her best friend gone from being ill in hospital to her dead body being dumped in the middle of a crop circle in Wiltshire? It can’t be true, makes no sense at all.

  ‘You alright?’ a young woman sitting opposite asks. She picks up Bella’s phone and hands it to her. Bella hadn’t even realised that it had slipped off her lap onto the carriage floor.

  ‘Thank you, I’m fine,’ Bella manages to say. But she’s not. Not fucking fine at all. She can’t even begin to get her head around what’s happened to Erin. How can it be? She was meant to be seriously ill in hospital. Should Bella have done more? Demanded to see her? She bites her lip and stares out of the train window.

  ‘You sure you’re OK?’ the woman asks.

  But Bella doesn’t hear. She’s back in Oxford, Freshers’ Week. Bel! Bel! They’re fucking killing me! Help me! Erin was screaming for her, but Bella could do nothing to stop them pinning her friend down on the ground, as if she were a wild animal, forcing the drugs into her. There were too many people, off their heads. Bella tried to intervene – God, how she tried – but they pushed her away, throwing her to the floor. Another hideous initiation rite that had gone way too far. And Erin was always in the thick of it, drawn to trouble like a moth to the flame.

  ‘Hazing – it was student hazing,’ Bella says to the woman opposite. ‘You know, like in America.’

  The train carriage starts to spin and she closes her eyes. At least Erin survived, didn’t blame Bella afterwards for not doing more. She was that kind of friend. Forgiving. This time she’s dead. And it’s all Bella’s fault.

  ‘Shall I call someone for you?’ the woman asks, a look of growing concern on her face.

  ‘I’m getting off at the next station,’ Bella says, as Erin’s despairing cries start to fade. ‘Just need some fresh air.’

  ‘Let me help you, then,’ the kind woman says, watching Bella rise unsteadily to her feet. ‘We’re here now.’

  A minute later, Bella is standing alone on the platform as the train pulls away. She’d had no intention of disembarking at Hungerford but she couldn’t stay on board a moment longer. The woman had checked she was OK before getting back on the train herself. Bella sits down on a metal bench in a daze and pulls out her laptop. There’s a weak free Wi-Fi signal from the pub across the car park. Her hands shake as she searches for ‘crop circles’ and ‘feather tattoo’. Christ, please don’t let it be true. But it is.

  Mystery of naked ‘bird woman’ found dead in crop circle.

  It’s too much. She spins away from the headline and throws up. Tears stream down her face as she’s sick again. Gradually, her retches turn to sobbing gulps. She looks around. The station is empty, thank God. She starts to scroll through the text. She can’t do this. Glancing up at the sky, she takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. She needs to find out more – for Erin – and begins to read again.

  No one knows who the woman is and police are appealing for any information about her and the unusual tattoos. Erin never showed anyone the rook behind her ear, apart from Bella. It was their secret, shared late one night near the end of Bella’s final year, when Erin was in her room. She’d got the tattoo as a child. Forbidden, hidden. That evening was also the only time Erin danced, reliving the mesmerising Irish reels and jigs she used to perform as a child. Afterwards, she tried to teach Bella the treble, but her long legs got into a terrible tangle.

  ‘You need a rook behind your ear, you feckin’ skinny malink,’ Erin had joked. ‘It calls out the moves – one, two, three! One, two, three!’

  Bella continues with the article, blinking away the tears, trying to focus. She can’t believe what she’s reading. The police suspect that Erin was murdered, possibly a victim of a sex game that went wrong. Her body was found naked in a straitjacket. Bella shakes her head, banishing the image. Erin wasn’t into that sort of stuff, not as far as Bella knew. At the end of the article, she recognises the name of the Swindon CID detective who is quoted. DI Silas Hart – the man who came to Jim’s house. Checking the number that’s given at the end of the story, Bella dials it and waits.

  ‘Hello?’ she says, glancing up and down the platform. She takes a deep breath, trying to stop the sobs. ‘Is that Crimestoppers?’

  ‘Yes it is, how can we help?’ says a woman’s voice. She sounds calm, reassuring, but Bella is still nervous.

  ‘I know who the crop circle woman is,’ she begins, sniffing, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. ‘The one whose arms are covered in feather tattoos. In Wiltshire. She’s a friend of mine.’ Bella starts to sob again. ‘My best friend.’

  ‘OK,’ the voice at the other end says. ‘I’m so sorry to hear that you’ve lost someone close to you. Would you like to give me her name?’

  ‘Erin, she’s called Erin,’ Bella says, looking around her again.

  ‘Do you have a surname?’

  Bella is about to c
ontinue when she hears Jim’s words ringing in her ear. Do not trust the police if they get in touch again, do you understand? Crimestoppers is not the police. It’s an independent charity, isn’t it?

  ‘Hello? Are you still there, caller?’ the woman asks.

  Bella moves the phone away from her ear and stares at it, listening to the voice, its gentle but repeated requests for her to continue.

  Remember, the police are not your friend.

  She ends the call and rips out her phone battery as if she’s gutting a fish.

  42

  Silas

  ‘I want the footage from every bloody camera in this place,’ Silas says, storming into the office of the director of estates at the Great Western. Strover is behind him, hurrying to keep up with her boss. He has just asked for a full lockdown of the hospital and called for as much uniform backup as nearby Gablecross can muster. The helicopter should also be overhead within the next few minutes.

  The ‘zombie’ patient, their main suspect for the crop circle killings, died shortly after going into cardiac arrest and Silas is convinced that the ‘doctor’ they saw walking out of the intensive care unit was responsible. Silas should have acted on his original suspicions. After the patient’s condition had started to deteriorate, he had rushed out of ICU with Strover in an effort to find the fake doctor, but their search had proved fruitless in the hospital’s rabbit warren of corridors.

  The director is now doing all he can to reassure Silas as he paces around his small office, reminding him that the hospital has always worked closely with Wiltshire Police. It also has a team of security guards on duty 24/7 and strong surveillance systems across the estate.