by Peter May
He raised his head, and Karen followed his gaze up through the trees to where the first stars were appearing faintly as blue faded to black. He took her by the arm, and she was reminded momentarily of Richard Deloit and the way he had expelled her from the offices of OneWorld. ‘Come on, we should go back to the cottage before it gets dark and we get lost in the woohooooods.’ He waved his arms, ghostlike in the air, and laughed. ‘Actually, after eighteen months of this, I reckon I could make it back blindfolded.’
*
Darkness fell suddenly, and evening became night even before they got back to the cottage. Strangely, it almost seemed lighter. The sky was clear and crusted with stars, and a nearly full moon rose up over the hills to cast its shimmering silver luminescence on the still, reflective surface of the loch.
Billy switched on a light when they entered the cottage, and the dismal yellow that washed over the room from the single naked bulb at its centre made it seem even more miserable. It really was a mess, Karen saw now. The floor strewn with discarded food wrappers and cigarette ends, and dried mud from caked boots. Clothes lay over the backs of chairs, and socks and underwear hung drying from a rack near the stove. Karen looked around with disgust. The contrast with the pristine, sanitised middle-class existence that her mother had contrived for her in suburban Edinburgh could hardly have been more stark, or unpleasant.
Billy followed her eyes and looked embarrassed. He ran his hand back through his hair as if somehow trying to make himself more presentable. ‘If I’d known I was having a visitor, I’d have tidied up. Never seems much point when you’re just on your own.’ He nodded towards a large flat-screen television in the corner. ‘TV’s my only company. No signal up here, of course. I’ve got a satellite dish out back.’
Karen could only imagine how depressing it would be. ‘And you’ve been here eighteen months?’
‘Yep. Had a wee break during the winter months. Without that, I’d have gone stir-crazy a long time ago. Thank God it’s just about over.’
‘Is it?’
‘Pollen season’s all but finished. We’ve got two years of results from three separate sources. Identical experiments with eighteen hives, each in contaminant-free environments. Covers all the variables so that the statistician can draw incontrovertible conclusions.’
‘Statistician?’
‘Yep. An independent fourth party, who takes all our figures and results and crunches the numbers. When his report on our experiment gets published, it’s going to blow the agrochem industry out of the water, Karen.’
‘So you already know what the results are?’
‘Well, we anticipated what they might be. But I haven’t actually seen the final figures myself.’
‘Why not? If you’re taking all these daily and weekly measurements, then you have all the figures yourself, surely?’
‘Not the most important ones.’ He headed towards a door in the far corner of the room. ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’
Karen followed him into what must once have been a storeroom of some kind, built out from the back of the cottage under a sloping roof. The light he turned on here was much brighter than the one in the sitting room, throwing everything into sharp relief. In contrast to the chaos outside, there was a sense of order in the tiny secret lab that it revealed. Worktops set out with scientific equipment. Microscopes, micropipettes, tweezers and scissors. Electrical equipment, a laptop, a small freezer humming in the corner. Shelves laden with glass jars and Petri dishes and bottles. Everything was shiny clean, and, unlike the air in the sitting room, there was a smell in this little room of antiseptic, almost hospital-like.
‘This is the nerve centre, so to speak. Most of the rest of what we do is keeping and collecting numbers. Figures. Statistics. Here, under that microscope, we dissect contaminated bees towards the end of their pollen-collecting lives, which are only about three weeks long, by the way. We remove brain matter and send it in ice-packed flasks to a laboratory in Edinburgh.’ He laughed. ‘I’m sure the good folks in the Post Office down in Strathcarron must wonder what it is I’ve been sending away in these wee parcels every week. But, anyway, the lab in Edinburgh measures levels of the contaminant, and is then able to relate them to cell damage.’
Karen looked at him. ‘But they don’t send the results back to you?’
‘No. They all go to the PI, along with all my stats, and those from –’ he grinned – ‘my co-conspirator.’
‘PI?’
‘Principal Investigator. He’s the team leader. The third in our little triumvirate.’ Billy turned out the light and pulled the door shut behind them as they went back out to the sitting room. ‘All the data goes to him, and he’s the one who feeds it to the statistician.’
Karen shook her head. ‘I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t you all share in the data?’
‘Because the PI trusts nobody but himself, Karen. Not even me, or Sam. And the PI’s known Sam since his university days. But he’s probably right to be so careful, because these bastards will go to any lengths to stop us publishing.’
‘Ergo?’
Billy nodded. ‘That’s why all the secrecy. I’m sure they know what we’re doing, just not exactly who’s doing it or where.’ He sat down at the table and took out a tin filled with loose tobacco and a chunk of cannabis resin wrapped in silver paper. ‘See, nobody’s done this kind of detailed research before, Karen, because the only people likely to fund it would be the industry themselves. And they just bury the results that they don’t like.’ His laugh lacked humour. ‘That’s why, when your dad went to Ergo with the results of our accidental experiment, they buried us. Threatened to withdraw funding from the Geddes, got your dad sacked and my fellowship withdrawn.’ He turned to look at her. ‘I wasn’t kidding when I said publication of our results would blow them out of the water. The European Union will be forced to extend its ban on neonicotinoids. The fucking British government, would you believe, has been trying to get that ban lifted, under pressure from the farmers’ union. So they’re going to have to change their tune pretty bloody fast. And then there’s the Americans. They’ve been resisting all attempts at banning neonics. We are going to leave them with no choice.’
