by Peter May
It was Karen’s first time in this part of the country. She felt dwarfed by it, lost and insignificant, and it cast a doubtful perspective on her foolish endeavour to track down Billy Carr in some distant, hidden valley. But his address, at least, had a postcode, so it couldn’t be impossible to find.
At last the train rumbled into the tiny station at Strathcarron, the village of Lochcarron strung out along the far shore of the loch itself, the jagged peaks of the Torridon mountains rising into an ominous sky. She was the sole passenger to leave the train here, stepping down on to a deserted platform, a blue and cream-painted rusty metal bridge straddling the track. As the train pulled away, she felt dumped and deserted in the middle of nowhere. She zipped up her hoodie and went out into a small car park. There wasn’t much here. A line of whitewashed cottages stretched away along a narrow lane. There was a Post Office in what might once have been the old station house, and beyond the car park, the Strathcarron Hotel.
Here, she asked a smiling young receptionist if she could call her a taxi. ‘Where are you going?’ the girl asked, and Karen showed her Billy Carr’s postcard. She frowned. ‘No idea where that is. The driver’ll probably know, though.’
The driver didn’t. It took fifteen minutes for him to come and pick her up from the car park behind the station, and when he looked at the address he shook his head. ‘Strathdarroch? Never heard of it, and I’ve lived here all my life.’ Then he grinned. ‘Thank the good Lord for GPS, eh?’
Programmed with Billy Carr’s postcode, the GPS took them off into the wilderness on a single-track road that rose up through wild, uncultivated country in the approximate direction of Loch Kishorn, or so the driver said. They passed through Forestry Commission plantation, and then what might have been the remains of ancient Caledonian forest, stands of ragged Scots pines and the deciduous oaks and birch and aspen of Scotland’s long-vanished temperate rainforest.
It took almost twenty-five minutes before the driver turned into a metalled cul-de-sac, where a wooden gate blocked their further progress and the road became a rutted track that cut up the hill through thick forest.
‘It’s up that track somewhere, love. But I’m afraid this is as far as I can take you. Rip the underside off my car if I try and drive her up there.’
Karen was reluctant to get out of the taxi. If she couldn’t find the Darroch Cottage of Billy Carr’s address, she would be stranded out here with nowhere to go, and no way back. They hadn’t seen a cottage, or a car, or any other sign of life for the last fifteen minutes. The light was already starting to fade from the east, and there could be no more than a couple of hours of daylight left. If she let the driver go, she was absolutely on her own. She checked her phone. There wasn’t even a signal here to call for help. ‘How much do I owe you?’ she said, in a voice that sounded a great deal more confident than she felt.
‘Forty-five quid, love.’ He paused. ‘Sure you know where you’re going?’
She nodded, almost afraid to speak in case the fear that was churning in her stomach would make her throw up.
After she had paid him, she stepped out into the dusk and watched as he turned the car and headed back the way they had come. She stood for a long time, listening to the sound of its motor fading into the early evening, until she could hear nothing except for the birdcall that filled the air all around her and, somewhere, the distant sound of running water.
Finally, with feet like lead, she unlatched the gate and slipped through it, fastening it again behind her, and started up through the trees, darkness closing in around her. She had never felt so entirely alone.
With her eyes turned down, watching each and every step on the ridges and ruts of the track so that she didn’t turn her ankle, she failed to notice how the trees around her were beginning to thin. And when finally she looked up, she saw that the track was leading her out of the forest and into a beaten clearing that sat in the lee of the hills.
Off to the right, on the very edge of the forest, stood a dilapidated stone cottage with a lean-to extension. To the left, a tiny loch lay still and dark in the gathering gloom, its waters lapping gently against the edge of the clearing. On the far side of it, a small waterfall tumbled through trees and rocks to send ripples arcing out towards its centre. A dusty, mud-spattered red Mitsubishi four-wheel-drive Outlander sat at an angle under the shade of a mountain ash growing among a cluster of rocks. Billy Carr, it seemed, liked red.
As she crossed the clearing, a couple of brown hens went skittering and clucking away into the trees, and she called out, ‘Hello, anybody there?’
