Coffin Road (16 page)

Connor’s smile was rueful and sad. ‘Oh, yes. Remember the research project on the impact of floral diversity on bee resilience and learning capacity?’

‘How could I forget?’

Now his smile widened with genuine amusement. ‘Well, Tom had handed that over to one of his students. A bright lad called Billy Carr. And since half of your dad’s bees had survived his experiment, Billy borrowed them to use in his. He employed them as his control group. In other words, they were fed a normal diet, while another group of bees was given a restricted diet, so the effects of the poor diet could be compared with the normally fed control group.’ Connor spread his arms and his hands. ‘It was pure bloody chance, Karen. A complete accident. But, in the course of his experiment, Billy found that your dad’s bees were the ones suffering from learning difficulties. They were unable to associate floral scent with the reward – the pollen and nectar they would find in the flower. Their memories were screwed. And, Karen, memory is everything to a bee. It’s how they find their way to food and convey that information to other bees. It’s how they find their way back to the hive. Without it they can’t find tomorrow’s food, and the colony in the hive breaks down.’

Suddenly Karen saw the significance of it. ‘So the imidacloprid hadn’t killed the bees directly, but it had left them brain-damaged.’

‘And unable to function properly. Exactly.’ Connor’s face was shining as he took pleasure in Karen’s intelligence. Her ability to see things clearly, and reason as her father had done. But, just as quickly, it clouded again, as if a shadow had passed directly over it. ‘But, for such an intelligent man, Tom could be so bloody naive.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, he and Billy took the results from that experiment and reran it, this time using bees that had only been exposed to environmental levels of the neonicotinoid. Same thing. The bees suffered neuronal brain damage and weren’t able to forage properly for food. Tom went straight to Ergo to warn them that there was a major problem. Their neonic insecticides were fucking with bees’ brains and leading ultimately to colony collapse.’ He threw back his head and hollered at the heavens. ‘So fucking stupid!’

Karen grabbed his arm. ‘What happened?’

‘What happened, Karen, was that his whole damn world just fell apart. He barely even had time to draw breath before he found himself summoned by the director of the Geddes and told that he was being made redundant.’

Karen was shocked. ‘And was he?’

Connor nodded vigorously. ‘Oh, yes. Totally unconnected with his research, they said. Cuts and natural wastage. And, of course, your dad being your dad, he accused them of trying to cover up his findings. Being scared of losing their research funding from Ergo. Which only hastened his departure. He was told to clear his desk and go. And when he threatened to publish the results of his research anyway, they had him escorted from the building. Security people came to his office and the labs and seized everything. Notes, results, computers, hard drives.’

‘You mean the results of his research were never published?’

‘Never. And there was no way he could ever repeat the experiment. The cost of these things is prohibitive. Way beyond the means of any individual.’

‘I never knew he’d been sacked,’ Karen said. ‘I’m not even sure my mum did. Why wouldn’t he have told us?’

Connor shrugged. He was still holding the shell in his hand. He looked at it briefly, then turned and hurled it into the water. The tide was turning. He resumed walking, and Karen slipped her arm through his again. They covered several hundred yards before Connor spoke again.

He said, ‘Billy Carr, the student who conducted the experiments with him, tried to smuggle stuff out to him in the weeks after he’d been kicked out.’

‘Weeks? How long after he’d been sacked did he kill himself?’

‘Must have been a couple of months, Karen.’

‘Jesus . . .’ She shook her head and wondered how he could have kept it from them for so long. And why.

‘Anyway, Billy himself disappeared after about a month. No idea what happened to him. He just . . . vanished. Didn’t turn up one day, and no one ever saw him again.’

Karen was struck by a sudden, dreadful thought. ‘They didn’t kill him, did they? My dad, I mean. Ergo. To stop him from publishing?’ In her mind, it explained everything. The empty boat. The life jacket still aboard. And then she remembered the note.
Tell Karen I love her
.

Chris was shaking his head. ‘I don’t think so, Karen. They’re pretty damned ruthless, these big corporations, but murder? I doubt it. Your dad was depressed. Never saw him so low. He went to all the big environmental campaign organisations, like Friends of the Earth, Buglife, the Soil Association. Looking for funding to repeat the experiment. But none of them had the resources. In the end, I think he just gave up. They’d beaten him, and he had no way to fight back.’

