Coffin Road (19 page)

Karen deleted the message and wondered why she didn’t feel at least some tiny sense of remorse or regret. All she could think was that Derek hadn’t discovered yet that one of his credit cards was missing, or her mother would have said something. But it surely wouldn’t be long before he did, and the likelihood was that he would have it cancelled.

She left Starbucks and searched for a cash dispenser. She needed money as a back-up in case the card stopped working. And she had to make a decision quickly about what to do next. The light was fading faster here than it did back home, and she didn’t relish a night spent on her own in London. There was no reason for her to stay. She had already decided that returning to hammer on the door of OneWorld would be a waste of time. A triumph of head over heart. She needed to talk to Chris Connor again. The night train to Edinburgh would get her there first thing tomorrow morning. But she would need to buy her ticket fast, while Derek’s card was still active.

*

The sleeper left Euston at ten to midnight, the guard’s shrill whistle echoing among the dark rafters of the long, gloomy platform as the train creaked and eased its way out of the station at the start of its seven-and-a-half-hour journey north. Karen found herself sharing a cabin with an over-coiffed middle-aged business woman. She was wearing a grey suit and black high-heeled shoes, and regarded Karen warily. Neither of them was comfortable undressing, and as the lights went out, each lay self-consciously on her back on the narrow bunks, listening to the rhythm of the wheels on the rails, frightened to go to sleep. The rolling stock groaned and complained as the train jerked and shuddered its way through suburban stations, gathering pace with the darkening of the night, and leaving the wealthy veneer of a decadent and decaying south behind them.

Karen was too tense to sleep, and certain that her travelling companion was equally awake. She lay for a long time staring at a ceiling that only occasionally took form as light leaked around the window blind from some street-lit conurbation. Finally, the relentless tempo of the train carried her off into a restless slumber.

She woke with a start in darkness sometime later. Her fellow traveller was on her feet, and for a moment Karen panicked.
Were you followed?
She sat bolt upright, heart pounding, before realising that the woman was simply returning from a visit to the toilet. After several long moments, she lay back down again, forcing herself to be calm. This was crazy. She was starting to become paranoid, without the least idea why. She tried to make herself breathe normally, but they were long, deep breaths with the hint of a tremor in them, and she knew that she would not sleep again tonight.

But when the train eased its way gently into the grey, early-morning Edinburgh light that fell through the glass of Waverley Station, Karen woke to the realisation that she had in fact succumbed. The lady with the suit was up and dressed, teeth brushed, hair immaculate, and was closing the clasps on her small suitcase. Karen swung her legs out of her bunk and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. She felt grubby and gritty and had a filthy taste in her mouth. She glimpsed her reflection in the window and saw how pale she was.

The business woman forced a smile. ‘Goodbye,’ she said, although they had never said hello, nor exchanged any other words between them during the entire night.

Karen paid to go into the station’s public toilets, where she washed in the sink and changed her underwear in a cubicle. In the buffet, she bought a coffee and a custard-filled croissant, and began to feel vaguely human again. Self-confidence had been restored by her return to Edinburgh. She was on home ground again. She took out her phone and saw that there had been another five calls from her mother. There were three messages, but she didn’t listen to them. Instead she redialled Chris Connor. Again her call went to messages, but this time she left one. ‘Chris, it’s Karen. We need to talk. I know you didn’t like me coming to the Geddes, but that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll see you there in about an hour.’

*

By the time her taxi swooped down towards the turning circle in front of the concourse at the Geddes Institute, the sky had broken up a little, letting sunlight through in peeps and patches to sprinkle itself across the rolling green woodland to the south-west of the city. Karen paid her driver and hurried across the concourse to the revolving glass doors. It was a different security guard who barred her way this time. ‘I’m here to see Professor Chris Connor,’ she said.

‘Are you expected?’

‘Yes.’ After all, he had almost certainly picked up her message by now.

‘Wait here, please.’ He crossed the foyer to the reception desk, and the same girl who had made out the pass on her previous visit looked up to see Karen standing at the door. She exchanged a few words with the security man, then stood up and came out from behind the desk to accompany him back across the atrium. Beyond them, the coffee shops and bakery in the mall were doing brisk business as students and researchers fuelled themselves up for the morning ahead.

The girl gazed very earnestly into Karen’s eyes. ‘You’re looking for Professor Connor?’

And something about her manner set alarm bells ringing in the back of Karen’s head. ‘Yes.’

‘I’m so sorry, you obviously haven’t heard. Chris was killed in a car accident on the bypass yesterday.’

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.