The Man on Hackpen Hill

by J. S. Monroe

  ‘You mustn’t be too hard on yourself,’ Jonathan says, breaking into his thoughts.

  Jim’s in an open-top sports car with the psychiatrist who has been working with him and Bella, and about to arrive at Harwell Business and Innovation Campus, sixteen miles from Oxford.

  ‘It’s going to take time,’ Jonathan adds, as he drives up Fermi Avenue, the main artery of the campus. The car, a bright red 1970s Alfa Romeo Spider, is a little cramped for Jim and his knees are wedged beneath the glovebox.

  ‘Where would you like to go?’ Jonathan asks, as they both take in the futuristic surroundings. To their right, the shiny new buildings of the National Satellite Test Facility, where satellites will be put through their paces, and the Rosalind Franklin building, billed as the most electromagnetically stable place on Earth. To their left, beyond a grassy bank, the sleek profile of the Diamond Light Source building – the circular ‘synchrotron’, low and silver, like a grounded spaceship.

  ‘Mind if we just drive around, see if the place rings any bells?’ Jim asks.

  ‘Of course,’ Jonathan says, slowing to take a better look at the synchrotron. ‘You sure you haven’t been here before?’

  Jim turns to him in surprise. ‘Isn’t that why we’ve come?’ he says, managing a laugh. ‘To find out?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jonathan says, smiling. ‘I mean, when you were younger, before you fell ill.’

  Jim shakes his head. ‘The first time I thought I had visited Harwell was on a three-year secondment.’

  Jonathan has encouraged Jim to see his life in terms of before and after his first psychotic episode, to acknowledge the San Andreas-sized fault in his timeline that split his world apart.

  ‘I did a bit of research,’ Jonathan says, trying to keep the mood upbeat as they drive on. ‘Harwell’s all about space, health and tech these days. Any of those sound familiar?’

  Jim shakes his head, sunk by a sudden wave of despair. They shouldn’t be here. He’s wasting everyone’s time. But Jonathan doesn’t say anything or pass judgement. He’s good like that, lets things come to the surface in their own time. They drive on in silence.

  ‘Mind if we head down there?’ Jim asks, glancing at a tree-lined side road to their right. A building at the far end looks familiar.

  ‘Sure,’ Jonathan says, turning off Fermi Avenue.

  Jim’s wrong about the building. Jonathan drives on down the road, nursing the car around a corner, and pulls over. He lets the engine idle, sensing perhaps that Jim wants to talk. A delivery van is parked up ahead of them, across the road.

  ‘I got a letter today,’ Jim says, sighing as he looks up at the blue sky, the contrails drawn across it like a grid for noughts and crosses. ‘From The Lab.’

  ‘The Lab?’ Jonathan asks, killing the engine. Somewhere, the sound of birdsong. A blackbird.

  ‘Porton Down. The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory. DSTL.’

  Jim removes the letter from his jacket pocket, reading the ‘care of’ address of the psychiatric unit in Oxford where he and Bella are inpatients.

  ‘DSTL used to have a small presence here, a while back, but not for a few years,’ Jonathan says. ‘I looked into it.’

  ‘Because a part of you believed that I really might have worked here?’ Jim asks, surprised by the psychiatrist’s diligence.

  Jonathan pauses before he answers. ‘I just thought it might help you to understand what happened. The way the brain strives for meaning in the world when we find ourselves disorientated.’

  ‘Could you open this for me?’ Jim asks, handing over the envelope. It reminds him of the day he got his first letter from The Lab, offering him a summer internship. He’d let his dad open it at the breakfast table at their home in Swanage.

  ‘If you’d like me to,’ Jonathan says, taking it.

  ‘I’m hoping it’s an invitation,’ Jim says. ‘To resume my original job when I’m well enough.’

  After Bella’s Oxford college had honoured her original place, she’d encouraged Jim to write to The Lab, explain what had happened.

  Jonathan opens the envelope and studies the contents.

  ‘What do they say?’ Jim asks, staring ahead. He doesn’t like the silence. Or the profile of another high-tech building up on the left that’s caught his eye. Why hadn’t he noticed it before?

  Jonathan folds the letter away and hands it back.

  ‘It’s a rather formal reminder of your obligations under the Official Secrets Act, given the current media interest in your story.’ He pauses. ‘I’m sorry.’

  The bluntness of the reply is not a complete surprise.

  ‘I signed the Act when I was a student, on my first summer internship,’ he says, thinking of the letter, his eyes still locked on the building ahead. What secrets do they not want him to share?

  A moment later, a black Range Rover appears out of nowhere. Jim stares at it in disbelief before he turns away, shielding his face.

  ‘You OK?’ Jonathan asks, looking at Jim and then over his shoulder at the disappearing vehicle.

  Jim nods, but he’s far from OK. He just wants his dad to be better. And his mum to be alive too, if only that were possible.

