‘A key word?’ Erykah said. Her gaze lit on the surfaces of the room, the profusion of plants, the stacks of books. Framed awards and photographs that seemed familiar, that she recognised from Leonie’s old office. A watercolour of a street scene in Lodz between the wars.
‘Your cup is going to go cold,’ Leonie said. ‘Shall I warm it up for you?’
‘Oh, that’s very kind,’ Erykah said. ‘It’s lovely. I’m just not in the mood for tea right now, it seems a little bit . . .’
‘Weak?’ Leonie winked. ‘I have just the thing. Stay right here.’ She disappeared into the kitchen and came back with a small glass bottle filled with pale pink liquid. Leonie set two tiny sherry glasses on the table, decorated with delicate pinks and gold leaf scrolls. She unstoppered the bottle and poured two measures of the liquid. ‘Rhubarb spirits,’ she said. ‘Now that I can buy Polish rectified spirits, I can make my own liqueur.’ Erykah sniffed at the glass. ‘Please, try it. It’s delicious. Na zdrowie!’
‘Cheers!’ Erykah quaffed the drink in one swallow, breathed deeply, and coughed. ‘Wow. Wow. That’s . . . certainly strong.’ Leonie laughed.
‘Now, the key word. The question for us is what would have been meaningful to him. I tried his name. First and last, then both together – none of them worked. His wife’s name and his children’s. The name of the university, a few other keywords that come up commonly. No luck.’
Erykah closed her eyes and tried to remember Schofield’s office. The things people carry with them from place to place, continent to continent, over decades of their lives. What meant the most to someone who had travelled the world for his work? ‘I think I know what it could be,’ she said.
Leonie raised a thin white eyebrow. ‘Do tell.’
‘When I went to his office, I tried to get into his terminal. There was a password, but it wasn’t hard to figure out. There’s a photo of him next to his desk with a place that seems to have meant a lot to him.’ The words poured out of Erykah as Leonie nodded slowly. It made sense now. The password was easy to guess, not because it was guarding anything on his computer – that would have been too obvious – but because it was guarding something not on his computer at all. No wonder his email and browsing histories looked completely clean. They didn’t need to be wiped of information because he had never kept anything important there in the first place.
‘So the question,’ Leonie said. ‘What was the password?’
‘Guanaco,’ Erykah said. She spelled it out letter by letter. ‘It’s a mountain near Ushuaia, where he lived in Argentina.’
‘Let’s try it,’ Leonie murmured, inscribing the letters across the top of the code grid in square, only slightly shaky capitals.
Erykah watched as, bit by bit, her old mentor started to decode the grid onto a new sheet. The letters began to join up across the page. But after a few lines there were still no clear words emerging.
‘No,’ Leonie said. ‘A good guess, but this is not it.’
Erykah wasn’t willing to let it go. ‘No, I think we’re on the right track,’ she said. ‘It’s too good a connection not to have some part in the puzzle.’
Leonie smiled. ‘Be careful of fits that seems too good to be true,’ she warned, tapping her finger on the sheet. ‘Because they often are.’
‘You don’t need to tell me that,’ Erykah said. ‘Thing is, I don’t think this guy was a master of codes. He was smart, sure, but if he was that good, he probably would have been good enough to evade whoever wanted to kill him.’
She closed her eyes and pictured the inside of Schofield’s office again. The smell of books and papers, the motes of dust in the shards of sunlight filtering through the windows. The notebooks. The old computer. The crossword puzzle books. The word finds.
The word finds.
‘Here’s an idea,’ Erykah said, turning the sheet back towards her and started to write out the next line of translated code. ‘Let’s say Damian Schofield loved puzzles, because I know he did. In fact when I first found this piece of paper that’s what I thought it was – I thought he was making a word find for his students. Only I couldn’t see words in it.’
‘I’m listening,’ Leonie said, raising her glasses again to her nose to watch what Erykah was doing.
‘It’s another layer. He left us all the clues we needed, because he thought someone was coming for him. The password was easy to find because he wanted the key to be discoverable. And he left puzzles and word games all over his desk because that was just his way. It’s what I would have done.’ A puzzle fiend can spot another puzzle fiend. He had scratched the other groups of letters in the margins of his notes, the ones that didn’t seems to relate to crossword clues at all. Erykah put her pen down. With several more lines of the grid translated, in diagonal letters, a recognisable word was starting to emerge.
Leonie picked up her pencil and circled the word Density crossing the page in diagonal letters. A few more, going in a different direction, that when complete might spell Shale. Leonie’s clapped her hands and rubbed them together. ‘Now we’re cooking with gas!’ she said. ‘No doubt the rest of what he’s trying to direct us to will be in this pile. How long do we have?’
Erykah checked her watch. ‘When’s the last ferry?’ she asked.
‘We have a few hours,’ Leonie said. ‘But we need to get cracking.’
: 24 :
A wood fire crackled in the corner of the pub over the road from Cameron Bridge station. Winter walkers and climbers gathered around the open fireplace. Steam rose off their damp Gore-Tex layers as they quaffed pints of local ale. Erykah stayed by the bar and sipped a glass of whisky.
