Coffin Road (29 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

This is the first time I have driven out across the machair to where the old caravan is roped down and pegged into the sandy soil. I could never risk being seen here, or having any contact with the man known as Buford.

My car is not well suited to this track with its ruts and potholes, and it lurches from side to side, creaking, and banging as the underside of it hits bump after bump.

The breeze is stiffening again as we step out into it, but the clouds gathering to the west are light and blow in shreds across the sky, sending shadows careening ahead of them over the sand. I breathe deeply and know I am going to miss this place.

I guide Karen around the giant satellite dish and a generator whose motor is barely audible, and we hear the radio mast vibrating and singing in the wind. At the front of the caravan, a Land Rover sits proud on the machair, a stone’s throw from the beach.

The caravan door opens, and the man with the binoculars and the straggling hair grins out at us. He steps down on to the machair and we embrace. A long, heartfelt embrace. He grins at me and shakes his head. ‘Man, I really thought I was never going to see you again.’

I turn to my daughter. ‘Karen, this is Alex. He’s my statistician. Being an obsessive twitcher, and a man who likes his own company, he jumped at the chance of a six-month sabbatical from St Andrew’s University, funded by OneWorld, to come up here and crunch the numbers on our research.’ She shakes his hand. ‘And be glad he did, because he saved my life.’

Alex scratches his head ruefully. ‘Aye, and very nearly got myself killed in the process.’ He steps back into the caravan. ‘Come in.’

It is the first time I have been in here, and I am immediately struck by the smell of stale cigarettes and cooking and body odour. Alex might well be a genius with figures, but I fear his personal hygiene leaves much to be desired.

One half of the caravan is a shambles of clothes that lie in crumpled heaps, a tiny sink piled high with dirty plates and tin cups, a table littered with books and papers and an ashtray overflowing with the remains of roll-ups and who knows what else. Three blackened pots crowd together on a two-ring cooker.

The other end is like some high-tech IT lab. There are several computer screens on a table that groans with black and silver boxes that spew cable in all directions. There are three keyboards and umpteen mice. Beneath the table, I see at least two large processing units.

‘Contrary to appearances,’ I tell Karen, ‘Alex is not an avid watcher of satellite TV. The dish provides him with a high-speed internet link, and the little generator out back supplies him with power. He also has secure radio comms with OneWorld, so he is in constant touch with our funders.’

‘Wow.’ Karen gazes at the computer equipment that Alex has assembled. ‘You’d never know there was all this stuff in here from the outside.’

‘That was the idea,’ Alex says. ‘Everyone thinks I’m a traveller, or a New Age hippy. The kids are scared of me and stay away. The adults want me gone, but the authorities can’t move me, so here I am.’

I clear away some laundry and sit down. ‘I was afraid from early on that the whole research project might be compromised. Billy was right, I didn’t trust anyone. And when the Harrisons turned up, it just seemed a little too pat. So I asked OneWorld to check them out. And guess what. They weren’t at all who they said they were. Which meant that someone on the inside had sold out to Ergo.’

‘Billy,’ Karen said.

I nod. ‘Deloit had someone run the rule over him. Turned out he had an awful lot more money sloshing around than they were paying him. So security became paramount. I stopped sharing with both Sam and Billy. We funnelled all the results through me, and from me to Alex. Nobody but me and Deloit knew about Alex. I worked on an external hard drive that I hid out on Eilean Mòr when there was anything of any value on it. I copied my data on to thumb drives that I left for Alex in waterproof bags under a couple of stones up on the coffin road, near where I have my hives.’

Alex said, ‘So all the research data was coming to me, and I was doing the statistical analysis as it came in. I have everything on my hard drives.’

I smile. ‘And just to be extra safe, we backed everything up on the internet.’ I turn to Karen. ‘Remember that web space I got you about three years ago? You were going to try your hand at website development.’ I pause. ‘And never did.’

She looks guilty. ‘Like all those things I was going to do and never did. It’s what Gilly was doing. I guess I just wanted to keep up. But I was never really that interested.’

‘Just as well,’ I tell her. ‘That’s the space we used to store our backup. On private pages. Somewhere no one would ever think of looking.’

‘So what happened out on the island between Billy and Sam?’

I exchange a dark look with Alex. ‘That was a bad idea,’ I say. ‘And I only have myself to blame. I thought, if we could draw Billy out in the open, confront him with the fact that we knew he’d sold out . . . I thought I could talk him round. Get him on our side again, then maybe we could find out what Ergo and the Harrisons were planning.’ I shake my head in raw regret. ‘I confided in Sam and we hatched a plan to snare Billy. Stupid! Sam deliberately let it slip to him that he and I were meeting up to exchange final data, and the statistician’s analysis.’

‘At the lighthouse?’

