Coffin Road (23 page)

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 their 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.’

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.

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.’