A huge wave of anger welled up inside Karen. Ergo might not have murdered her father, but they had killed him as surely as if they had. With their greed and their arrogance and their total disregard for the planet, and every man, woman and child on it. ‘Bastards!’ she said. ‘Fucking bastards!’ It was out before she could stop herself, and she glanced, embarrassed, at her godfather. But he seemed not even to have heard her. His eyes were glazed and gazing off into some unseen distance.

Then he turned towards his god-daughter. ‘Come back to the car with me, Karen. There’s something I want to give you.’

*

Chris Connor’s car was parked in Straiton Place, beyond a children’s play area with swings and a chute. Almost as soon as they left the beach to follow the path one street back, he seemed to Karen to lose the confidence he had found talking to her on the sands. He appeared nervous again, and his eyes were everywhere, directed at every movement. Every pedestrian, every passing car. Until his gaze fell on some kids kicking a ball about on the grass. Tiny kids, the ball almost as big as themselves. And he seemed briefly absorbed by them. He stopped, watching, oblivious to Karen’s impatience. Then, absently, he drew the remote from his pocket, and the lights flashed on his white Renault Scenic as the doors unlocked.

He looked at Karen, almost as if seeing her for the first time. ‘She took the kids.’

Karen frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘My wife. Took both the kids. My boys. Seven and nine now. Said they deserved better.’

And while her godfather was clearly feeling sorry for himself, it was his boys that Karen’s heart went out to. She knew only too well what it was to lose a father. And after the revelations of the past half hour, her guilt and regret had been replaced by an anger that filled her up, very nearly consuming her. But she was used to containing her emotions, and there was no outward sign of the internal fury that was firing her impossible desire for revenge. Her father might have taken his own life, but he had been driven to it. Someone had to pay. ‘You said you had something for me.’

‘Oh, yes . . .’ He rounded the car and lifted the tailgate, then reached inside and drew out a shoebox. Literally a shoebox – it had a Clarks logo on the side of it. Its lid was held shut by string wrapped length and widthwise and tied in a knot on top. It was rough, frayed string, and the knot looked impossibly tight. The green colour of the box had faded, as if it might have been sitting somewhere in sunlight for a long time. He thrust it at her. ‘Here. It’s for you and your mum.’

Karen took it, holding it slightly away from her, as if it might be contaminated. ‘What is it?’

‘They never did give your dad time to clear out the things from the drawers in his office. Not that there was much in the way of personal stuff, anyway. So I did it for him. And then forgot to give it to him. It’s been sitting in the house all this time.’

And suddenly Karen wrapped her arms around it and pulled it close. It was as though she was holding a little piece of her father in them. There was enormous comfort in it, and she found herself both excited and scared by the prospect of opening it. Excited because she knew it would be a voyage of discovery, however brief, and that it would put her in direct contact with her dad again, in a way she hadn’t felt since her mother had given his clothes away to charity. Scared, because maybe it wouldn’t be enough, and she didn’t want to be disappointed. She saw her godfather lift his eyes from the box and glance each way along the street.

‘And something else.’ He reached into an inside pocket of his coat and pulled out a long white envelope. He held it in his left hand and ran the fingers of his right gently over it, and Karen could see her name written on it in the bold, clear handwriting of her father. But Chris didn’t give it to her immediately, as if reluctant to part with it. ‘He gave me this just a couple of days before he went missing.’ He sighed deeply. ‘I should have seen it, I should have known. But at the time, and even now, I couldn’t conceive of your dad as being a man who would take his own life.’

She wanted to snatch it away from him. It had her name on it. It was hers. ‘What’s in it?’

‘I don’t know. He gave it to me sealed, and made me promise to keep it safe, and only give it to you when you had turned eighteen.’ He expelled air in frustration with himself. ‘I can see now why he gave me it. But at the time, I really didn’t understand.’

‘I’m not eighteen yet,’ Karen said.