There was work to do back in London. Or so the Major said when he rang her. The Highlands to Holyrood tour was cancelled, they were booked on the sleeper train back to London. Heather was driving ahead on the route to cancel reservations and make apologies. The Major didn’t say why things had so suddenly changed, and Erykah didn’t ask.
Erykah smoothed her hands over her thighs, cased in a long sleeved grey jersey dress. A travel standby, a dress that could stay crumpled in the bottom of a bag for a long weekend and emerge, wrinkle-free and appropriate for most situations. Give or take a statement necklace here or a strappy sandal there.
She had put it in her bag the day she had planned to walk out on Rab and run away with Nicole. It seemed like years ago now.
The thoughts about ‘what if’ would have to wait until later. She wasn’t looking forward to twelve hours of being shut up in a sleeper with the Major because she couldn’t stay silent about what she had learned for much longer.
Once she and Leonie had the keyword, everything fell into place. Erykah had finished the decoding and the message was spelled out in words travelling diagonally, back and forth, and up and down through a sea of letters.
If what they put together was true, then it explained why someone might have wanted Schofield to die. He was poised to expose a cover-up that, had it been known before the Scottish referendum, could have affected the outcome. Not to mention proving the government had a stake in keeping the truth of Scotland’s energy future secret.
And if this was what was going on behind the SLU, then no wonder there was so much money sloshing about. The thought chilled her to the bone.
Billy and Buster doing a bit of dirty work? That was only scratching the surface. In a pinch you might, if you were lucky, get the police to keep them from your door. When the rot goes right to the core, though, nowhere is safe. Not the police. Not the press. Nowhere.
Her mobile beeped, a text from the Major. Am running late, it said. Check in without me. If anyone asks, you’re my wife.
Erykah ordered another whisky. The barman poured a generous double. She was going to need some liquid courage first.
The station was tiny, the ticket counter and kiosk were already closed for the night. A conductor walked up an
d down the short platform holding a clipboard. He squinted at the passenger list as Erykah approached. ‘Name?’ he asked.
‘Mrs Whitney Abbott,’ Erykah said. She realised she didn’t know the Major’s wife’s name. ‘My husband will be along shortly.’
The conductor nodded and crossed a name off the list. He didn’t meet her eyes. In a small place like this, her lie probably stood out a mile. But then, the Major had probably been taking this train for years – doubtless it wasn’t the first time the staff would have had to look the other way when someone claiming to be his wife came aboard. ‘Coffee or tea in the morning?’ he asked.
‘Coffee for me, thank you,’ she said.
‘It’s another half hour till we depart,’ the conductor said. ‘Go on and make yourself comfortable. It’s a quiet train tonight, so catch the dining car early if you want anything. We’ll come by to wake everyone up about an hour before we arrive at Euston.’
‘Cheers.’ Erykah glided down the narrow corridor and found the tiny room. It had been a sleeper seat she booked on the way up, with a change in Glasgow, so she hadn’t even seen the compartments. This train was direct all the way to Euston. The two single beds were arranged bunk style. A neatly folded tartan blanket, hand towel, and single use bar of soap were arranged at the foot of both beds. The heat was turned all the way up, and she fiddled with the mysterious controls to try to get it off. The room smelled like a camping cabin, equal parts wool blanket and industrial cleaner.
‘It may not be five-star, but it’s clean and comfortable,’ the Major said behind her. She jumped, startled, and turned around. His eyes darted around the cabin. Erykah noticed a sheen of sweat across his forehead.
‘How did it go?’ she asked.
‘Long day,’ he snapped. ‘I need a drink.’
‘Just let me touch up my make-up,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t mind seeing the dining car for myself.’ She hoped it would be less stifling than the compartment.
The Major planted a hand on her chest and pushed her back. Erykah stumbled onto the lower bunk. ‘No, you wait here,’ he said. She couldn’t put a finger on it, but something was up with him. His eyes had a strange, watery sheen. Maybe he was sick and that was why they had to cancel the tour?
‘Are you OK?’ she said.
‘Fine, fine,’ he mumbled. ‘I suppose you’ll be wanting to get your head down as soon as possible.’
Erykah didn’t want anything of the kind, but it was obvious he wasn’t going to let her leave the cabin. He checked his sporran for his wallet and phone, then snapped it shut. He went to the door. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ he said. Erykah smiled until he left.
The mobile in her bag beeped. It was a text from Seminole Billy saying he would meet them at Euston in the morning. Not the person she wanted to see. Right now, though, she had other things on her mind. Such as what she and Leonie had discovered.
Schofield had been an oilman; working out the location and volume of untapped reserves was his bread and butter. So if, for example, there was a project to survey the possibility of fracking in Britain, you would have expected him to be involved. Which he was. Yet when the final report was released in the weeks before the referendum, his name had been dropped from the panel of government advisors.
The surveys reported, unexpectedly, that the highest volume of available gas was not in Scotland. It was in England. Under the Home Counties no less. And according to the reports, Scotland’s potential was less than a tenth of what had been predicted in the early days of fracking technology development – a prediction that had been made by Professor Damian Schofield.
