Coffin Road

Chapter twenty-one

Karen sat at a table outside the Kilimanjaro Coffee shop in Nicolson Street, oblivious of the fact that she was smoking in full view of the British Heart Foundation next door. Buses and taxis rumbled past, filling the air with noise and fumes, and obliterating the view of the church opposite.

But she heard nothing, saw nothing. Felt nothing. Except for the fear that seeped in behind the numbness.

Poor Chris, she kept thinking, over and over again. And wondering whether he would still be alive if she hadn’t gone to see him. If he hadn’t given her the letter and told her the things he had. She had spilled tears for him in the taxi on the way back to the city, but her eyes were dry now, burning, and red like the paintwork on the facade of the coffee shop.

She stubbed out her cigarette and lit another with shaking fingers.

An accident on the bypass, the girl at the Geddes had said. And maybe, after all, that’s just what it had been. An accident. But given how agitated Chris had been about speaking to her at all, and Richard Deloit’s behaviour in London yesterday, Karen found it hard to believe. You are putting his life in danger, Deloit had said of her father. Did that mean she had also put Chris’s life in danger? Was she responsible for his death? She buried her face in her hands and couldn’t bear to face the thought. Because if she was, then perhaps she really was putting her dad’s life in danger, too. But if it was true, she still had no idea how that was possible.

She lifted her head from her hands and breathed deeply. There was no way, now, that she could go home, having stolen money and a credit card, and refused to answer a single one of her mother’s calls. Never mind the fact that she had barely been at school in the last week. No, there was no way back.

But what was the way forward? Where would she stay? How would she survive once they cancelled the credit card? Who could she turn to? There was no one else. Deloit wouldn’t speak to her. Chris was dead. Again, she choked on the thought.

She closed her eyes and replayed her final moments with him, walking together on the beach at Portobello, occasional daubs of sunlight burnishing patches out on the firth. And suddenly she remembered that there was someone else. A loose thread that it had never even occurred to her to follow back to its source. Her father’s student. The one who had conducted the experiment with him. Billy... What was it Chris had called him? Billy, Billy... Carr! It returned to her suddenly as she replayed Chris’s voice in her head. Billy Carr. What had happened to him? He had just vanished, Chris said. There one day, gone the next. But people, Karen knew, didn’t just vanish without trace. People leave tracks, most of them electronic, and Karen had a thought about how she might find and follow Billy Carr’s trail, like the loose thread that he was, back to its source.

By late afternoon it was spitting rain, and Karen had her hood pulled up as she leaned back against the sitting rail in the bus shelter. But not because of the rain. A lot of the kids passing would probably recognise her, so she kept her head down, face obscured by the hood, and only revealed it on occasion when she glanced up the road in search of a familiar figure.

It had been an unbearably long day, treading water, counting off the minutes and the hours until school would be out. Walking the length of Princes Street, sitting in the park at lunchtime, eating sandwiches from a plastic wrapper and watching the trains rumble in and out of Waverley. Feeling small and very vulnerable in the shadow of the castle. Now she was starting to fear that she had wasted her time, and that Gilly was not at school today. Maybe she’d been off sick, and Karen could have gone straight to her house hours ago. The thought almost induced her to kick out at the perspex wall of the bus shelter.

But then she saw her. On her own, as usual. Sauntering down the road in no particular hurry, absently swinging her school bag from her free hand. Raising a cigarette to her lips with the other. The only time she wasn’t on her own was when she was with Karen, though Karen was aware that Gilly was actually one hundred per cent self-reliant. She only really tolerated Karen because they were cerebral equals. Or very nearly. Karen was certain that she topped her friend by a couple of IQ points, and that Gilly knew it, which is why she had never revealed to Karen the result of the Mensa test she had taken last year. But what was a couple of points between friends? The truth was that no one else in the school came anywhere close to their level of intelligence. Which made them at the same time outcasts and misfits.

