Coffin Road (15 page)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The skyline beyond the promenade that ran the length of the Portobello sands had probably not changed much since its heyday as a beach resort in the nineteenth century. Grand Victorian stone-built villas, and colourfully tarted terraces. Church spires and redbrick factory chimneys. For much of the twentieth century it had fallen out of fashion, only recently undergoing a renaissance that had seen the beach as crowded on a summer’s day as in the old photographs taken in the late eighteen hundreds that Karen had found on the internet.

Now, on this grey, blustery September morning, she and her godfather were the only souls leaving tracks in the sand. It was where he had suggested they meet. An unlikely place, but Karen had taken the bus out from the centre of town with butterflies colliding in her stomach. If Chris Connor had behaved oddly on her visit to the Geddes Institute, then his manner on the phone had been even stranger. Terse, almost monosyllabic. It was Karen’s clear impression that he could barely contain his impatience to hang up. But they had, at least, arranged to meet, albeit in this most unexpected of places.

Beyond their initial greeting, they had walked together in silence. Karen had wanted simply to blunder into the conversation, but she sensed Connor’s reticence, and forced herself to be patient. Bad weather out in the North Sea had driven seabirds back up the firth, and gulls wheeled overhead in the breeze, shrieking their anger at the sky. A little sunlight played through breaks in the cloud along the coastline of Fife on the far shore.

‘M-my wife’s left me,’ Connor said suddenly, and Karen was startled to a standstill. But he didn’t seem to notice and kept walking, and she had to run to catch him up.

‘Why?’

He shrugged. ‘She says I’m n-not who I used to be.’

‘But . . . why?’ Karen struggled to make sense of this unexpected turn. ‘I mean, what’s changed about you?’

He kept his eyes on some distant place that only he could see. ‘Everything, I suppose. Since your dad’s death.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘We were compatible, I think, only because we were so different. M-me and your dad, that is. He was . . . cavalier. Adventurous. Strong. I . . . I admired him enormously. But he was also impetuous, Karen, sometimes to the point of just plain foolishness. Headstrong and, well, for want of a better word, arrogant. No one was going to push him around, tell him what to do.’

Karen was wide-eyed and breathless. This was all new to her. A different picture of her dad. And she realised that the man she had known as her father was also someone else, someone she hadn’t really known at all. ‘And you?’

For the first time, her godfather smiled. ‘Oh, I was the sensible one. Conservative. Safe. Maybe that’s what he liked about me. I . . . I moderated his excesses. I was his anchor. Everywhere he went, he wanted me to go, too. Which is how, I suppose, we c-came to follow such a similar academic route, and both ended up working at the Geddes Institute.’ He turned to look at Karen for the first time. ‘Losing him was like losing the better, stronger half of me.’ And she was shocked to see his eyes fill with tears. He looked away quickly. ‘You see, I . . . I knew what he knew. And if he didn’t have the strength to deal with it . . . if a man like your father could take his own life . . . To be honest, I don’t know how I’ve got through these past two years. But a part of me died with him, Karen, and what was left couldn’t be the man my wife had married, the man she wanted me to be. It’s been . . .’ He searched for a word to express it, but could only come up with the mundane. ‘Difficult.’

Karen could no longer contain herself. ‘What do you mean, you knew what he knew? What did he know? Why did he kill himself?’

But he just shook his head. ‘It’s not that simple, Karen. There are no easy answers.’

‘Well, give me the difficult ones, then.’ Her frustration lent an edge to her voice that made him turn, forgetting himself for a moment and smiling fondly, his hesitancy disappearing like smoke in the wind.

‘You really are just like him, you know. I couldn’t get over that the other day when you came to the Geddes.’ Then his smile faded, and his gaze wandered off towards the far shore. ‘Your dad had been working on a study of bees, funded by Ergo.’

‘Bees? I didn’t know he was interested in bees.’

‘He wasn’t, particularly, before undertaking the study.’ Now he looked at her quite directly. ‘Wh-what do you know about bees, Karen?’

She shrugged. ‘They make honey. They sting you.’

He raised a rueful eyebrow. ‘Not unless they absolutely have to. It kills a honey bee to sting you, did you know that?’

