The Man on Hackpen Hill

by J. S. Monroe

  ‘Bella,’ the porter says. His tone is not exactly welcoming but nor is it aggressive. The other porter behind him looks up from his bank of TV screens. She doesn’t recognise either of them.

  ‘I’ve come to see Dr Haslam,’ she says, wondering how the man knows her name. ‘Is he around?’

  ‘He’s expecting you,’ the porter says, pushing forward a clipboard for her to sign in.

  ‘Expecting me?’ Bella says, unable to conceal her surprise. At least he’s back from Italy.

  The porter glances at his watch. ‘He’s in the library.’

  Bella signs in, trying to stay focused as she walks through the familiar glass sliding doors of the porter’s lodge and across the floodlit courtyard. A CCTV camera mounted on a wall in the far corner tracks her progress. Student security became a big issue in her time here. She glances around the Victorian building and remembers a night when Erin was more off her face than usual. Round and round the courtyard she ran, arms outstretched like a bird, chased by three breathless porters.

  ‘You can’t catch me, you bunch of dryshites,’ she’d cried. If it wasn’t so sad, it would have been funny.

  Bella’s room was on the second floor and she instinctively glances up at the window. The light’s on, which is disconcerting. Who’s in there now? Maybe the rooms are being hired out for a summer school. She steps into the reception area, where a woman behind a desk looks up at her. She’s unfamiliar too. Another CCTV camera clocks her arrival.

  ‘I’m meeting Dr Haslam, in the library,’ Bella says.

  ‘Welcome back,’ the woman says, smiling at Bella. ‘He’s waiting for you.’

  Bella’s eyes linger on the woman, testing the strength of her smile. Sure enough, it soon starts to collapse into a look of guilt and anxiety. The woman turns away.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Bella asks, fear rising.

  ‘Excuse me?’ the woman says, glancing up again.

  ‘You’re not telling me something,’ Bella says. Her ears start to hum, a loud, persistent noise as if someone’s just hung up on her.

  ‘Dr Haslam’s waiting for you,’ the woman repeats, keeping her head down as she types.

  Bella walks along the lit-up corridor, tracked by more cameras as she turns right into the library, still spooked by the woman’s reaction. She came here a lot when she was an undergraduate, spent hours reading on the windowsill, the shadow of the thick glazing bars falling across her like a crucifix in the afternoon sun.

  At first she thinks the library is empty. The lights are off, the rows of bookcases standing sentinel in the shadows. She looks down one aisle, and then another, before she sees him at the far end, leaning against a desk in a solitary pool of light. Dr Haslam, the same as ever, patches on his corduroy jacket, small round reading glasses. Erudite eyes at odds with his soft, pale skin. Something of the sorcerer about him. He doesn’t look up. Instead, he stays focused on the book in his hand, and starts to read out aloud as Bella approaches.

  ‘Her eyes are wild, her head is bare, The sun has burnt her coal-black hair.’

  Bella’s in no mood for poetry, not even Wordsworth.

  ‘What happened to her?’ she asks, looking around again. No one else is in the library. ‘Tell me what you did to Erin.’

  99

  Jim

  Jim hears Vincent before he sees him. Only Vincent whistles like a blackbird in spring. He opens his eyes, watching as a blur moves around in front of the basin on the other side of the chamber. He’s still in the same place but Dr Haslam has gone, leaving him with a nauseous headache. Slowly raising his tied hands to his forehead, he touches the soft material of a wet bandage, wrapped around his ears.

  ‘Where am I, Vincent?’ he asks.

  ‘Hope I didn’t wake you, Jim-boy?’ Vincent says, turning to face him.

  ‘Where am I?’ Jim repeats.

  ‘Wherever you want to be. There’s a bloke down the corridor who thinks he’s on a beach in Jamaica. “Pass the piña colada!”’

  Vincent returns to work on the mirror. ‘And the geezer next door thinks he’s in Helmand, back with his old regiment. “IED! IED!”’

  ‘What are you doing over there?’ Jim manages to ask. It’s not just his head. His whole body is in agony.

  ‘Removing the mirror. Should never have been here in the first place. Not with a category one like you. But we’re full to the brimmers, so needs must.’