Gilly didn’t even notice her as she wandered by. It was only Karen’s ‘Hey!’ that caught her attention. She turned, surprised, not immediately recognising her, until Karen pushed back the hood. And then her eyes widened. ‘Jesus, girl! What have you done to your hair?’ But she didn’t wait for an answer. ‘And...’ She peered at her. ‘Christ! I knew there was something different about you. All the ironmongery’s gone.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Hated that stuff. But, bloody hell, you look naked without it now.’ Then she frowned. ‘You been crying? Fuck’s sake, you look hellish.’

Karen struggled to prevent tears welling up in her eyes again. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Can always rely on you to make a bad day worse.’

Gilly sighed. ‘You are in such trouble, I can’t begin to tell you.’

And in spite of everything she felt, Karen smiled. ‘See?’

Gilly grinned. ‘Jesus Christ, come here.’ And she put her arms around her friend and squeezed her so hard she almost stopped her breathing. By the time she let her go, the tears were coursing down Karen’s cheeks and she had to use both palms to wipe them away. Gilly gazed at her with concern. ‘Your mum’s been up at the school. And I think she’s been to the police to report you missing. Officially.’

‘Stupid bitch,’ Karen said, and remembered Deloit calling her exactly that just yesterday. ‘I need help, Gilly. Can I come back to your place? I need to use your computer.’

Gilly shrugged. ‘What am I going to tell my mum?’

‘Does she know I’m... missing?’

‘Well, I haven’t said anything to her. Your mum spoke to me at school this morning. Wanted to know if I knew where you were. Of course, I didn’t. So she’d have no reason to go asking my mum. I mean, they’re hardly big pals anyway, are they?’

‘Good. I might need her to let me stay over tonight.’

‘Shouldn’t be a problem. We’ll just tell her your mum’s away at a wedding or something.’ She tugged on the strap of Karen’s backpack and grinned again. ‘And look, you’ve even got an overnight bag. So who’d ever know different?’

Gilly’s mum wasn’t at home when they got to the house, and they went straight up to Gilly’s attic room. Karen took off her hoodie and backpack, dropped into the two-seater settee pushed against the far wall and lit a cigarette. Four velux windows were set into walls that sloped up to the ceiling, and Gilly’s desk, with its impressive array of computer equipment bought by adoring parents to indulge her, stood against the wall below one of them. A top-of-the-range iMac with two ancillary Thunderbolt screens, a 12-terabyte external hard drive, a state-of-the-art sound system. If Karen had the edge on IQ points, Gilly’s family were wealthier than hers by a mile. The room, however, was a tip, as it always was. Gilly’s pathological untidiness as counterpoint to Karen’s manic sense of order.

Gilly slumped into her computer chair and lit a cigarette for herself. ‘You going to tell me?’

Karen thought about it. You are putting his life in danger, Deloit had said. And Chris was dead. ‘Nope.’

Gilly shrugged. ‘Fair enough. You don’t get to use my computer, then, and you can find somewhere else to spend the night.’

‘Bitch,’ Karen said.

Gilly raised an indifferent eyebrow. ‘You always knew it, didn’t you?’

Karen sighed and leaned forward. ‘Look. This is serious, okay? You don’t tell a soul. Not your folks, not anyone. People have died.’

‘Yeah, right. Who?’

‘My godfather, for a start.’

Gilly didn’t look impressed.

‘And what I’m doing, right now, might be putting my own dad’s life in danger.’

Gilly very nearly laughed. ‘Karen, your dad’s already dead.’

Karen closed her eyes and pulled on her cigarette. When she opened them again, she looked at Gilly very directly. ‘That’s just it: he’s not.’

Gilly’s cigarette paused halfway to her lips. For the first time, Karen had caught her interest. ‘So tell me.’

And Karen told her. Everything. About her meetings with Chris Connor, her father’s experiment with bees that had so upset Ergo, the box of her father’s belongings from the Geddes Institute, the letter from her dad. The phone call to Richard Deloit and her subsequent visit to London. And then the news, when she got back, of her godfather’s ‘accident’.

‘I need to find this Billy Carr,’ she said. ‘My dad’s student. He’s the only remaining link to him.’

‘A guy who disappeared nearly two years ago?’