‘I know.’ He looked at the envelope again. ‘But, after you came to the Geddes the other day, I knew I had to give it to you. What was the point of waiting? Seventeen, eighteen. What difference does it make now? It’s something he wanted you to have.’ Almost reluctantly he held it out to her, as if he were giving away the last piece of his friend, saying a final, belated farewell to the man he had loved, too.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Outside, the light was fading. September was evolving towards October. Summer to autumn. The shadow of winter already loomed large on the horizon.

Karen stood in the bathroom, staring at herself in the mirror. More than once, her godfather had told her that she was just like her dad. He hadn’t meant her appearance, of course.

She had always thought that, in looks, she took after her mother. Her dyed-black hair was naturally brown. A mousy, insipid sort of brown, somewhere between chestnut and blond, but without the distinction of either. Just like her mum’s. Although it was curly like her dad’s. For years, her mother had dyed her hair blond, though now, Karen thought, there was perhaps as much platinum white in it as any colour.

Her mother was a pretty woman. Not beautiful, but she had small, attractive features. Petite and perfectly formed. Cute. Somehow
cute
had bypassed Karen. Her features were not unlike her mother’s, but their arrangement was not as pleasing to the eye. She regarded herself as plain. Not the sort of girl that would turn heads.

But now, as she stared in the mirror, she was looking for any sign of her father. It pleased her to think that she had inherited his intelligence, and perhaps some of that belligerent personality that Chris Connor had spoken of. But she was desperate to detect some physical manifestation of it. Something of him that she could see every time she caught her reflection in a mirror, or a window. If she had inherited any of his physical attributes, it was in the blue of her eyes. Her mother’s were green. She had her mother’s mouth, but the lips were pale, like her father’s. And she gazed hard into her own eyes, as if perhaps her genetic inheritance might be staring back at her through the blue lenses of her dead father, critical, appraising.

For some reason, she still hadn’t opened the box, or her letter. And the longer she left it, the harder it became to do. She couldn’t really explain it to herself, but she felt sick every time she thought about opening either. She went back down the hall to her bedroom, pausing briefly on the landing at the top of the stairs. She could hear Derek and her mother talking in the lounge below, but the burble of the television masked their words and she couldn’t make out what it was they were saying.

She hadn’t been to school for days, and she knew that sooner or later they would contact her mother. But not yet, evidently. She slipped into her bedroom and shut the door carefully behind her. The Clarks shoebox and the white envelope sat on the bed, beckoning her to come sit beside them and open them up, to reveal the secrets she wasn’t at all sure she wanted to know.

She had not said a word to her mother, about going to the Geddes, or meeting her godfather on the beach at Portobello, and she wasn’t sure she had ever felt quite so alone in all of her short life. Even at the moment of learning about her father’s death, her mother had been there with warm, protective arms. But that umbilical had been cut now for ever. She was adrift on her own in a world vacillating between fear and uncertainty.

Tentatively she sat on the edge of the bed and lifted the shoebox on to her lap. The knot in the string was impossible to unpick and, in frustration, she reached for a pair of scissors on the dresser and slashed through it. The lid toppled to the floor. She peered into the box and, as she had feared, felt disappointment wash over her. There was really very little in it. Pens and pencils, a couple of erasers, a small stapler and a sprung implement with opposing claws for removing unwanted staples. There was a box of Gaviscon double-action antacid tablets, strawberry flavour, a fluorescent yellow marker pen, a small brown resin Buddha. She remembered something very similar to it sitting on his study desk here in the house, but bigger. And she wondered suddenly what had happened to all that stuff.

She lifted out two sheets of folded A4 paper and opened them up. The top sheet was the draft of a letter applying for a job at a university in England. She glanced at the date, and realised it could only have predated his redundancy by a matter of weeks. Or days. Had he seen the writing on the wall? If he’d got the job, would that have meant moving the whole family south? Or were he and her mother already bound for divorce? The second sheet was his résumé. All the jobs he had held over the years, and then a long list of his qualifications. She had not realised that he’d had so many degrees. An M.Sc. in Molecular Biology, a B.Sc. Honours in Genetics, a Ph.D. in Cell Biology. He had also studied ecology, and conducted investigations into chronic neurological conditions in both humans and insects.

