The Man on Hackpen Hill

by J. S. Monroe

  She’s about to return downstairs when a thought slips into her mind and the room seems to darken, as if the day has momentarily lost power. Taking a piece of A4 paper out of her drawer, she inserts it into the typewriter, scrolling the page into position. Another memory: the way he let her open a new ream of paper, the fresh smell of vanilla. She starts to type, slowly, with two accusatory fingers.

  PS Make sure you ‘overhear’ the man on his own in the corner.

  She pulls out the original letter from her bag and holds it next to the typewriter, her hand shaking. The font is identical.

  50

  Silas

  ‘I’ve been doing some research into folie à deux,’ Strover says to Silas, as they wait for the secure Zoom meeting to start. They are still in the major incident mobile command vehicle outside the hospital, which remains in lockdown. Silas can hear the police helicopter overhead, part of the net they’ve thrown across the site in an attempt to find the fake doctor.

  ‘Anything interesting?’ Silas asks, half turned away from his computer’s camera, as if he’s shy. The Zoom meeting is not great timing. He also doesn’t like to see himself on screen. A reminder of how much weight he still needs to lose. Strover’s suggested that he turns off his camera and mic and renames himself as ‘Reconnecting’ when Zoom meetings go on too long and he wants to leave.

  ‘Literally, folie à deux means a shared psychotic disorder or delusion,’ she says. ‘“Madness for two”, or “double insanity”. Although you can get folie à trois. Sometimes more. There was a case a few years ago in India where eleven members of the same family took their own lives. Delhi police suspected it was a case of folie à famille.’

  ‘And how does that relate to our crop circle victims?’ Silas asks, still no wiser why the zombie patient had whispered ‘folie à deux’ in the night.

  Before Strover can answer, two academics appear on his screen, popping up one after the other in quick succession. The female professor of mathematics from Cambridge, and a male chemistry professor from Imperial College, London.

  Silas switches to gallery view and for a second, as he looks at the grid of images, he thinks he’s starring in an episode of University Challenge. Except that he wouldn’t be on the programme, having never been to university. After some cursory pleasantries, Silas cuts to the chase and asks for an update – ‘in simple, layman’s terms, please.’

  ‘We have two things going on here,’ the professor of chemistry says, sharing an image of the first crop circle, at Hackpen Hill, on the screen. The professor is balding, in his late forties at a guess, with a wry, world-weary tone of voice.

  ‘Geometric patterns on the right and a spiralling binary sequence to the left. I’ll concern myself with the former and allow my colleague to expand on the binary. From what we can tell, the two hexagons and surrounding lines would appear to represent the structural formula of a chemical compound,’ the professor continues. ‘But we’re not sure at this stage about the exact molecular geometry. Parts of it appear to be incomplete – linear rather than 3D. Whoever made it might have run out of time.’

  The connection isn’t great so Silas tilts his laptop, hoping to improve the poor picture quality. Zoom is one of the many legacies of Covid-19. The force’s bean counters now refuse to sign off travel expenses without first satisfying themselves that the visit could not have been conducted online.

  ‘It’s not clear from the pattern, for example, what exactly these represent’ – he highlights the two hexagons – ‘but the parallel lines on two of their sides suggest the telltale alternating double bonds of a benzene ring, which has six carbon atoms, each one bonded to a hydrogen atom.’

  Silas feels the same pang of restlessness he used to get in chemistry O-level classes. He glances at Strover, who remains firmly focused on her screen.

  ‘Which doesn’t exactly narrow it down much,’ he continues. ‘There is a large class of aromatic compounds that contain benzene rings.’

  ‘How about BZ?’ Silas asks, remembering what Jim had said. ‘The incapacitating agent?’

  Strover calls up the details on her screen and shares the molecular structure. Silas had warned her that he was going to throw BZ into the mix, and had asked her to prepare a screenshot.

  ‘Your colleague mentioned BZ earlier,’ the professor says. ‘It’s a troubling suggestion – I won’t ask why it’s become a candidate because I suspect you’re not allowed to tell me. 3-Quinuclidinyl benzilate does indeed have two benzene rings, but it’s not clear, at this stage, that the rest of its molecular structure is depicted here.’