  ‘You’re going to see a lot of black Range Rovers in the future,’ Jonathan says. They’ve talked at length about what happened, how he was followed when he worked at the pet shop, not by MI5 but by people from AP Brigham, all of whom have now been arrested. ‘Plenty of things that stir up bad memories. It’s not easy, particularly with a brain as lively as yours, but not all the signs, the hidden messages around us, the codes in the sky and the sand and the sea – in the fossils – are for you. Sometimes you have to let them go, leave them for others.’

  Jim agitates in his seat, uncomfortable, restless. Jonathan has already mentioned a condition called apophenia, the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things, patterns in random information.

  ‘You want to take a walk around?’ Jonathan asks.

  ‘Sure,’ Jim says, keen to stretch his legs.

  ‘Watch out for security,’ Jonathan says. ‘There’s a lot of it about.’

  Jim smiles as he climbs out of the car, but not for long. A tall, bulky figure leaves the building up ahead and walks over to the delivery van across the road.

  Vincent? The maintenance man? It can’t be. He was arrested, like all the others. Jim hopes he’ll be treated more leniently. The man opens the door of the van. Maybe he’s on bail? He has the same prominent forehead, long face and big, looping gait. He’s also whistling, like a blackbird.

  Pass the piña colada!

  Jim wants to call out, ask him about the high-containment facility, thank him for what he did that day, but instead he just watches as the man climbs into his van and drives away.

  ‘Friend of yours?’ Jonathan asks from the car.

  Jim shakes his head and looks again at the building, squinting in the sunlight as he takes in its glinting edges and curves. It’s set back from the road and security is tight, CCTV cameras covering all approaches. Two guards keep watch from inside the reinforced front door. Jim spots a bench, in the shadows to the left of the building, partially hidden from the road, and his piano fingers twitch. The grass is worn all around. A muddy place to sit in winter.

  Get back inside.

  ‘Won’t be a moment,’ he says to Jonathan, a sudden chill passing through him. He hops over a low wall and walks across to the bench, where he sits down, letting the surrounds sink in.

  You’ll have a broken neck if you don’t get back inside.

  Is this where it happened? Where he came for a break from his work that day? He rests his arms on his knees and lowers his head, trying to think, to remember, staring at the dried mud. A glint catches his eye. He bends down and removes something, prising it out of the ground.

  ‘Can I help?’ a voice says.

  Jim looks up at a security guard, standing over him.

  ‘Private property,’ the guard continues, but th
ere is no aggression in his voice.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jim says, standing up. ‘My mistake.’

  ‘Everything OK?’ Jonathan asks, as Jim walks back over to the car, watched by the security guard, who is talking on his radio.

  ‘All good,’ Jim says, taking in the Harwell campus for one last time. ‘We can go now.’

  They don’t say much on the drive back to Oxford. Jim asks to listen to Radio 3, which is playing The Magic Flute. He closes his eyes. Mozart’s last opera is rich with numerological symbolism, full of threes. Three-part harmonies, the three women who serve the Queen of the Night, the three boys. And it begins and ends in E-flat major, a key with three flats. Stop it. He must stop it.

  Jonathan reaches forward and turns the radio off.

  When they reach the unit, Bella greets Jim in the family area with a kiss.

  ‘How was it?’ she asks, holding him close. ‘Did it help?’

  She looks across at Jonathan who has stood back, talking in quiet tones to one of the nurses.

  ‘We need to visit your Oxford college,’ Jim whispers, checking around him. ‘Where you studied.’

  Bella pulls away from him, searching his big eyes for an explanation.

  ‘How do you mean?’ she asks, glancing over at Jonathan again. He gives her a look of sympathetic concern.

  But Jim can’t find the strength to answer Bella’s question, to go on living like this, trying to decode a universe he no longer understands. Instead, he looks around the family room, tired, despairing, and starts to sob in Bella’s arms – hot, bitter tears for all that’s happened in his life. For the mum and dad he has lost and the beautiful person he has found.

  And for the excruciating pain in his right hand.

  ‘You’re bleeding,’ Bella says, looking down at his clenched fist. ‘What is it?’ she asks, lifting up his hand. ‘What happened?’

  Jim uncurls his bloodied fingers as a nurse approaches. A small shard of glass is embedded in the soft palm of his hand.

  ‘It’s a piece of lens,’ Jim says, lifting his hand up for the nurse to inspect. ‘From my glasses.’ He pauses, looking around at everyone. ‘I found it at Harwell.’

  After the sharp fragment has been removed and his wound dressed by the nurse, Jim and Bella talk all afternoon, interrupted by visits from Jonathan and the unit’s own duty psychiatrist, who each spend time with Jim, letting him talk, assessing his mental health, his current levels of medication. There are no quick solutions, no easy ways to piece back his life, repair the shattered mirror. But talking to Bella helps more than anything. She understands. She’s been there. Knows what it’s like when the train jumps tracks to run on parallel lines.