She was rewarded with a silence broken only by the birds. The door to the cottage stood ajar, and she could see that the place lay in darkness beyond it. She reached out a hand and pushed the door open into the dark. The hinges creaked like a sound effect from a bad horror movie.
‘Hello?’
Still nothing. She stepped inside and allowed a few moments for her pupils to dilate. Most of the footprint was occupied by a single room, cluttered with old furniture standing at odd angles on an uneven stone floor. A sofa and a couple of armchairs, horsehair bursting through where the upholstery was worn thin or torn. An old rocking chair, with a red cushion, pulled up beside a wood-burning stove set in what must have been the original fireplace. To the left of the door, a dining table covered by an old, stained cloth was cluttered with all manner of bric-a-brac. A fishing rod and flies, boxes, and torn-open cartons of some kind of scientific supplies. There was a pair of large, padded white gloves, an SLR camera fitted into a bracket with a clamp on one end, a scattering of inch-long red plastic tubes with flip-over lids.
Through an open door that led into the lean-to, she saw dirty dishes piled around an old Belfast sink. A gas cooker caked in grease. She heard the hum of a refrigerator. The air was thick with the odour of stale cooking and woodsmoke.
‘Can I help you?’
The voice startled her, and she wheeled around to find herself faced by a tall figure wearing a white circular hat. Netting that hung from its wide brim obscured the face, like an alien from the same horror movie as the door with the sound effect. She let out a small, involuntary scream.
A hand shot up to whip away the hat and reveal the grinning, bearded face of the young man whose photographs she had seen on the Billy Carr Facebook page. His hair was longer. The beard, too. And it tangled around a tanned face that was more handsome in life than captured on a screen. He wore a grubby white T-shirt and jeans tucked into mud-caked boots. He said, ‘That’s the trouble with this country practice of leaving your doors open. Sometimes folk wander in uninvited.’
Karen recaptured a little of her composure. ‘I’m sorry. As you say, the door was open. I’m looking for Billy Carr.’
He looked at her appraisingly. ‘Oh, are you? And I suppose you’ll be the Karen who told my maw that I knew her from the Geddes.’ He chucked his hat on to the table and swung a pack from his back to set down on the floor at his feet. ‘She was pretty pissed off at you stealing my postcard and running off without so much as a thank you or goodbye. Good thing my email address was in her mailer, or she’d never have been able to get in touch with me.’ His smile had long gone. ‘So you want to tell me what the fuck your game is?’
Karen took a half-step back. ‘I’ve come a long way to see you, Billy.’
The grin returned, although there was no humour in it that Karen could see. ‘All the way from Glasgow, no doubt. I’m flattered. There’s not many lassies would travel that far just to see me. Must be my irresistible charm, eh?’ The grin vanished again. ‘Or maybe not. What are you after, Karen?’ And he put a heavily sarcastic emphasis on her name.
She was determined not to be intimidated and stuck out a defiant jaw. ‘I was hoping you could tell me whether or not my father is still alive.’
It was as if a light had been switched out behind his face. Darkness fell across it like a shadow, and his black eyes widened. ‘Jesus Christ! Karen Fleming?’
*
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Karen sat at the space Billy had cleared for them on the table and smoked nervously as she waited for him to come back out from the kitchen. He had already broken the seal on a bottle of Australian shiraz and poured them each a glass of the dark purple wine. She didn’t much like the taste of it, and left it untouched after the first sip.
Now he arrived with a wooden chopping board laden with chunks of cheese and glistening, freshly washed grapes, and half a French loaf, which he cut into pieces on the table and dropped into a basket with a hand engrained by grime and punctuated by the odd bee sting.
‘Not really hungry,’ Karen said.
Billy sat down opposite her and shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’ He cut some slices of cheese to lay along a piece of bread, which he wolfed down hungrily, washing it over with a mouthful of wine. As he picked a couple of grapes from the bunch, he said, ‘You know as well as I do that your father’s dead.’
‘I know as well as you do that he’s not.’
He eyed her suspiciously. ‘And just how exactly would you know that?’
‘He left me a letter, which I wasn’t supposed to get for another year.’