  ‘So how do we set about confirming the compound in these crop circles?’ Silas asks, keen to target the problem in hand.

  ‘If I may come in at this point,’ the professor of mathematics says, leaning forward. She is younger than the man, with short-cropped hair, and seems more enthusiastic about her subject and life in general.

  ‘Be my guest,’ Silas says, sitting up.

  ‘The spiral pattern that adjoins all three crop circles is, I think, crucial,’ she begins. ‘Certainly more detailed. It appears to contain a binary sequence, moving out from the centre. We’ve seen this sort of thing before, most notably outside Winchester at a place called Crabwood Farm in August 2002. And in May 2010, at Wilton, near Marlborough, where Euler’s Identity was encoded in a binary wheel.’

  Silas looks up. To his surprise, he feels reassured by the mention of Euler’s Identity. And thanks to Strover, he now knows that binary’s ones and zeros can be converted into everyday characters using ASCII code. She’s done her best to educate him, but he still feels out of his depth.

  A pause while the professor shares a photo of a large crop circle and an even bigger face of a Hollywood-style alien, carved out of the wheat. Silas glances at Strover. Here we go. ET time. The alien is all big eyes and narrow chin, bearing an uncanny likeness to the figure in Munch’s The Scream.

  51

  Jim

  Jim stands on the landing of his dad’s old home in Swanage, breathing hard. The back door is locked and there are no open windows. The house is secure, no need to panic. But how did the people in the Range Rover, parked outside, know that he’s here in this deserted house?

  Jim flinches as a bell rings and someone raps on the front door. A moment later, the letter box flaps open.

  ‘We just want to talk with you, Jim,’ a man says. It’s a different voice from the person who rang him in the car. ‘Have a chat about things.’

  Jim tenses again, tells himself to relax. Did they go to his dad’s apartment? If they touched him, harmed him in any way, he’ll kill them. He needs to calm down. Maybe they’re bluffing, don’t know for sure that he’s holed up in here. He’s certain nobody saw him enter and he was careful not to turn on any lights.

  ‘We need to know how you met Bella, the journalist in the pub,’ the man continues, his voice echoing up from the empty hall below.

  Unless they chuck a brick through the window, there’s no way for them to enter. His dad was a stickler for security. And Swanage is too busy at this time of year for a break-in to go unnoticed. They could come clean that they are from MI5 and force entry. But that’s not their style. And they won’t have a warrant, not for this house.

  ‘Did she arrange the meeting?’ the voice asks. ‘Or was it by chance? It’s really important you tell us.’

  Jim closes his eyes, shaking his head. They’re on to him as a whistle-blower. It’s the only explanation, the reason for such a specific line of questioning.

  ‘We also need you to tell us how much you know about these crop circles. You must share it with us, Jim – any information you have, however small. Anything at all.’

  A sudden thought occurs to Jim. Are these people aware that there are two whistle-blowers at Porton Down? Or do they think there’s only one – and that he’s responsible for the bodies in the circles? In which case, they’ll try to charge him with murder as well as contravening the Official Secrets Act. Not th
at he’s told anyone yet what he’s discovered. Either way, he needs to keep them at arm’s length.

  He glances around the landing. The windowsill, now bare, was once piled high with every kind of Rubik’s cube he could find. His record was twenty-five seconds, a good minute faster than his dad. He looks up and sees him coming out of his bedroom, red-and-blue-striped flannel dressing gown wrapped tightly around him, humming a tune as he completes the cube and looks at his watch. And then he’s gone.

  They shared a lot of good times together: restoring an old Mirror dinghy in a miasma of fibreglass fumes in the garage; making a fuel-powered rocket that nearly reached the Isle of Wight. But it was a mutual interest in prime hunting that Jim misses the most, using free, open-source software. When the largest known prime number was discovered a few years back, by an IT professional in Florida, Jim rang his dad to tell him the exciting news.