She had known none of this about him. The years he must have studied, the jobs he had taken, research projects he had worked on. He left in the morning, he came back in the evening. He was the man she knew at nights and weekends, and on holidays. He was her dad. The other person he’d been had simply never existed for her. What kind of pain and pressure had he kept to himself? The loss of his job, the destruction of his research, a wife who’d been having an affair. Karen had been oblivious, and when it seemed to her that he hadn’t been there for her, she’d accused him of caring only about himself and screamed in his face,
I hate you, I hate you, I hate you
.

She did not even know she was crying until she saw her tears blister the paper she held in her hands. She laid it aside and quickly brushed away the tears with the back of her hand. At the bottom of the box was a picture frame lying face-down. On top of that, a grubby white business card. She lifted it out. It belonged to a Richard Deloit, Campaign Director of OneWorld. Karen had heard of the organisation. A high-profile, very vocal, international environmental group based in London. They were, it seemed to Karen, always in the news. Well known for gimmicks and stunts designed to attract media attention, if nothing else. She could even picture Deloit himself. A glamorous sort of man with curls of palladium white, full of righteous indignation and silky self-confidence, who seemed more impressed by himself than the causes he spoke for. She flipped the card over. There was a mobile phone number scrawled on the back of it, and the words,
Call me
.

She laid it aside and reached into the box again to retrieve the final item. As she turned it over, she saw that the frame was fashioned from hand-worked pewter and engraved with a Rennie Mackintosh design of interweaving tulips. She caught her breath when it revealed to her the picture it framed. She remembered it well. A photograph taken one year on holiday in France, when she was maybe five or six. She was wearing a pale blue print dress, and a wide-brimmed straw hat with blue ribbon over curling hair, much fairer than she remembered. It fell in soft loops to smooth, tanned, bare shoulders.

She gazed at that smiling, innocent face, and ached inside for those happy days of childhood spent, lost to the turbulence that would come in later years and wreck her young life. Her dad must have had it on his desk. And maybe he, too, had longed for those forgotten days and years when the sun seemed always to shine, and love and happiness just existed, like the sea and the sky.

She refused to let more tears fall, and reached over to place the photograph in its frame on her bedside table, determined to let it remind her that life had once been worth living. That, if she had been happy once, then maybe one day she would be again.

Now the box was empty, and she had no excuse for further procrastination. She lifted the letter and weighed it in her hands. But there was no weight in it at all. At least, not in the paper. The words inside, she knew, would be considerably more laden, and she couldn’t put off reading them any longer.

Suddenly, as if impelled by some outside force, she ripped open the envelope and pulled out the folded sheet from inside. Her fingers trembled as she opened it up and saw, in virgin ink, what may very well have been some of the final words her father ever wrote. Between his writing of them and now, no one else had ever read them.

My darling Karen,

I have no idea how to apologise for the pain I must have caused you. I know I never lived up to the father you wanted me to be, and I won’t make excuses for that now. One can always find excuses for one’s own failings, but when you reach the place that I have reached there is no room left for self-delusion. I know that suicide will have invalidated my life insurance, but I also know that your mother’s relationship with Derek will have ensured financial security. One of the great regrets of my life is that I failed your mum. I hope you didn’t blame her. I don’t. And, who knows, maybe Derek has been the father to you that I couldn’t. But however much you might hate me for what I have done to you, I want you to know that I love you, and that I always have, even if I couldn’t be the dad you deserved. Maybe one day, when the dust has finally settled on all of this, we can find again the happiness we knew when we were both so much younger.

Dad.

Karen sat with the skin tingling all across her scalp. Every fine hair rose on the back of her neck and on both arms . . .
find again the happiness we knew . . .
How could they find happiness again when he was dead? She read the letter once more, quickly, hungrily, and every nuance of tense, every choice of word screamed only one thing. He wasn’t dead. Her dad was alive. He had written this letter thinking that she would not read it for another year, by which time he was assuming she would know things she didn’t know now. Primary among these being that he wasn’t dead. That he hadn’t committed suicide. It was a post-revelation apology, an appeal, however tentative, for some kind of rapprochement. Asking for her forgiveness and a second chance.

