Coffin Road

Chapter sixteen

The skyline beyond the promenade that ran the length of the Portobello sands had probably not changed much since its heyday as a beach resort in the nineteenth century. Grand Victorian stone-built villas, and colourfully tarted terraces. Church spires and redbrick factory chimneys. For much of the twentieth century it had fallen out of fashion, only recently undergoing a renaissance that had seen the beach as crowded on a summer’s day as in the old photographs taken in the late eighteen hundreds that Karen had found on the internet.

Now, on this grey, blustery September morning, she and her godfather were the only souls leaving tracks in the sand. It was where he had suggested they meet. An unlikely place, but Karen had taken the bus out from the centre of town with butterflies colliding in her stomach. If Chris Connor had behaved oddly on her visit to the Geddes Institute, then his manner on the phone had been even stranger. Terse, almost monosyllabic. It was Karen’s clear impression that he could barely contain his impatience to hang up. But they had, at least, arranged to meet, albeit in this most unexpected of places.

Beyond their initial greeting, they had walked together in silence. Karen had wanted simply to blunder into the conversation, but she sensed Connor’s reticence, and forced herself to be patient. Bad weather out in the North Sea had driven seabirds back up the firth, and gulls wheeled overhead in the breeze, shrieking their anger at the sky. A little sunlight played through breaks in the cloud along the coastline of Fife on the far shore.

‘M-my wife’s left me,’ Connor said suddenly, and Karen was startled to a standstill. But he didn’t seem to notice and kept walking, and she had to run to catch him up.

‘Why?’

He shrugged. ‘She says I’m n-not who I used to be.’

‘But... why?’ Karen struggled to make sense of this unexpected turn. ‘I mean, what’s changed about you?’

He kept his eyes on some distant place that only he could see. ‘Everything, I suppose. Since your dad’s death.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘We were compatible, I think, only because we were so different. M-me and your dad, that is. He was... cavalier. Adventurous. Strong. I... I admired him enormously. But he was also impetuous, Karen, sometimes to the point of just plain foolishness. Headstrong and, well, for want of a better word, arrogant. No one was going to push him around, tell him what to do.’

Karen was wide-eyed and breathless. This was all new to her. A different picture of her dad. And she realised that the man she had known as her father was also someone else, someone she hadn’t really known at all. ‘And you?’

For the first time, her godfather smiled. ‘Oh, I was the sensible one. Conservative. Safe. Maybe that’s what he liked about me. I... I moderated his excesses. I was his anchor. Everywhere he went, he wanted me to go, too. Which is how, I suppose, we c-came to follow such a similar academic route, and both ended up working at the Geddes Institute.’ He turned to look at Karen for the first time. ‘Losing him was like losing the better, stronger half of me.’ And she was shocked to see his eyes fill with tears. He looked away quickly. ‘You see, I... I knew what he knew. And if he didn’t have the strength to deal with it... if a man like your father could take his own life... To be honest, I don’t know how I’ve got through these past two years. But a part of me died with him, Karen, and what was left couldn’t be the man my wife had married, the man she wanted me to be. It’s been...’ He searched for a word to express it, but could only come up with the mundane. ‘Difficult.’

Karen could no longer contain herself. ‘What do you mean, you knew what he knew? What did he know? Why did he kill himself?’

But he just shook his head. ‘It’s not that simple, Karen. There are no easy answers.’

‘Well, give me the difficult ones, then.’ Her frustration lent an edge to her voice that made him turn, forgetting himself for a moment and smiling fondly, his hesitancy disappearing like smoke in the wind.

‘You really are just like him, you know. I couldn’t get over that the other day when you came to the Geddes.’ Then his smile faded, and his gaze wandered off towards the far shore. ‘Your dad had been working on a study of bees, funded by Ergo.’

‘Bees? I didn’t know he was interested in bees.’

‘He wasn’t, particularly, before undertaking the study.’ Now he looked at her quite directly. ‘Wh-what do you know about bees, Karen?’

She shrugged. ‘They make honey. They sting you.’

He raised a rueful eyebrow. ‘Not unless they absolutely have to. It kills a honey bee to sting you, did you know that?’