  ‘It’s another Mersenne!’ Jim had enthused, referring to a rare class of prime number.

  ‘I can’t find my cup of tea,’ he had replied. It was then that Jim began to suspect something was wrong.

  ‘We know you’re in there,’ the voice downstairs says again, bringing Jim back to the present.

  No they don’t, not for certain. They’re guessing, taking a punt. But Jim doesn’t feel any relief. Only anger. Last time Jim was paid a visit by these people, his house was ransacked and he was beaten up, knocked unconscious. That’s the way MI5 does things. It likes to cut up rough, particularly with potential traitors. He feels a surge of rage rise through his body. Anger at his dad’s cruel disease, his mum’s early death, what they continue to do to people in the name of science at Harwell. How dare they behave like that? And what a nerve to turn up here, at his old family home, trampling back through time on his precious memories?

  He moves to the wall, shaking now, and thumps his forehead against the hard plaster. The pain is fierce and immediate and he screws up his eyes, trying not to shout out. And then he does it again. And again. The discomfort will pass. It always does. Blood, warm and metallic, begins to seep down his face from the reopened wound. Enough now. He stands and listens, shaking, waiting for them to bark out another question. Silence. They won’t stop him from revealing the truth. He leans towards the window again, careful not to be seen.

  The Range Rover has gone.

  52

  Bella

  Bella returns downstairs from her bedroom, still reeling from the words she typed out on her dad’s old Remington. It doesn’t mean that the anonymous letter was written on it. Or that her mum sent it to her. All old typewriters have a similar font, don’t they? But it’s left her even more anxious that her mum isn’t here.

  Why did she leave in such a hurry? As Bella reaches the hall, she spots another note, a scrap of torn paper, tucked under a wooden carving from Kenya. She must have missed it earlier. Bella steps forward and picks it up.

  Have to go out. Stay safe, Mumxx

  It’s not written with the same care as the note upstairs in her bedroom. Someone else could have almost written it, but she can still see traces of her mum’s floral style in the dashed-off words.

  She walks over to the landline phone in the kitchen and rings her number, holding the note in her trembling hand. The call goes straight to voicemail and she leaves a message.

  ‘Hi, Mum, where are you? Ring me when you get this. Got your note. Hope everything’s OK.’

  Should she call the police? It’s so unlike her. She never writes notes like that. It also looks as if it’s been hidden behind the carving, out of sight. Her notes are always thoughtful, considered, like the one upstairs, signed off with a small drawing, usually a flower, sometimes a bird. But then she checks herself, remembering Jim’s words of warning about the police.

  She walks into the sitting room and looks out of the window. The car is parked outside, where her mum always leaves it. Back in the kitchen, she picks up the landline handset again and scrolls through the list of recent missed calls. Several are from Gladys, a friend of mother’s who works at the migrant centre. And then she sees Dr Haslam’s name. It’s the last incoming call before the missed calls. A short, twenty-second conversation. Of course. They’re together, that’s what’s happened. Her mum can be impulsive like that. He rang, asking if she wanted to meet for a quick drink, and she dropped everything to join him. She wouldn’t have explained in her note who she was meeting, knowing how disapproving Bella’s become of Dr Haslam.

  Bella pulls out her own mobile and slots in the battery. Lots of missed calls from Jim. She was going to text him earlier on the train, to say that Rocky was fine and that she’d left the house, but she didn’t want to risk turning on the phone. She dials his number and waits.

  ‘You OK?’ he asks. ‘I’ve been trying to call you.’

  Bella closes her eyes with relief. She didn’t realise how alone she was feeling, how comforting Jim’s voice would sound. For a few minutes, she’d forgotten about Erin but now her death comes crashing back into her consciousness.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Bella says, looking around the abandoned kitchen, tears in her eyes. Why’s she lying to him? She’s not fine at all. She should just come clean, tell him about Erin.

  ‘You got my message about Rocky?’ he asks. ‘Left the house OK?’

  Jim doesn’t sound himself. Or maybe it’s her. She’s struggling to concentrate.