  ‘Why can’t I have a mirror?’ Jim asks.

  ‘Because we don’t want you giving yourself a fright,’ he says, laughing. ‘The sea wouldn’t even give you a wave in your current state.’

  Jim doesn’t join in with the laughter. Instead, he closes his eyes and thinks again about his last conversation with Dr Haslam. Paranoid schizophrenia… Every volunteer reacts differently to incapacitating agents, which is why a large sample size is so important. It wasn’t unusual for volunteers at Harwell to become psychotic.

  ‘You’re OK over there,’ Vincent continues. ‘Your leash doesn’t reach this far anyway. But we can’t take no chances with the mirror. Last month, a woman on the female wing nearly strangled herself to death with a bath plug,’ Vincent says, pulling the chain out of the sink with a flourish. ‘Ripped it right out and garroted herself. Month before, this bloke found some surgical gloves on a windowsill and swallowed them whole. They had to do the full tracheotomy treatment on him.’

  Jim stares at the ceiling. Harwell used to be such a tightly run ship. Someone’s losing their grip. Turn your back for a second and a volunteer’s trying to fly out of a carelessly opened window.

  ‘You shouldn’t be here, you know, Jim-boy,’ Vincent says. ‘You’re different. A gent. Things have gone from crap to shite since you left. People’ve started to go missing. Know what I mean? Something’s going on. And the staff, they’re…’ Vincent wells up. ‘I’m a cleaner, Jim-boy. Nothing wrong with that. Somebody’s got to do it. But they’re treating me like the shit I have to scrub off the walls. Vince do this, Vince do that. It’s not right. Not right at all.’

  ‘Dr Haslam called me a patient earlier,’ Jim says. ‘I’m not a patient, Vincent. I’m a successful government scientist, back at Harwell because I blew the whistle on what’s going on around here.’

  Vincent stops work on the mirror, now off the wall, and stacks it outside in the corridor. He comes back with a dustpan and brush and sweeps up the remaining glass shards from the floor beneath the sink. Once he’s finished, he walks over to Jim.

  ‘Who did you tell?’ he says, sitting down at Jim’s bedside like a doctor on his rounds.

  ‘A journalist,’ Jim says, suddenly overwhelmed. ‘A beautiful journalist called Bella.’

  Vincent nods. ‘Think I might know her.’

  ‘You do?’ Jim asks. He hasn’t got the energy to ask how on earth Vincent might know Bella. ‘Went to Oxford, now working for a national newspaper. Tall as a giraffe.’

  He remembers when she walked into the pub for the first time, how he’d seen her at the bar and had to look away, confused by her awkward beauty.

  ‘That’s the one,’ Vincent says. ‘Smart bird.’

  ‘She’s coming back here to Harwell to talk to Dr Haslam, get his version of events for her newspaper story. But she mustn’t, Vincent. They’ll do awful things to her. I’ve got to stop her.’

  Vincent nods again and checks over his shoulder. ‘So that’s why I’ve left you a little present, in the sink,’ he says, leaning forward to whisper in Jim’s ear. ‘I’ll leave the door open too, as it’s you, Jim-boy. Can’t do any more than that. Haslam’ll kill me otherwise. He’s more dangerous than the patients. Proper psycho, that one. The short arses always are.’

  But Vincent does do more. As he rises from the chair, he pulls out a key and unlocks the security tether that runs from Jim’s tied hands to the bed frame, winking at him as he walks out of the room and down the corridor.

  ‘Let them know, Jim-boy,’ he calls out. ‘You let them know.’

  100


  Bella

  ‘You were keen on Wordsworth, very keen,’ Dr Haslam says, looking at the spine of Lyrical Ballads as he closes it. ‘Not many of you were.’

  Bella hasn’t come to the college library for a tutorial. She wants to know what happened to her friend.

  ‘Shakespeare too. And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on—’

  ‘What did you do with her?’ Bella interrupts. It feels wrong to be raising her voice in a library, but she’s beyond caring.

  ‘…and our little life is rounded with a sleep.’ Dr Haslam pauses. ‘Erin was very ill,’ he says, glancing over to the door where she entered. Bella looks too but no one’s there.