Karen shook her head.

‘Unlike a wasp, or a bumble bee, which can sting you again and again, a honey bee’s sting is barbed, so it hooks into your skin, and when they try to fly away it rips their insides out. Eviscerates them.’ He plunged his hands deep into the pockets of his coat, and his heels seemed to dig deeper into the wet sand with each step. The tide was well out now, and every so often they had to climb over the groynes that subdivided the beach. ‘There are more than twenty thousand different species of bee, most of which aren’t even honey bees, but together they are the biggest single pollinators of plants on earth. You understand the process of pollination?’

Karen was indignant. ‘Of course I do. I got an A in biology. Transferring pollen from the male to the female reproductive organs of plants makes babies. It’s all about sex, really.’

He grinned and she knew she was making him think of her father again. ‘Exactly. And those babies are the fruits and nuts, or the vegetables and grain that feed us.’ The stutter had vanished as his passion kicked in. ‘Bees pollinate seventy of the roughly one hundred crop species that feed the world, Karen. Einstein was once quoted as saying that if the bee became extinct the human race would die out within four years. Apocryphal, of course, but not that far from the truth. Without the bee, there is no way we could sustain the current human and animal population of the planet. People would suffer from poor nutrition, increased disease. There would be mass starvation. Those of us left would have to survive on a radically reduced and very expensive diet. Workers would have to be employed on the grand scale to hand-pollinate plants. Can you imagine? But they’ve already started it in China. In the end, only the rich would be able to eat well.’

‘Wow.’ Karen tried to absorb all that her godfather was telling her. She had known, though she didn’t know how, that bees were important, but just how important was news to her. ‘Wouldn’t affect meat, though, I guess.’

But Connor shook his head. ‘Oh, yes, it would.’ And she saw how there was fire again in his eyes, replacing the cataracts of uncertainty that had clouded them earlier. ‘The production of animal fodder is bee dependent, too. In the US alone, bees pollinate more than thirty million hectares of alfalfa that gets cut and bailed as hay for horses and cattle, and fermented as haylage for dairy cows. Without it, they would have to return to traditional grazing, winter feed would be poor, and meat production would plummet.’ He fixed her with staring eyes that seemed somehow to be seeking her approval.

Karen whistled softly. ‘Guess we can’t do without the bee, then.’

He drew a deep breath. ‘We might have to, Karen. The agrochem industry claims that bee populations have varied hugely over the centuries. Affected by disease, environmental change, any number of different factors. Which is true. But here’s the thing: bees are dying off now faster than they’ve ever done in history.’ He stopped in his tracks and turned his face towards her. ‘Christ, Karen, between thirty and fifty per cent of the bee population of the United States alone is dying every year.’

Karen found herself gripped by his intensity. ‘And we don’t know why?’

‘Well, yes. And no. A few of the causes we’ve identified and understand. Changes in farming practices, the destruction of natural habitat, disease, parasites. But other causes are a mystery. You know, in the US, they harness bees on an industrial scale to pollinate crops, truck them all over the country and sell their services to farmers. There’s a phenomenon there that they call CCD. Colony Collapse Disorder. The bees simply vanish. Leave the hive and never return. No one knows why. But it’s destroying that industry and threatening to ruin crops. There are barely enough of them left to pollinate the almond crop in California.’ He turned abruptly and started walking quickly towards the next groyne, and Karen almost had to run to keep up. ‘It is going to cost the US economy billions, Karen. Not millions. Billions! Replicate that on a worldwide scale and we’re talking hundreds of billions.’ He gave a bitter little chuckle. ‘As with all things in this world, money’s never far from the centre of them.’

Karen grabbed his arm to make him stop. ‘What’s any of this got to do with my dad, Chris?’

He turned to face her and wild eyes searched hers. ‘You would think, wouldn’t you,’ he said, ‘that, with so much at stake, everyone everywhere would be doing what they could to solve the problem, to protect the bees?’

‘Well, why wouldn’t they?’