According to Schofield’s original figures, Scotland would have been viable as an independent country and potentially a player in northern European affairs, with enough energy reserves to rival Norway. There was the possibility that an independent Scotland might gain back a measure of production and population while England sank further into a wholly service-and-tourism industry.
The updated surveys released in the run up to the vote, however, put paid to Schofield’s old predictions. And the fact that the Government decided to hold back awarding new oil and gas licenses until after the referendum? It added up to a very suspicious whole.
Schofield’s workmate had mentioned a sexual harassment allegation. Plausible? Sure. Plausible enough to put him on probation while the university investigated. Plausible enough to keep him from going to the press with allegations that the oil books were being cooked to look less promising than they really were.
According to Schofield’s code the fracking report was a lie. Someone involved with the final report had tweaked the results, swapped the densities for sand and shale, and, hey presto, England looks like the winner and Scotland looks like the loser. Once that was done it was easy to pass off the results to the press, who reprinted the claims without looking any deeper into the data. Only someone with an eagle eye for detail would have had a chance of catching the swap, and even then it had passed plenty of experts by. Farewell to dreams of petroleum trusts and social safety nets. Scotland stays a dependent little fiefdom, good for no more than blasted hunting estates and tins of shortbread.
Until after the referendum, when all of a sudden fracking licenses were being awarded where only months before the official line was there was no oil to be profitably extracted.
But so what? Did the outcome of the referendum rest on that one issue? ‘You might be surprised,’ Leonie had said. ‘The Scottish government supports alternatives to fossil fuel, but they’re no fools. They need that short-term oil income to fund upgrades all over the grid so that renewables can feed in where the wind and water power are strongest.’
Leonie gestured to the window. ‘A lot of people don’t remember, but some parts of Scotland weren’t on the grid until recently. This village came on in the ’60s, and some of the villages west of here? Not until the ’80s. There are still only two lines running in to the peninsula even now. It’s not cheap getting infrastructure to the Highlands and Islands.’
She helped herself to another drink of rhubarb liqueur before continuing. ‘Storms take out the peninsula’s power lines all the time. People with home turbines will be watching them spin and spin with no way to get the power to the grid. If government can’t manage it reliably on that level, what hope is there for wind farms?’
‘Sounds like a cop-out to me,’ Erykah said. ‘Promise renewables, but it’s really all about the oil.’
‘Yes and no,’ Leonie said. ‘The oil will run out eventually – or be too expensive to extract, or the price will fall. The question is, who gets the revenues until then, and what do they do with them?’
‘Why anyone would trust a politician to do the right thing is beyond me,’ Erykah said.
‘I know, and I agree,’ Leonie said. ‘But it’s about accountability. As soon as Scotland can’t produce any more, it will be offered independence again. And no new infrastructure between now and then.’ She looked out at the ferry, still ploughing the few hundred metres of water between the crumbling Cameron Bridge road and the Ardgour peninsula. ‘You see that ferry? Most expensive in the country, by the metre. How do they expect young working families to cope with that? And those of us on fixed incomes?’
‘But didn’t this all come up in the campaign?’ Erykah had said. ‘The potential new oil fields?’
‘A bit, yes,’ Leonie said. ‘But the media was complicit with the No campaign, and unwilling to join the dots. It was easy to bury positive stories and play up the negative ones.’
‘Or distract the media with personal stories and non-existent scandals,’ Erykah said. ‘I know how that one works.’
‘Correct,’ Leonie said. ‘Energy policy doesn’t exist in a political vacuum.’
‘So the SLU realised what Schofield knew and tried to guarantee his silence,’ Erykah said. But money would not have been enough. The outdated furniture and old computer in h
is office told her as much as she needed to know: money was not important to him. He was not someone who could be bought off.
She tapped her teeth with a teaspoon. It still didn’t quite add up to her. ‘But the voters went for No, and no one from the Yes campaign picked up on the errors at the time. Why kill him now, when it doesn’t matter?’
Leonie had chuckled. ‘Oh, it matters, it always matters, when powerful interests have secrets to keep,’ she said. ‘Like elephants, they move slowly and they never forget. Once the SLU knew what he knew, he was a marked man. Could you imagine if the general population found out they had been lied to so close to the referendum? People would be demanding a new vote. Especially because it went No. Especially because it was closer than anyone predicted.’
‘So they – what’s the term?’ Erykah asked. ‘They sexed it up. Only the opposite of that.’
Leonie nodded. ‘They de-sexed the report. They put a negative spin on it, buried the real numbers, and got exactly what they wanted. And when the coast was clear and no one would make the connection, they got rid of the weakest link in the chain.’
Erykah felt very out of her depth. Why hadn’t she played dumb, let the thugs push Rab around a little, handed over the money and then said goodbye? Why couldn’t she have stamped her curiosity down a while longer?
She had played her hand blackmailing the Major and had nothing left to bargain with. This wasn’t some common or garden cover-up. This conspiracy had a body count.
The Turning Tide Page 26