  ‘Why didn’t you let me see her?’ Bella asks. ‘I phoned, emailed, texted you so many times, but you never answered.’

  ‘Shall we take a walk? In the gardens?’ Dr Haslam says, replacing the book on the shelf. ‘We light them up at night now.’

  Bella’s memories of this man were all from her last months here, when she felt herself, on top of her game. His smile was winsome, his beady eyes brimming with empathy and intellect. Now all she sees is a liar, a little man who’s hiding the sordid truth from her.

  ‘I’m not interested in going for a fucking walk,’ Bella says, still thinking of Erin.

  Dr Haslam glances up at her, a steely look at odds with the soft flesh of his face. She turns away. A wave of fear passes through her, shaking her confidence. She’s back as the student and Dr Haslam is her tutor, a figure of authority who she’s just sworn at.

  ‘What did you say?’ Dr Haslam asks, facing her now, pulling at the cuffs of his jacket like an agitated bouncer.

  ‘I don’t want to go for a walk,’ she says, more tentatively this time.

  ‘You’ll do exactly as I ask,’ he says, his own voice firm but measured. She remembers this tone, its undertow of menace, the effect it seems to have on her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she hears herself saying, staring at the carpet of the library. Why’s she apologising? She looks up at Dr Haslam again, fighting back a tear. ‘What did you do to her? To Erin? I just want to know what happened.’

  Dr Haslam gestures for them to head for the door.

  ‘As I say, she was very ill and, tragically, chose to take her own life,’ he says, as they start to walk. ‘As for what I “did” to her, we all did what we could to save her, the staff here and the medical team, but she passed away in hospital after a long fight, never regained consciousness. If I could have arranged for you to see her, I would, but she was far too ill for any visitors.’

  So it’s true, her friend is dead. She tries to keep it together as they reach the library door but she can’t stop herself from crying. And wondering how Dr Haslam’s version of events squares with the body that was found in the crop circle. Has she got it all wrong? Was it someone else? Another bird tattoo fanatic?

  ‘Has there been a funeral?’ she asks, stopping at the door.

  ‘Not yet,’ he says. ‘She had no family.’

  ‘She had friends,’ Bella insists. ‘People like me.’

  ‘And you were a very good friend to her,’ Dr Haslam says, putting a hand on Bella’s shoulder.

  Just not quite good enough. She recoils from Dr Haslam’s touch, shaking off his hand.

  ‘Erin was found in the middle of a crop circle in Wiltshire,’ she says, holding on to what she believes to be true.

  ‘As I understand it, they’ve not been able to identify any of those poor victims,’ Dr Haslam says, his voice almost hypnotic in its evenness.

  ‘The body in the second circle – the arms were covered in feather tattoos, just like Erin’s,’ Bella continues, fighting against the tone of control in Dr Haslam’s voice.

  ‘A lot of people have feather tattoos on their arms, Bella,’ Dr Haslam says. ‘They’re quite the thing at the moment, so I’m told.’

  ‘And she had a small rook tattoo hidden behind her ear – she showed it to me once.’

  A rook that spoke to her when she danced. One, two, three! One, two, three!

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ Dr Haslam says. He seems genuinely surprised.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Bella says, insistent now. ‘I’m writing a story for a national newspaper about the deaths. I’ve spoken to a government scientist at Porton Down who knows what the circles mean. They’re the formulas for chemical weapons that are being tested on innocent victims like Erin. And it’s all happening at Harwell, down the road from here.’ She thinks of Jim’s diary, the multiple references to Dr Haslam. ‘A place that I think you know only too well.’

  ‘Harwell?’ Dr Haslam asks, more amused than surprised. ‘Can’t say I’ve ever been there. But I’ve heard a lot about the place from others. The famous synchrotron. But listen, your visit here’s most timely.’ He turns to open the library door. ‘We’re running a residential course at the college, teaching English as a foreign language, and could do with some help. Your room’s ready—’

  ‘The fuck are you talking about?’ Bella says, staring at Dr Haslam in disbelief. Is that why the light was on in her old room? ‘I’ve left this place. I’ve got a life, a job as a journalist.’ She relishes saying these last words. Dr Haslam never took her Fleet Street ambitions seriously, her desire to follow in her dad’s footsteps.