Billy paused, with a grape at his lips. ‘What, and he told you in this letter that he was still alive?’
‘As good as.’
‘Fuck!’ He popped the grape past his waiting lips and bit down on it to release its sweet juices into his mouth. ‘Why would he do that?’
‘Because he figured that, by the time I read it, he wouldn’t have to pretend any longer that he had committed suicide.’
Billy gazed at her thoughtfully while he took another mouthful of bread and cheese. ‘Aye, well, since he didn’t mean you to get it for another year, maybe he still wants people to go on thinking that. Does it not occur to you that by blowing his secret you could maybe be putting his life at risk?’
She drew on her cigarette and blew smoke into the thick, fetid air of the cottage. ‘Funny. You’re the second person to suggest that in the last couple of days.’
He frowned. ‘Oh, yeah? Who else?’
‘Richard Deloit.’
Billy’s eyes opened wide. ‘Deloit spoke to you?’
‘Well, no. I spoke to him, and he as good as told me to fuck off.’
He breathed consternation through his nose. ‘So why are you pursuing this?’
‘Maybe if you’d ever lost your father, only to find out that he was still alive, you wouldn’t have to ask.’
He took a large gulp of wine. ‘Aye, well, I know what it’s like to lose a father, right enough. It’s tough. Especially when you’re still a kid. Different for a girl, maybe, but for someone like me, suddenly it brings responsibilities.’
‘Your mother.’
He nodded. ‘I’d fucking do anything for her, you know? She and my old man both. Sacrificed almost everything to send me to a good school. I mean, there’s not many kids from Balornock get to go to Hutcheson’s Grammar, do they? A working-class boy among all the toffs. School fees, university. I owe them everything. And my dad goes and dies just when she needs him most. So it’s down to me now. Payback. Not that I resent it. I love that woman.’
And Karen wondered how it must feel to love your mother. ‘So what are you doing here?’ she said.
He placed his glass carefully on the table and thought about it. Then he stood up. ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you.’
He lifted his beekeeper’s hat and walked out from the gloom of the cottage into the dusky pink twilight of the clearing. Karen stubbed out her cigarette and followed. He led her then along a well-worn path that wound its way through the trees. A startled fawn bounded away into the darkness of the woods, crashing through the undergrowth and sending birds screeching and cawing into the high branches.
After just a few minutes they emerged into a natural clearing where trees had been brought down by rockfall from the hill above, and eighteen beehives stood secured to wooden pallets set among the rocks and the tangling remains of fallen tree trunks.
They cast shadows there in the dying light, among the trees, like sentinels standing guard over the future of mankind. A few bees were still making their return to the hives at the end of a long day of foraging for pollen. Billy went to the nearest of them and removed the lid and the crown board, setting them carefully on the ground beside it. He turned to see that Karen had not moved from her place on the clearing’s edge.
‘Come and see,’ he said. ‘They’ll not sting you unless they think you present a threat.’ He grinned. ‘Though they like to crawl into tight, dark spaces, like nostrils and ears. That’s why the hat.’ And he put it on, letting the netting drape itself over his shoulders, before reaching in to slide out one of eleven frames containing honeycomb and crawling with bees.
Karen approached cautiously, nervous of the bees that buzzed around the hive, and the netted figure of Billy Carr as he held up the frame. They were crawling all over his hands, but he didn’t seem troubled by them.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘Aren’t they beautiful? A perfect matriarchal society, behaviour elaborately preordained for perpetuation of the species. The honey and the beeswax and the propolis are just side products that we have learned to harvest. If there is some kind of intelligent design to this world, Karen, then bees are the key to the survival of Man. Even if it was only a random process of evolution, we can’t do without them.’
Karen nodded. ‘I know.’
‘What do you know?’
‘I know that they pollinate two-thirds or more of the fruit and vegetables and nuts, and other crops that feed us. I know that without them tens of millions of people or more would probably starve to death.’
He grinned. ‘Your father’s daughter, I see.’
‘Actually, it was Chris Connor that told me about bees.’
Billy glowered. ‘Connor? What the fuck’s he been saying?’