Karen shook her head.

‘Unlike a wasp, or a bumble bee, which can sting you again and again, a honey bee’s sting is barbed, so it hooks into your skin, and when they try to fly away it rips their insides out. Eviscerates them.’ He plunged his hands deep into the pockets of his coat, and his heels seemed to dig deeper into the wet sand with each step. The tide was well out now, and every so often they had to climb over the groynes that subdivided the beach. ‘There are more than twenty thousand different species of bee, most of which aren’t even honey bees, but together they are the biggest single pollinators of plants on earth. You understand the process of pollination?’

Karen was indignant. ‘Of course I do. I got an A in biology. Transferring pollen from the male to the female reproductive organs of plants makes babies. It’s all about sex, really.’

He grinned and she knew she was making him think of her father again. ‘Exactly. And those babies are the fruits and nuts, or the vegetables and grain that feed us.’ The stutter had vanished as his passion kicked in. ‘Bees pollinate seventy of the roughly one hundred crop species that feed the world, Karen. Einstein was once quoted as saying that if the bee became extinct the human race would die out within four years. Apocryphal, of course, but not that far from the truth. Without the bee, there is no way we could sustain the current human and animal population of the planet. People would suffer from poor nutrition, increased disease. There would be mass starvation. Those of us left would have to survive on a radically reduced and very expensive diet. Workers would have to be employed on the grand scale to hand-pollinate plants. Can you imagine? But they’ve already started it in China. In the end, only the rich would be able to eat well.’

‘Wow.’ Karen tried to absorb all that her godfather was telling her. She had known, though she didn’t know how, that bees were important, but just how important was news to her. ‘Wouldn’t affect meat, though, I guess.’

But Connor shook his head. ‘Oh, yes, it would.’ And she saw how there was fire again in his eyes, replacing the cataracts of uncertainty that had clouded them earlier. ‘The production of animal fodder is bee dependent, too. In the US alone, bees pollinate more than thirty million hectares of alfalfa that gets cut and bailed as hay for horses and cattle, and fermented as haylage for dairy cows. Without it, they would have to return to traditional grazing, winter feed would be poor, and meat production would plummet.’ He fixed her with staring eyes that seemed somehow to be seeking her approval.

Karen whistled softly. ‘Guess we can’t do without the bee, then.’

He drew a deep breath. ‘We might have to, Karen. The agrochem industry claims that bee populations have varied hugely over the centuries. Affected by disease, environmental change, any number of different factors. Which is true. But here’s the thing: bees are dying off now faster than they’ve ever done in history.’ He stopped in his tracks and turned his face towards her. ‘Christ, Karen, between thirty and fifty per cent of the bee population of the United States alone is dying every year.’

Karen found herself gripped by his intensity. ‘And we don’t know why?’

‘Well, yes. And no. A few of the causes we’ve identified and understand. Changes in farming practices, the destruction of natural habitat, disease, parasites. But other causes are a mystery. You know, in the US, they harness bees on an industrial scale to pollinate crops, truck them all over the country and sell their services to farmers. There’s a phenomenon there that they call CCD. Colony Collapse Disorder. The bees simply vanish. Leave the hive and never return. No one knows why. But it’s destroying that industry and threatening to ruin crops. There are barely enough of them left to pollinate the almond crop in California.’ He turned abruptly and started walking quickly towards the next groyne, and Karen almost had to run to keep up. ‘It is going to cost the US economy billions, Karen. Not millions. Billions! Replicate that on a worldwide scale and we’re talking hundreds of billions.’ He gave a bitter little chuckle. ‘As with all things in this world, money’s never far from the centre of them.’

Karen grabbed his arm to make him stop. ‘What’s any of this got to do with my dad, Chris?’

He turned to face her and wild eyes searched hers. ‘You would think, wouldn’t you,’ he said, ‘that, with so much at stake, everyone everywhere would be doing what they could to solve the problem, to protect the bees?’

‘Well, why wouldn’t they?’