  The shard of lens he found in the mud exists in two worlds. He gets that now. One in which it belongs to him and one in which it doesn’t. It’s up to him to decide. Just as it is with the Range Rover, with Vincent, the building at Harwell.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says, as the dying sun floods their favourite corner of the family room. Rocky’s favourite too. ‘Thank you for sitting at my table in the pub that night. For believing in me. For listening.’

  But Bella doesn’t answer. Instead, she takes Jim in her arms and holds him close until the sun finally sets and his burning mind has stilled.

  Acknowledgements

  I am indebted to my exceptional agent, Will Francis, and all at Janklow & Nesbit, in particular Kirsty Gordon. Many thanks too to the brilliant team at my UK publisher Head of Zeus: my peerless editor, Laura Palmer; her editorial assistant, Anna Nightingale; Lucy Ridout, whose structural edit went well beyond the call of duty; copy editor Jenni Davis; and Jon Appleton, who proofread the manuscript.

  I know some people read the acknowledgements page before the book – a tempting crime that I’ve been guilty of myself – so the following will be necessarily oblique. Unfortunately I can’t thank by name those who helped me with my research into Porton Down, the UK’s secretive military research facility on Salisbury Plain, but I’m very grateful for the insights that I was given into ‘The Lab’ and its talented workforce.

  The charity Mind and its excellent website (mind.org.uk) should be the first port of call for anyone interested in learning more about mental health, or for those seeking support in connection with any of the issues raised in this book. Its report, Mental Health Crisis Care: Physical Restraint in Crisis, was a truly eye-opening read.

  The initial idea for the story of Bella and Jim came to me after I had the pleasure of interviewing Nathan Filer about his seminal work, This Book Will Change Your Mind About Mental Health, at the 2019 Marlborough Literary Festival. It’s a powerful, lyrical piece of writing that introduced me to, among many other things, the campaigning work of psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff and her own fascinating book, The Bitterest Pills: The Troubling Story of Antipsychotic Drugs. I also urge everyone to watch Eleanor Longdon’s inspiring TED talk, ‘The Voices in My Head’. And if you’re on YouTube, take a look at Marcus du Sautoy’s analysis of J.S. Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’ in his lecture, ‘The Sound of Symmetry and The Symmetry of Sound’. ‘Novichok and Other Poisons’, an article in the London Review of Books by Hugh Pennington, Emeritus Professor of Bacteriology at the University of Aberdeen, introduced me to puffer fish poisoning and tetrodotoxin.

  In no particular order, I’d also like to thank Lou McGregor for her floristry tips; the Royal Literary Fund for their invaluable support; Dr Stephen Gooder for the chemistry lesson; Antonia Gooder for her African botanical suggestions; Tim Jones for his encyclopaedic car knowledge; Dr Andy Beale for answering my morbid medical questions; Mary Harper for sharing her formidable knowledge of Somalia; David and Janet Stock and her sister Christine for their Jamaican insights; Chris Stock for his army tales; Andrew Stock for the ornithological checks; J.P. Sheerin for the walking and Irish talking; NHS local hero Bruce Mason for his paramedic expertise; Gay Herd for BSO acoustic advice; Toby and Katie Ashworth for their loyal support; Tim Thurston for his interviews on Swindon 105.5FM; Gay Herd for and the Crop Circle Exhibition and Information Centre in Honeystreet, Wiltshire. Any mistakes are, of course, mine.

  My interest in crop circles began in the summer of 2019, when my wife, Hilary, and I were on a walk with friends in the beautiful Vale of Pewsey in Wiltshire. Passing through the tiny hamlet of Honeystreet, we stumbled across a forty-strong Chinese film crew milling around the Crop Circle Centre, which was about to be opened by guest of honour Feng Shaofeng, a Shanghai-born movie star. It was a surreal occasion, to put it mildly, but Monique Klinkenbergh, the woman who runs the Centre, made everyone, including passers-by, feel very welcome. We found ourselves toasting the opening with champagne before Shaofeng disappeared in a helicopter to fly over a nearby crop circle for a Chinese reality TV show called Life in Adventure. Monique has done much to encourage better relations between croppies and farmers and the Centre is well worth a visit – for sceptics like me, who want to know how they are made, and for believers who already know.

  Finally, I’d like to thank my ever-supportive family: Felix, Maya and Jago, who keep me young and help with the lingo (not a word they’d use); and Hilary, my first and best reader, without whose love, humour, endless patience and encouragement none of this would be possible. This book is dedicated to the memory of Stewart, her much loved father and my wise and wonderful friend.

  About the author

  J.S. Monroe read English at Cambridge, worked as a foreign correspondent in Delhi, and was Weekend editor of the Daily Telegraph in London before becoming a full-time writer. His psychological thriller Find Me became an international bestseller in 2017 and, under the name Jon Stock, he is also the author of five spy thrillers. He lives in Wiltshire.

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