‘He can only be a few years older than us, Gilly. Chances are he’ll be on social media. Twitter, or Facebook, or Snapchat or something. That’s why I need to use the computer.’ She stood up.

But Gilly didn’t move from her chair. She stubbed out her cigarette in an overflowing ashtray. ‘What you need is help.’

‘Why do you think I came to you?’

‘No, I mean adult help. We might be smart, K, but we’re just a couple of teenage girls. And if you really are up against a giant agrochemical corporation like Ergo, we’re no match for them. I mean, really! Get serious.’

Gilly’s words came like darts out of the dark, puncturing her fragile veneer of self-confidence and deflating all her hopes. ‘There is no one,’ she said.

‘Come on, think, K. Think. There must be. What about your dad’s family?’

Karen sighed. ‘His parents are dead. He has a brother somewhere in England, but they were never close and I haven’t seen him since Dad vanished. And that was the first time in years. I wouldn’t even know where to start looking for him.’ But even as she said it, she knew that she did. ‘Wait a minute! He sent me a friend request on Facebook about a month after Dad died. Of course, I accepted, but we never shared or commented on anything. In fact, I can’t even remember him making a single post. I’d forgotten all about him.’ She pushed Gilly out of her chair and swapped places with her in front of the computer.

‘Help yourself, why don’t you?’ Gilly said dryly.

But Karen wasn’t listening. She brought up Facebook on Gilly’s browser and logged in. At the top of her profile page, she clicked on Friends and the short list of her twenty-seven friends appeared, most of whom she barely knew and almost never interacted with. All but one had postage-stamp profile pics alongside their names. The one blank was a white profile on a grey background of an anonymous male head beside the name Michael Fleming. ‘That’s him.’ She clicked on his name and brought up his page.

It was blank. He had never posted a profile pic or cover photo. He had never entered any details about himself, where he lived or worked, or where he had been educated. There were no photos, no posts, and he had a single friend. Karen.

Gilly peered over her shoulder at the screen. ‘This is a dead account, girl. Maybe he thought it was a good idea at the time, and then never followed up on it. He obviously doesn’t use it.’

Karen sat staring at the screen. ‘That creeps me out, G. Like he’s just been watching me. All my posts, all my pics.’

‘Or he set it up on an impulse then forgot about it. One way of finding out.’

Karen turned to look up at her. ‘Send him a DM?’

Gilly shrugged. ‘Worth a try.’

Karen opened up a new message box and tapped in her uncle’s name. She thought briefly about what to say. Something that would grab his attention, elicit a response. If he ever checked it. And she typed, Uncle Michael, I think Dad might still be alive. Please get in touch. Short and to the point.

Gilly said, ‘Let’s give him a little time to respond. Depends what app he’s using. Some of them put alerts up on the screen.’

They heard a door banging shut downstairs, then Gilly’s mum’s voice. ‘Gilly? Are you home?’

‘Upstairs, Mum. Karen’s here.’

Karen whispered, ‘What if she’s heard I’m missing?’

Gilly grinned. ‘Let’s find out.’ And she raised her voice. ‘Can she stay over tonight? Her mum’s away at a wedding.’

‘No problem, love. You girls want something to eat? I can order pizza.’

‘Brilliant!’ Gilly called back down the stairs, then turned to high-five her friend. ‘What topping do you want?’

‘Chorizo?’

‘Awesome!’

They sat eating the pizza, when it came, at the breakfast bar in the kitchen. Karen, Gilly, and Gilly’s mum prattling inconsequentially as she made them mugs of tea. Karen had never much cared for her. She thought her vacuous, and really not very bright. Gilly got her brains from her dad, as Karen’s had come down the genetic line from hers. She was equally sure that Gilly’s mum seriously disapproved of her daughter’s friendship with the goth punk. But she smiled at Karen and asked politely how her mother was doing these days. As if she was interested. Out of wickedness, Karen said, ‘She’s doing fine since her lover moved in.’ Gilly’s mum’s mouth hung open, a slice of pizza on pause midway between it and her plate. ‘Her boss from the estate agency. Turns out they’d been having sex for years.’

