Don’s investigation of Mike Coleman

Don Challenor’s investigation of Mike Coleman begins as a practical inquiry about an unusual house and becomes an important clue to the concealed system at Wortalleth West. Coleman, who runs Sympergy Ltd, explains that Jack Harkness commissioned an independent energy supply on a scale that seems excessive for the property. The flow battery that formed part of the installation is missing, and Don privately connects it with the house’s suspected sealed chamber without telling Coleman. In retrospect, the power system is not merely an oddity of Harkness’s property: Wortalleth West’s system is later revealed to be powerful enough to initialize Cascade.

A house with unexplained infrastructure

Don’s questions about Coleman arise amid an investigation into the construction of Wortalleth West and the possibility that a sealed panic room lies behind its unusual steel barrier. The barrier might be a sliding door, closed and locked from inside, with a chamber extending across two floors. Yet the expected traces of such a room—independent cables, pipes, air supply and telephone line—cannot be located. If those services exist, they are well shielded. The uncertainty makes the house’s hidden infrastructure a practical problem rather than simply a mystery of architecture: whatever the chamber contains, its connections to the rest of the building are not apparent.

Don learns that Coleman is another person interested in the property. He has met Coleman at business gatherings and understands that Coleman heads a renewable-energy company supplying wind turbines and solar panels. Sympergy’s offices are in Helston, and Coleman lives on the Lizard. Don receives Coleman’s business card, which carries contact details and two handwritten telephone numbers. After the landline goes unanswered, Don calls the mobile number and introduces himself as the person involved with Wortalleth West. Coleman responds by asking what Don’s interest is and proposes a visit on his way home, suggesting that they might help one another.

Coleman’s visit and the missing battery

Coleman arrives at Wortalleth West in a red Mercedes and parks close to Don’s car. He presents Sympergy as a renewable-energy business working with solar and wind farms, as well as wave and tidal projects. Don listens politely, though he is not persuaded by Coleman’s promotional manner. Coleman’s approach is partly a pitch: he claims access to affluent clients who might be interested in the property and offers to introduce suitable prospective buyers. Don encourages him to continue, but his apparent interest is tactical; he wants to find out why Coleman has come.

Coleman says that, while Harkness was still the legal owner, Harkness hired Sympergy to install a large solar array in a field about half a mile inland. The array was intended to provide Wortalleth West with an exclusive power supply, supplemented by photovoltaic film on the south-facing walls of the house and garage. The film was transparent, less than a millimetre thick, and based on oligomer cells rather than silicon, which explains why Don had not noticed it. Coleman’s description makes clear that the installation was designed to be unobtrusive as well as substantial.

The supply also included a new design of flow battery. Coleman describes it as a full rack of modules roughly the height of the room, with a large storage capacity and a high price. He had wondered why Harkness needed so much electricity when the property already had solar generation. The battery’s purpose was to provide backup when the solar array could not supply power, but Coleman cannot say where it was installed. Its absence is the sharpest point in his account: a large, specialized piece of equipment was part of the project, yet it is no longer visible or readily locatable.

The trail of payments

Don does not answer Coleman’s question about the battery. An obvious possibility has occurred to him: the equipment could be in the suspected panic room. He chooses not to disclose that inference, preserving the distinction between what Coleman knows about the installation and what Don has pieced together from the house itself. Coleman’s explanation gives the hidden-room investigation a concrete technical dimension. The chamber might require a substantial independent supply, while the battery’s disappearance could account for why the equipment Coleman remembers is not apparent elsewhere in the property. At this stage, however, Don’s suspicion is not proof of where the battery went.

Coleman also explains why he is dissatisfied with the deal despite having received continuing maintenance payments. He had hoped to use Harkness’s purchase for publicity, presenting a pharmaceuticals billionaire as a prominent customer for renewable energy. But he could not secure Harkness’s direct cooperation. The contractual arrangements had been handled by an intermediary at Harkness’s Swiss headquarters, who later became unreachable; Harkness Pharmaceuticals’ human-resources staff said they had never heard of him. Coleman then discovered that the invoices had not been paid by the company. Instead, the arrangements had gone through a Swiss shell company, although the maintenance money continued to arrive.

That distinction matters to Coleman because it leaves the transaction difficult to explain, not because the payments simply stopped. He connects the unexplained contracting arrangement with Harkness’s arrest and the accusations then facing him, and wonders whether the intermediary and the off-the-books operation belong to a larger scheme. His suspicions remain suspicions: the conversation supplies no confirmation of who controlled the shell company or why the installation was organized that way. It does, however, place the energy project alongside other signs that Harkness’s business dealings were routed through concealed financial arrangements.

Significance in hindsight

The later disclosures about Harkness’s finances and research give Coleman’s account a broader context without resolving every detail of the transaction. Quintagler Industries alleges that Harkness diverted funds through subsidiaries of shell companies ultimately owned by him, and investigators do not know where most of the alleged billions went. Separately, investigators identify extensive research in nanotechnology and bioelectronics, together with additional funding that has no booked source. These revelations make Coleman’s story of indirect contracts and hidden expenditure one strand in a much larger pattern of concealed operations, though the evidence does not establish that Coleman knew about the research or its purpose.

The subsequent explanation of the nanobot programme clarifies the practical importance of the house’s infrastructure. Harkness, Astrid and Filippo Crosetti developed a programme that distributed nanobots through pharmaceutical products, cosmetics, pesticides and treated meat. A chain reaction called Cascade could activate them, and the Wortalleth West system was powerful enough to initialize that process. Coleman’s account thus plants an essential material clue before its full significance is known: the conspicuously oversized supply, the concealed building services and the missing battery all point to a property equipped for a purpose beyond ordinary domestic use. Don’s decision not to tell Coleman what he suspects preserves that clue as part of his own inquiry, while the later revelation transforms an apparently eccentric energy contract into part of the machinery behind Harkness’s plan.