‘And the agrochem industry is not going to be very happy.’
‘Fucking right, they’re not!’ He held the flickering flame of his lighter under the little tinfoil package he had made containing the cannabis. ‘They don’t care about the planet or the bees, Karen. They don’t give a shit about people starving. All they care about is money. Profit. The bottom line. Like the tobacco industry’s big five, they are just in total denial. And trust me, they will do anything, anything, to stop us from publishing.’
He laid tobacco along a sheet of cigarette paper and crumbled the cooked resin into it, before rolling it up, licking the gummed edge and sticking it down. He put the deformed-looking cigarette to his lips and lit it, drawing deeply and holding the smoke in for some moments before blowing it out.
He held the spliff out to Karen. ‘Want a drag?’
She took it, and sucked hot smoke into her lungs. When she exhaled, she felt a sense of something like relief wash over her. She handed it back and looked very directly at Billy. ‘The PI. The Principal Investigator. That’s my father, isn’t it?’
Billy took another long pull, then slowly nodded as he blew smoke at the ceiling.
*
The moon was almost startling in its clarity. It had risen well above the hills now, shrinking in size as it rose above the Earth’s atmosphere. But vivid in its illumination, sprinkling colourless light across the hills and the trees, reflecting in the waterfall at the far side of the loch and delineating the ripples it sent out towards Karen, who stood at the water’s edge contemplating all the contradictions of her young life.
That her father was still alive was confirmed now beyond doubt. But elation in that discovery was tempered by the anger that still festered at what he had put her through these last two years.
&nbs
p; Yellow light spilled out across the clearing as the door of the cottage opened, and Billy’s shadow extended long across the dry, beaten earth. It grew even longer, then faded, as he moved towards her, until she saw his reflection in the water as he reached her shoulder. ‘A month ago,’ he said, ‘you couldn’t have stood out here on a night like this. The midges would have eaten you alive.’ He chuckled. ‘Just one of the many joys of living here. Midges from June to September, cleggs in June and July, cold bloody weather in spring and autumn. We had snow here in May, and they’re predicting an early frost next week.’ He looked at her. ‘Where are you staying tonight?’
She laughed. ‘Well, I was hoping that might be here. Not really anywhere else for me to go, is there?’
He shrugged. ‘You’re welcome to stay if you want. But like I said, I wasn’t exactly expecting visitors, so you’ll have to take things as you find them. There’s a bed in the back room. Never been slept in, so it might be a wee bit damp.’
She looked at him, surprised. ‘Where do you sleep?’
‘Sleeping bag on the couch. It’s always been warmer in front of the stove.’
She turned to gaze back out across the silvered surface of the loch. ‘Will you take me to my father?’
There was a long silence, during which she daren’t even look at him. Then she heard him sigh. ‘Karen, I can’t.’
And a spike of anger shot through her. ‘Why not?’
‘Because everything we’re doing and have done has only been achieved through secrecy. Your father would kill me if I told you where he was. The whole point of the three of us living like this, no contact with friends or family, was so we’d drop below the radar. So Ergo wouldn’t know how or where to find us.’
She turned blazing eyes on him, and he very nearly flinched.
‘Hey, don’t look at me like that. None of this was my idea.’ He hesitated. Then, ‘Just how well do you know your dad, Karen?’
‘Well enough.’ All her defiance apparent in the set of her jaw.
But Billy just shook his head. ‘I doubt it. You’ve never worked with him. You don’t know him like I do.’ He gazed out over the loch. ‘He’s brilliant, sure. No one’s going to argue with that. But I’ve never known a more difficult man in my life. Obsessive. Relentless. Demanding. You wouldn’t want him on your team, cos he’d never give you the ball. He’d have to be the gaffer, and you’d damn well do it his way or he’d deselect you in a nanosecond. And he’s paranoid, Karen. Paranoid.’
‘About what?’
‘That Ergo might fuck him again.’
‘Well, he must have been pretty desperate to fake his own suicide.’
Billy dragged his eyes away from the loch and turned them on Karen. ‘He didn’t do that for himself.’
‘How do you mean?’
He paused only for a moment. ‘When your dad was forced out of the Geddes, he went around trying to raise finance to privately fund a repeat experiment. And that’s when they told him.’
Karen frowned. ‘Told him what?’
‘That if he didn’t drop it, they’d go after his family.’
Her eyes opened wide in shock. ‘Who? Who told him that?’
Billy snorted and threw his hands loosely in the air. ‘Christ, Karen, who knows? These people never speak to you directly. Threats are never specific. They’re veiled. And, in a way, that almost makes them even more sinister. I don’t know who threatened him, or how, but he was spooked. Man, was he scared. Not for himself. Cos, really, he’s not the kind of guy who’s going to back down from anything, or anyone. I bet he got a few doings at school for standing up to the class bully.’ He looked at Karen’s upturned, wide-eyed face. ‘The only reason he faked his suicide was to protect you. If he was dead, you were safe. That’s why he’s spent the last two years living under an assumed identity in the back of beyond.’