‘Money, Karen. Fucking money!’ His voice rose almost to a shout, and Karen was startled, but more by his language than his tenor. She had never heard him swear before. Just as she had never heard her father use bad language. She supposed that adults did swear, just not in front of the children. But it still came as a shock to hear it. He relented, and uncertainty consumed him again. ‘I... I’m sorry.’

Karen stood awkwardly, looking at him. And he wouldn’t meet her eye. After a moment, she stepped in and put her arms around him. He tensed, then after a few seconds she felt him relax, and his arms slipped tentatively around her, and they stood in a long, silent embrace. Two solitary figures on an empty beach. Beyond them, somewhere out there in the firth, they had both lost someone they loved.

When, finally, they broke apart, she said, ‘Tell me.’

He was pale now, and resigned somehow. He nodded, and they resumed their walk towards the distant pavilion. But their pace was more leisurely now. He watched his feet as they walked, scliffing the wet, compacted sand left by the recently retreated tide, and she slipped her arm through his. She felt as close to her father in this moment as she had in years.

He said, ‘The project that Ergo had funded Tom to pursue was...’ He forced a smile. ‘You’ll laugh. It sounds so prosaic.’ And he put an emphasis on each of the words. ‘The impact of floral diversity on bee resilience and learning capacity.’ He looked at her and took in her expression. His laugh was spontaneous and genuine. ‘Yeah, exactly. In other words, they wanted to find out how poor diet affected the performance of bees.’ He hesitated. ‘But they wanted your dad to do something else, which I think was the real object of the exercise. You’ve heard of neonicotinoids?’

Karen shook her head. ‘Sounds like it might have something to do with tobacco.’

‘Close. It’s actually a class of insecticides that are chemically similar to nicotine. They have unpronounceable names like clothianidin and imidacloprid. Anyway, a bunch of them got banned by the European Union about three years ago, because there was strong scientific evidence that treating crops with this stuff was harmful to bees. Some scientists were even claiming that it was the primary cause of the sudden decline in bee populations. Trouble is, there was no actual proof. No smoking gun. And the big agrochemical companies, Ergo among them, were furious. Loss of revenue from the banning of these products was running to billions a year.’

Connor stopped suddenly and stooped to pick up a shell lodged in the sand. A classic small scallop shell. He turned it over in his fingers.

‘Big corporations run the world, Karen. Biotech, agrochemical, oil. They are bigger than a lot of governments. And in certain cases they turn over more in profit than the GDP of many small countries. They wield enormous influence. Politicians and political parties, particularly in America, rely on them to fund election campaigns. They are powerful lobbyists. Which is why the US has not banned the use of neonicotinoids, and thousands of tons of the stuff are still being used on crops there every year. Biggest usage is on oilseed rape. They coat the seeds with insecticide, so that, when it germinates, the insecticide is diffused throughout the plant, including the nectar and pollen that’s harvested by the bees.’

‘In spite of the danger to them?’

Connor laughed. ‘Well, of course, the agrochem companies say there is no danger. They produce all these studies showing that the level at which their insecticides are found in the environment has no effect on bees.’

Karen raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?’

‘Which is why Ergo was keen to have an independent researcher — your dad — show unequivocally that neonicotinoids do not kill bees, and are therefore not responsible for the decline in bee populations.’

‘And did he?’

Connor nodded. ‘He did. They got him to repeat an industry experiment that exposed bees to levels of insecticide one hundred and forty times higher than you would typically find in areas where the stuff had been used on crops. An absolutely toxic level of imidacloprid, which you might think would simply wipe out all the bees exposed to it. It didn’t. Only about fifty per cent died. A level they call LD50. And proof that, at normal levels, neonicotinoids were not at all toxic to bees.’

‘Wow. So what did my dad do?’

‘Well, Ergo were keen to have him speak out in support of his findings.’

‘And he did that?’

Connor sighed and nodded. ‘He published his research, Karen. Ergo put out press releases and made his findings available to every media outlet on the planet. He spoke at several industry conventions. Making him very unpopular with the environmental lobby.’ He shrugged. ‘I mean, your dad was a scientist, Karen. These were his findings.’

Karen said, ‘Why do I have the feeling there’s a but somewhere in our future?’

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.