‘Yes. A lie, of course. I arranged for someone to take Sam out to the island. I was going to meet him there, and we would see who, if anyone, turned up. Billy is who we expected, and Billy it was. But I got held up by the bad weather, and by the time I got there, Billy had beaten me to it and he and Sam were knocking lumps out of each other. I don’t know what happened between them, or what was said, but when I tried to intervene I got knocked to the ground. And the next thing, Billy’s grabbed a rock and he’s smashing it into Sam’s head. Again and again. Totally out of control. And when he looks at me, covered in Sam’s blood, I see only madness in his eyes and I know he’s going to try and kill me, too. Nothing I could do for Sam, so I ran. Back down to the boat, and off into the night. Only to hit a damn rock in the dark and hole my boat below the waterline.’ I am trembling from the recollection of it. ‘I suppose I must have been trying to make it back here, and by the time she finally went down I couldn’t have been that far offshore. But the first thing I know is I’m lying out there on the beach and I can’t remember a thing. Not who I am, nor what I’m doing here, nor anything that happened on the island.’ I shake my head. ‘Which damn near blew the whole project.’

Karen has been listening in rapt silence. And now she looks from me to Alex and back again. ‘So how did Alex save your life?’

‘Billy showed up at the cottage two nights later. Tried to kill me. Finish off what he failed to do on the island.’

Alex says, ‘It was a golden rule. Your dad and I would never have any personal contact. Never. But I saw him that day, washed up on the shore. And the next day, when he took Sally up to the hives, I knew that something must be badly wrong. I was going to go and see him at the cottage that night, but she was there. So I waited a day, and went back the next night. Which is when I saw Billy sneaking into the house, well after midnight.’

‘A good job you broke that golden rule,’ I tell him. ‘If you hadn’t, I’d be dead.’

Karen’s eyes are wide with wonder, and consternation. ‘And it’s all been worth it, Dad, has it? Three lives, and everything you’ve all been through?’

I sigh deeply. ‘It’s hard to measure the worth of anything against the loss of even a single life, Karen. Sam was a great friend. It breaks my heart that he died the way he did. I can’t speak for him, but if I had died achieving what we’ve achieved, then I would have felt that I had given my life for something worthwhile. Call me naive, but I have to believe that what we’ve done here will make a difference.’ An extra-strong gust of wind rocks the caravan, and we hear it whistling around every window. ‘As for the Harrisons, they brought what happened on themselves. I find it hard to sympathise.’ Though my heart still aches for Sally, and I wonder what, after all, she really felt about me.

Karen nods gravely. ‘So it’s been a success?’

I nod. ‘We stopped collecting data a few weeks ago. Alex completed his statistical analysis and I have written my paper on it. We have proved, scientifically, beyond any doubt, that neonicotinoid-based pesticides are destroying bee colonies by robbing them of their memory. Ergo and the rest will deny it till they’re blue in the face. Governments will try to ignore it, but they’ll be forced to act by public opinion. All that remains for us to do is publish.’ I turn to Alex. ‘It’s all set?’

He nods and crosses to his computer screens. He pulls up several documents. ‘Press release. PDFs of the stats and all the data. Your paper.’ He stands back. ‘All you have to do is hit the
return
key, and it’s out there. Everywhere across the web. There won’t be a single hiding place left for Ergo, or any of the rest of them.’ He looks at me. ‘And your story, when you start giving interviews to the media, is going to go global.’

I stand up and take Karen by the hand, leading her to the computer. ‘You do it.’

She looks up at me. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You hit the
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key. Tell the world. Save the bees. No one deserves that more than you.’

I see tears well in her eyes as the enormity of it all dawns on her. ‘This is only the beginning,’ she says. ‘Isn’t it?’

I nod. ‘It is.’

She turns to gaze at the screen for a moment, then looks down at the keyboard and hits
return
.

The End

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to offer my grateful thanks to those who gave so generously of their time and expertise during my researches for
Coffin Road
. In particular, I’d like to express my gratitude to Dr Christopher N. Connolly, an associate of the Centre for Environmental Change and Human Resilience (CECHR), University of Dundee, Scotland, on whose research the science in my story is based; Joe Cummins, Professor Emeritus of Genetics at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, whose presentation to the European Union on links between neonicotinoids and the collapse of bee colonies pre-dated the current controversy by several years; Gavin Jones, beekeeper, Isle of Harris, and Iain Smith, beekeeper, Isle of Lewis, Scotland, for their advice on Hebridean beekeeping; Dr Steven Campman, Medical Examiner, San Diego, USA, for his advice on pathology; George Murray, for his insights into Hebridean policing; Murray Macleod of Seatrek, Uig, Isle of Lewis, for his expertise in accessing the Flannan Isles by boat; Lorna Hunter of the Northern Lighthouse Board, for photographs and information provided on the lighthouse at Eilean Mòr in the Flannan Isles; and Judy Greenway, acting trustee for the Wilfrid Gibson literary estate, for her kind permission to quote lines from Wilfrid Wilson Gibson’s poem ‘Flannan Isle’, about the unresolved disappearance in 1900 of the three lighthouse keepers on the Flannan Isles.