When they got upstairs again, Gilly said, ‘Is that true? About your mum and her boss.’

‘Yep.’ Karen didn’t want to talk about it any more. Its shock value was all used up. She sat in Gilly’s seat and banished the screensaver. The brief message to her uncle was enclosed in a speech bubble that issued from her profile pic. The cursor was winking in the text box. But there was no reply. She sat staring at it, motionless, for too long, and Gilly became aware that something was wrong.

‘What is it?’

Karen’s voice was small and hushed. ‘What if it wasn’t my uncle I friended at all? What if it was Ergo pretending to be him so they could keep an eye on me?’

‘Oh my God!’ Gilly’s hand flew to her mouth. ‘Then you’ve just tipped them off that you know about your dad.’

Karen turned frightened blue eyes towards her friend. ‘How could we be so fucking stupid!’ She raised her eyes to the heavens. ‘Christ!’ Then, ‘We’ve got to find this Billy Carr guy. And fast.’

‘Okay, let me in.’ Gilly shoved her friend out of her seat and logged out of Karen’s Facebook. ‘First thing we do is disguise my IP address. Though that might just be shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted.’ She pulled up a piece of software called VPN Unlimited, and connected to an IP address registered somewhere in the south of England. ‘Okay.’ Now she logged into her own Facebook account and typed Billy Carr into the search window. A long list appeared of Carrs and Carvers and Carrolls and Carringtons, and other variations on Carr. But there were fewer Billy Carrs than either of them had expected, and it didn’t take long to narrow the list down to three in Scotland. The second one that Gilly brought up to look at in detail elicited a yelp from Karen.

‘There!’ She pointed at the screen. ‘Studied genetics and neurobiology at Glasgow University, then won a research fellowship at the Geddes Institute of Environmental Sciences in Edinburgh. That’s him.’

Gilly scrolled through his personal details, but most of them were blank. Apart from his school. ‘He went to Springburn Academy in Glasgow,’ she said. ‘So the family home must be somewhere in that catchment area. Let’s see how many Carrs there are in Glasgow.’ She switched screens and brought up the home page of the online BT Phone Book, tapping in Carr and Glasgow. ‘Twelve,’ she said, then grinned from ear to ear. ‘And only one in Springburn. A certain W. Carr in Hillhouse Street. Balornock, actually.’ She swiped to another screen and initiated Google Maps. She typed in the Hillhouse Street address and watched as a map of Springburn and Balornock materialised. ‘And just about two streets away from Springburn Academy.’

‘That must be him.’ Karen’s mouth was dry. ‘W for William; that’ll be his father. Probably named after him.’

But Gilly was back on Carr’s Facebook page on another screen. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Look at this.’ She was scrolling through an album of photographs he had posted and stopped suddenly on a group of young men gathered outside a four-in-the-block house on a street corner. A tidy garden lay beyond a black, wrought-iron fence, and a shiny new red car sat at the kerb. The young men, most of whom seemed to be in their late teens or early twenties, were gathered around it, grinning and laughing. Billy’s post read, My first car. Billy, the proud owner, was at the centre of the group, with several of his friends pointing fingers at him.

Karen leaned in to get a closer look at him. It was hard to judge his age, but the pic had been posted about eighteen months ago, and he looked around twenty-two or twenty-three. Judging by the car, he had done alright for himself after leaving the Geddes. His hair was longer than fashionable and drawn back in a short ponytail, and he sported a sparse-looking beard and moustache. But she could see that he was a good-looking boy, and with a car like that wouldn’t have trouble pulling girls.

But Gilly was pointing at the street sign bolted to the railings behind the group. ‘Look,’ she said, and Karen refocused her gaze. The sign read, Hillhouse Street. Gilly turned a smile towards her friend. ‘I knew Facebook would come in useful for something one day.’ Her smile faded. ‘What will you do? Phone? He might not be living at home any more.’

Karen shook her head. ‘No. It’s too easy for someone to hang up on you. I’ll get the train to Glasgow first thing tomorrow and go knocking on the door.’