‘That you and my dad did an experiment proving that neonic pesticides are screwing with bees’ brains.’
‘Fucking idiot! He should have known better than to go opening his mouth like that.’ Billy slid the frame back into place and started replacing the crown board and lid.
‘That fucking idiot was my godfather. And he won’t be opening his mouth again, because he’s dead.’
Billy turned, removing his hat, and she saw that his face had gone deathly pale. ‘Dead? How?’
‘A car accident. Apparently. The day after he met me and told me all about you and my dad, and your experiment.’ She paused and cast her gaze over the eighteen silent sentinels. ‘You’re repeating the experiment, aren’t you?’
He sighed and seemed resigned to the fact that there was little point in trying to hide the truth from her any more. He nodded. ‘Here and at two other sites. Chosen because of their purity. Areas uncontaminated by pesticides or herbicides. So that, when we introduce neonics to the diet of the bees, we know with certainty no other cause can be attributed to the effects. We even monitor the bees for disease and mites, though that’s not really a problem, since we had the original colonies checked and declared disease-free before we brought them on site.’
‘So nine of these would be control hives?’
He raised his eyebrows in surprise. ‘Oh, you know about that, do you?’
‘Chris explained.’ She nodded towards the hives. ‘I’m assuming that you let the bees in half of the hives forage for pollen naturally, and feed the other half with . . . what? Imidacloprid?’
Billy grinned now. ‘You must have been paying attention, girl. You’d make a good student.’ He paused. ‘We actually let both groups forage naturally, and at certain times feed both groups sugar syrup. The difference is that we introduce tiny quantities of imidacloprid into the sugar syrup of the non-control group. The kind of quantities they would expect to encounter in the pollen and nectar of any environment where crops have been treated by neonic pesticides. About 2.5 parts per billion, which is already proven not to kill bees.’
‘But it destroys thei
r learning and memory.’
He nodded grimly. ‘It does.’
‘How do you know that, Billy?’
‘Because we monitor their performance.’
‘How? How’s that possible?’
He shrugged. ‘Lots of ways. We measure the colony once a week by weighing the hives. But only at night, when they’ve all returned. We mark the queen to keep an eye on her and make sure she’s not been replaced. We photograph all the frames, after shaking off the bees, to estimate areas of honey stores, and pollen, sealed brood, larvae, eggs. We place cameras above the entrance to the hives to collect data on activity levels. Mainly the number of bees returning with pollen. We can measure the amount of pollen gathered by using pollen traps. And we can use that same pollen, when foraging is good and they’re not interested in the sugar syrup, to contaminate it with imidacloprid then give back to them the following day. We even screen foraging bees for gut parasites at the entrance to the hive using a handheld field microscope.’
‘So the effect of the pesticide is measurable?’
‘Absolutely. And, Karen, it is seriously fucking with their ability to do their job.’ He grinned. ‘Which is . . . ?’ He held open hands out towards her to prompt a response.
She tutted and raised her eyes skyward. ‘To feed the world.’
He rang an imaginary bell. ‘Brrrrring! Well done, you’ve just won a microscope and a holiday for two in a tropical rainforest somewhere in South America.’
She shook her head and smiled in spite of herself.
‘What’s amazing about bees, Karen, is their ability to associate colour and smell with good food sources. You can actually teach them to remember and identify smells that will lead them to food. They are so good at it that the military are now using bees to sniff out explosives, like landmines, or IEDs. Feed them after exposing them to the smell of any explosive substance, and they will identify it with food. Release a bunch of bees where you suspect there are buried landmines, and they will immediately cluster around them, smelling the explosive. Without, of course, setting them off.’ His face clouded. ‘But the effect of the neonics is to destroy that ability. It damages their brain cells. The cells don’t die, but they stop generating the energy that fuels their memory. So they don’t remember the smell, or the colour, or the way to the food or the way back. And, you know, bees communicate all this information to one another by these amazing dances they do in the hives. Where the good food is, what direction to go, how far. But, without memory, there is no accurate communication. And, without either, the colony will wither and die.’ He turned to wave his arm towards his hives. ‘And that’s exactly what’s been happening here.’