  ‘Yeah. I was going to reply,’ she says, wiping her eyes, trying to keep it together.

  ‘It’s cool. Where are you?’

  ‘I’m in London. Where are you?’ She can hear seagulls. She used to love the sound of the sea.

  ‘Swanage. I’ve just been seeing my dad.’

  ‘Was he OK?’ she asks. A pang of recognition. She’s sure Swanage isn’t far from Studland. Distant memories of arriving there on a steam train with her dad. He loved old trains, even proposed to her mum on the overnight express from Mombasa to Nairobi.

  ‘Not really,’ Jim says. ‘He’s got dementia.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know.’

  Bella hears her dad’s typewriter echoing through the house. Tries to imagine what he’d do now. He would focus on the story. The heart of things. If she hadn’t received the anonymous letter, she wouldn’t have gone to Wiltshire, met Jim, heard so much about the crop circles. They’re the key to explaining Erin’s death. The talk is of them being connected to Porton Down, where Jim works. It’s all too much of a coincidence to ignore.

  ‘You need to tell me about Porton Down, Jim,’ she says, trying to sound confident.

  ‘You got the USB?’ he asks.

  ‘I got it,’ she says, remembering how she fished it out of Rocky’s vivarium. ‘But I can’t open it. Tell me what’s going on. Please?’

  ‘I can’t – not yet.’

  Bella starts to well up with anger. Jim doesn’t know about her connection with Erin, that her interest in the crop circles is no longer just professional.

  ‘Why not?’ she asks, trying to control her voice. ‘It’s all linked back to these crop circles, isn’t it?’

  ‘Bella, it’s really not safe to speak on the phone,’ he says.

  ‘Jim, she’s dead,’ Bella interrupts, almost shouting now. ‘Erin, my best fucking friend at college. It was her body that was found in the second crop circle. Her eyes that were pecked out by birds.’

  53

  Silas

  ‘This is Crabwood, 2002,’ the professor of mathematics says on Zoom. Silas looks again at the image of the Hollywood extraterrestrial and shakes his head, glancing at Strover beside him.

  ‘Ignoring the ridiculous alien,’ the professor continues, ‘which isn’t hard to do, the spiralling circle really is quite intriguing. If we follow the binary sequence out from the centre in an anticlockwise direction, we see that it is broken down into a series of blocks, each one with eight pixels in it. These pixels are a patch of either flattened crop or standing crop. And each block of eight pixels is separated from the next block by a divide
r – a smaller patch of standing crop. We can take this sequence to correspond to the eight-bit ASCII code used by computer programmers the world over. Flattened crop equates to zero, standing crop equates to one. Is everyone still with me?’

  Silas nods at the screen, trying to keep up with what she’s just said. He hasn’t concentrated so hard since he was in shorts.

  ‘The groups of eight binary digits can then be converted into ordinary text using ASCII?’ Strover asks. ‘Like the Euler’s Identity circle at Wilton in 2010?’

  If they were playing University Challenge, Silas would be glad to have Strover on his team. In fact, she could be captain.

  ‘Exactly,’ the professor says. ‘First up, we need to take one of the eight-bit binary numbers – 0100 0010, say – and convert it into its decimal equivalent, 66. We then see what it corresponds to in ASCII’s character set. In this case, the capital letter “B”. The message in the 2002 circle was relatively straightforward to decode – and really not worth the effort – but unfortunately it’s not so simple with these messages. We’ve run the binary codes through an ASCII converter and—’

  ‘And what?’ Silas interrupts. ‘What does it spell out?’ He’s impatient for results today, nervous in the company of academics.

  ‘Nothing, I’m afraid,’ she says. ‘We get a string of meaningless text.’

  Silas sighs, unable to disguise his disappointment.

  ‘Does the text need to be decoded too?’ Strover asks. ‘Like a double lock?’

  The professor nods. ‘That’s where we’re at. I won’t bore you with the details, but we think that whoever is behind this has used a Vigenère cipher – a traditional way of encrypting text by using a series of Caesar ciphers that are based on a key word.’