‘Money, Karen. Fucking money!’ His voice rose almost to a shout, and Karen was startled, but more by his language than his tenor. She had never heard him swear before. Just as she had never heard her father use bad language. She supposed that adults did swear, just not in front of the children. But it still came as a shock to hear it. He relented, and uncertainty consumed him again. ‘I . . . I’m sorry.’

Karen stood awkwardly, looking at him. And he wouldn’t meet her eye. After a moment, she stepped in and put her arms around him. He tensed, then after a few seconds she felt him relax, and his arms slipped tentatively around her, and they stood in a long, silent embrace. Two solitary figures on an empty beach. Beyond them, somewhere out there in the firth, they had both lost someone they loved.

When, finally, they broke apart, she said, ‘Tell me.’

He was pale now, and resigned somehow. He nodded, and they resumed their walk towards the distant pavilion. But their pace was more leisurely now. He watched his feet as they walked, scliffing the wet, compacted sand left by the recently retreated tide, and she slipped her arm through his. She felt as close to her father in this moment as she had in years.

He said, ‘The project that Ergo had funded Tom to pursue was . . .’ He forced a smile. ‘You’ll laugh. It sounds so prosaic.’ And he put an emphasis on each of the words. ‘The impact of floral diversity on bee resilience and learning capacity.’ He looked at her and took in her expression. His laugh was spontaneous and genuine. ‘Yeah, exactly. In other words, they wanted to find out how poor diet affected the performance of bees.’ He hesitated. ‘But they wanted your dad to do something else, which I think was the real object of the exercise. You’ve heard of neonicotinoids?’

Karen shook her head. ‘Sounds like it might have something to do with tobacco.’

‘Close. It’s actually a class of insecticides that are chemically similar to nicotine. They have unpronounceable names like
clothianidin
and
imidacloprid
. Anyway, a bunch of them got banned by the European Union about three years ago, because there was strong scientific evidence that treating crops with this stuff was harmful to bees. Some scientists were even claiming that it was the primary cause of the sudden decline in bee populations. Trouble is, there was no actual proof. No smoking gun. And the big agrochemical companies, Ergo among them, were furious. Loss of revenue from the banning of these products was running to billions a year.’

Connor stopped suddenly and stooped to pick up a shell lodged in the sand. A classic small scallop shell. He turned it over in his fingers.

‘Big corporations run the world, Karen. Biotech, agrochemical, oil. They are bigger than a lot of governments. And in certain cases they turn over more in profit than the GDP of many small countries. They wield enormous influence. Politicians and political parties, particularly in America, rely on them to fund election campaigns. They are powerful lobbyists. Which is why the US has not banned the use of neonicotinoids, and thousands of tons of the stuff are still being used on crops there every year. Biggest usage is on oilseed rape. They coat the seeds with insecticide, so that, when it germinates, the insecticide is diffused throughout the plant, including the nectar and pollen that’s harvested by the bees.’

‘In spite of the danger to them?’

Connor laughed. ‘Well, of course, the agrochem companies say there
is
no danger. They produce all these studies showing that the level at which their insecticides are found in the environment has no effect on bees.’

Karen raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?’

‘Which is why Ergo was keen to have an independent researcher – your dad – show unequivocally that neonicotinoids do not kill bees, and are therefore not responsible for the decline in bee populations.’

‘And did he?’

Connor nodded. ‘He did. They got him to repeat an industry experiment that exposed bees to levels of insecticide one hundred and forty times higher than you would typically find in areas where the stuff had been used on crops. An absolutely toxic level of imidacloprid, which you might think would simply wipe out all the bees exposed to it. It didn’t. Only about fifty per cent died. A level they call LD50. And proof that, at normal levels, neonicotinoids were not at all toxic to bees.’

‘Wow. So what did my dad do?’

‘Well, Ergo were keen to have him speak out in support of his findings.’

‘And he did that?’

Connor sighed and nodded. ‘He published his research, Karen. Ergo put out press releases and made his findings available to every media outlet on the planet. He spoke at several industry conventions. Making him very unpopular with the environmental lobby.’ He shrugged. ‘I mean, your dad was a scientist, Karen. These were his findings.’

Karen said, ‘Why do I have the feeling there’s a
but
somewhere in our future?’