Karen felt like she was wearing lead boots. She could not have moved her feet from that spot if she had tried. Her whole body felt heavy, and stinging as if from an electric shock. And all she could remember were her final words to her dad. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. She felt tears filling her eyes. Those were the words he must have taken with him as he faked his own death and embarked on a life of denial, sacrificing everything to protect her. If anything, her sense of guilt was even greater now than it had been when she learned that he had gone missing. ‘Please.’ Her voice felt very small and quiet. ‘You have to take me to him.’
He turned and put his arms around her, and she let him draw her to him, pushing her face into his chest and trying not to cry in front of this young man she had known for only a matter of hours. ‘Karen, I can’t!’
She pushed away again, suddenly, misery morphing to anger. ‘Billy, you must. You’ve got to.’
He shrugged helplessly. ‘Honestly, Karen. That’s not even a decision I can make on my own.’
‘Well, who can make it, then?’
He sighed. ‘We could ask Sam, okay? That’s as much initiative as I’m prepared to take on my own. And if he says no, then that’s it. No argument.’
‘Who’s Sam?’ There was real aggression in her voice.
‘Sam, your dad and me are the ones who’ve run this whole experiment. Sam Waltman. Your dad knew him from his time at University College, London. They studied cell biology together. One of the few people in the world he trusts. Our funder sponsored him on a two-year sabbatical to do the research.’
‘Well, what? Can you phone him? Email him?’
Billy laughed. ‘Karen, we don’t communicate directly. Mobiles and emails are not secure. Not that I’ve even got a signal here. We’ll have to go and see him.’
‘Now?’
Billy laughed again and shook his head. ‘No, Karen, not now. Tomorrow. We can go and see him tomorrow. He has his hives hidden away on the Waternish Peninsula on the Isle of Skye. It’s just a couple of hours’ drive from here.’
*
Scattered moonlight somehow made its way down through thick foliage on the trees behind the cottage, to creep in around the edges of the frayed curtain Karen had dragged across the window. She wasn’t sure why she had bothered. She had no intention of undressing, or getting into the bed, and in any case there was nobody out there to peek in at her even if she had.
She lay on top of a soft, damp-smelling quilt, and heard all the old springs of the bed creak beneath her. The room was small and square and cluttered, a dumping ground for anything and everything that had been displaced from the rest of the house, including beekeeping equipment and shelves of honey. The air was infused with the sweet smell of it, and the astringency of cedar wood and smoke. It was cold in here, too, and she understood why Billy preferred the couch in front of the stove. What kind of miserable, lonely existence must it have been, stuck out here on his own for a year and a half, cut off from friends and family, miles distant from the nearest human life? And she realised it could not have been so very different for her father, wherever it was he might be. Had it really all been worth it? To bring the results of some experiment about bees into the public domain? And no sooner had she asked the question in her mind, than she knew the answer.
This wasn’t just some vague, scientific experiment he had sacrificed himself for. This was about the survival of one species, and the future of another. About naked greed versus the very existence of mankind. She got that. She understood what must have driven him, what still drove him. And, yet, there remained a part of her that resented it. Why had she, and her dad, and her family had to suffer? It made her mad at Ergo.
She heard the creak of the bedroom door, and a pencil-thin line of pale light fell across the room, zigzagging across the clutter. She sat bolt upright, heart hammering, and watched as the line of light widened and the door opened.
‘Billy?’ Her voice rang out in the dark, shrill, frightened.
‘It’s okay.’ His voice came reassuringly, and she saw his silhouette as he stepped into the room. ‘Just checking that everything’s alright
.’
‘Everything’s fine.’
But he didn’t go away again. Standing hesitantly in the open doorway as if undecided about what to do or say. Then he started easing his way through the debris, towards the bed.
‘I said everything’s fine.’
‘I know, I know . . .’ He sat down on the edge of the bed, and she moved away until her back was against the wall, and she felt the cold of it seeping through her clothing. ‘Just checking.’
‘You said that.’
There was a long silence, in which all she could hear was her breathing and his. ‘You have no idea how lonely it’s been here, Karen.’
‘Yes, I have. I can imagine it.’ Her voice sounded shrill.
‘I’m mean, I’m just a young guy, you know? It’s not normal to be cooped up on your own all this time. It’s only natural.’
‘Billy, please go.’
More silence. She felt him move in the dark, the squeak of the springs. But he was the merest shadow, and she couldn’t tell if he was moving closer or about to get up. Until she felt his breath on her face, and his hands on her body, clumsy and clawing. His mouth trying to find hers.
She reacted violently, clenched fists flying blindly in the darkness, sometimes striking air, sometimes connecting with flesh and bone. But he was so much stronger than her, and it was only when she bit his lower lip hard that she felt, more than heard, his voice exploding in her face with pain. He recoiled immediately, slipping from the bed on to the floor, then clambering to his feet and staggering to the door. There, he flicked a light switch, and she blinked in the sudden harsh glare of the naked flickering bulb that hung from the ceiling.