*

Karen’s mother was less than pleased with her. ‘Derek lives here now, too,’ she’d said when Karen demanded to speak to her alone.

‘Well, come upstairs, then.’

But her mother had dug in her heels. ‘Anything you’ve got to say to me, you can say here and now. Derek and I have no secrets between us, and nor should you.’

‘Oh, well, forget it, then!’ And Karen had started for the hall.

‘No, it’s okay.’ Derek had been the one to pour oil on troubled waters. He stood up. ‘I’m for an early night, anyway.’

He half-smiled at Karen’s mum as he left the room, but Karen refused to meet his eye. And now that he’d gone, she wasn’t quite sure where to start.

Her mother stood, arms crossed defensively, a face like thunder. ‘Well?’

‘Why didn’t you ever tell me that dad had been sacked two months before he went missing?’

Whatever her mother might have been expecting, it wasn’t this. She unfolded her arms and blinked, surprised, at her daughter. ‘Well, that’s nonsense.’

‘It isn’t. He was kicked out of the Geddes Institute weeks before his boat was found out on the firth.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Chris Connor.’

A name that came out of the blue and struck her mother like a slap across the face. She shook her head, green eyes filled with confusion. ‘Chris . . . ? When were you talking to him?’

‘I went to the Geddes a couple of days ago.’

‘Why?’

Karen pulled a face. ‘Why do you think?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Karen, why can’t you just let it go? Your dad’s dead. Get over it.’

Karen almost bit her tongue in trying to hold back the truth. Instead, she said, ‘Are you telling me you didn’t know he’d been sacked?’

‘No, I didn’t. Why wouldn’t he tell me something like that?’

‘You didn’t know what he was working on, then?’

Her mother sighed in exasperation. ‘I don’t know. Something to do with bees. He’d been coming home with stings all over his hands. What kind of nonsense has Chris been putting in your head?’

‘It’s not nonsense! Dad was doing experiments on the effects of insecticides on bees. When he came up with something the industry didn’t like, they got rid of him. Forced him out of the institute by threatening to withhold its funding.’

Her mother shook her head. ‘I don’t know what Chris’s game is, but this is pure fantasy.’

‘No, it’s not!’ Karen shouted so violently at her that her mother took a half-step back, almost as if she had been physically assaulted. In the silence that followed, Karen glared at her, breathing hard. ‘He gave me a letter that my dad wrote and asked him to give me when I was eighteen.’

‘Well, he was a bit premature then, wasn’t he?’

‘After I went to the institute, he decided to give it to me, anyway. I opened it tonight.’

Her mother crossed her arms again. ‘And?’

Karen steeled herself. ‘He’s not dead.’

Her mother gasped her disbelief, turning her head away, shaking it and raising her eyes to the ceiling. ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’

‘He’s not!’

‘Oh, don’t be so bloody stupid!’ She drew a deep, tremulous breath. ‘Karen . . . I’ve been talking this over with Derek . . . and we both think it’s about time you saw a psychiatrist.’ She blurted it out before she could stop herself. What might have been discussed as one of many possible approaches to dealing with her troublesome daughter was suddenly right out there, top of the agenda.

Karen felt the skin on her face redden, stinging as if she had been slapped on both cheeks. ‘Go to hell!’

She turned and stalked out of the room. Her mother’s voice came after her, laden with regret at words spoken in haste and anger. ‘If there’s a letter, show it to me.’

Karen swivelled on her heel in the doorway. ‘Oh, yeah. So you can accuse me of making it all up. Writing it myself. Cos, of course, I’m off my fucking head!’

She took the stairs two at a time, and saw a startled-looking Derek standing at the far end of the hall as she stormed into her bedroom and slammed the door shut, locking it behind her. Two strides took her to the laptop, and she selected a Marilyn Manson album to blast out at full volume. Then she threw herself face-down on the bed, wrapping her pillow around her head to shut out the music and the banging on her bedroom door, her mother’s voice shrill and hysterical somewhere far beyond it.