  ‘And where’s Mum?’ she adds. If there is something between Dr Haslam and her mum, he must know where she is.

  ‘Your mum?’ he asks, holding the door open for Bella as he follows her out into the corridor. ‘Your mum’s right here.’

  Bella looks up to see her mother being ushered out of a side room by a porter, eyes blood-red with crying.

  ‘Hello, flower,’ she says softly, holding one of Bella’s suitcases. ‘I’m so sorry. I’ve brought your things.’

  101

  Silas

  ‘I see they’ve brought the big red key,’ Silas says to Strover, as they watch the emergency response team unload a bright red battering ram from a police van in the car park at Cranham Hall. ‘Of course they have.’

  Silas doesn’t expect to use the battering ram but nor does he have any more keys if they discover another secret morgue.

  ‘Remember, this is a psychiatric hospital,’ Silas calls across to the officers, as they continue to get ready. ‘So we go in nice and gently. It’s not another drugs raid in east Swindon.’

  He’s done enough of them in recent weeks, targeting gangs in Walcot, Eldene and Park North. But unlike those dawn raids, there’s no element of surprise here. Silas has already informed the manager that he’s about to search the premises, mindful of the patients’ well-being. The circumstances are not ideal – unannounced visits are always better – but at least it’s dark. As a precaution, the uniforms on all exits will check everyone who enters and leaves the women’s wing in the old hospital building at the front and the men’s wing in the modern extension to the rear.

  ‘Here come forensics,’ Strover says, turning as a lorry enters the car park, its headlights sweeping across the lawn in front of the main house.

  ‘About bloody time,’ Silas says, glancing at his watch. They’ve taken longer than the promised twenty minutes to drive over from Oxford. ‘Once we’re in, I want you to focus on the women’s wing and I’ll look for Jim in the men’s.’

  Silas nods over to a BMW X5 in the far corner of the car park, where three officers from the Tactical Firearms Unit have assembled. ‘And we only call in the cavalry if we really need it.’

  ‘Am I looking for anyone in particular?’ Strover asks.

  Silas hasn’t yet shared his theory with her, who else they might find inside the secure hospital.

  ‘Take CSI to the mortuary and then start asking around, see if any patients or staff knew of a tattooed patient called Erin,’ he says, pausing. ‘And keep your eyes open for Bella.’

  ‘Bella?’ Strover asks, surprised, as her phone starts to ring.

  Silas
nods. Strover holds eye contact with her boss while she takes the call. She’s always believed in Bella’s involvement in the case and now she’s about to be proved correct. He’s not sure what he’d do without her. It didn’t take long for the magistrates’ court to fast-track a search warrant for Cranham Hall, thanks to her help with the paperwork. Getting a warrant for AP Brigham’s headquarters in Reading required more persuasion, but colleagues from Thames Valley have already started to search the premises, looking for evidence of the three untested antipsychotics.

  ‘That was the hospital,’ Strover says, coming off the phone. ‘Noah’s regained consciousness.’

  ‘He took his time,’ Silas says, but he’s pleased Noah’s out of danger. He had no idea what he was getting into when Jed Lando commissioned him to make three crop circles. A gentle soul caught up in something horrific. Their visit to his remote farmhouse seems a long time ago now.

  Silas looks over at the dark Victorian building and sees a solitary pale face lit up in a high window. If Lando was drawing attention to antipsychotics made by AP Brigham, how many Erins are there? How many victims died in their development? Two were found in the crop circles, but were there others? He wouldn’t put it past the American CEO, last seen dancing with an inflatable syringe. And did they all die in illegal trials or did some survive, living a life of dopamine-fuelled delusion?

  ‘OK, let’s do this,’ Silas says.

  He takes a deep breath and sets off for the entrance gate with Strover by his side and Jim and Bella on his mind.

  102

  Bella

  ‘You’ve got to tell her,’ her mum says, turning from Bella to Dr Haslam. ‘It’s just not right.’

  ‘What’s not right, Mum?’ Bella asks, increasingly desperate.