Coffin Road

by Peter May

  I am tired now, my concentration shot, and I almost collide with another vehicle as I turn south on the main road. The blast of the other car’s horn sets my heart racing and clears from my mind the cloud that has been obscuring my immediate future in all its uncertainty. I have no idea what I am going to do when I get back to the cottage. I desperately want the comfort of Sally’s arms around me, soft and warm. I want to breathe in her scent, drift off in her embrace, like a child. And, who knows, maybe waken with tomorrow’s dawn, memory fully restored, knowing exactly who I am and why I am here.

  Everything on the drive to Luskentyre feels reassuringly familiar. The sign on the left for the Episcopalian Church, the roadsigns for Rodel and Geocrab and Manais. The Golden Road. Even the roadworks on the brae leading down to the fabulous expanse of silver and turquoise in the bay.

  The bizarrely wind-sculpted Scots pines to the right of the single-track seem to be welcoming me home as I turn at the cottage before the cemetery and come up over the rise to see a phalanx of police and other vehicles crowded on to the tarmac behind my house.

  It comes like a punch in the gut. Debilitating and painful, suffusing my entire being with a sense of utter hopelessness, and very nearly robbing me of the ability to turn the wheel and guide my car over the cattle grid. For the briefest of moments I consider driving past, as if just passing by. But the road goes nowhere, except to the beach at the end of it, and I would have to turn and come back. And then what? I have to face up to the reality of my situation some time.

  As I draw in behind all the other vehicles parked in my drive, I cut the motor and close my eyes. There can only be one possible reason for this congregation of policemen at my house. And I see once again the face of the man I found dead in the ruined chapel on Eilean Mòr, the blood and brain tissue, and know that they, too, think that I killed him.

  The afternoon is blustery, grey and depressing as I step out of my car. The clouds over the beach are low, almost purple on their underside. The wind is fierce and I feel it filling my mouth and bringing tears to my eyes. A uniformed policeman climbs out of one of the cars and approaches me. ‘Excuse me, sir, what’s your business here?’

  And I hear myself saying, ‘I live here.’

  I see his eyes open wide. ‘You’re Mr Maclean?’ I nod, knowing that it is absolutely not who I am. ‘Better come with me, sir.’ I feel his fingers closing around my upper arm, and he is leading me down the drive towards the door of the cottage, which is standing wide open. We reach the foot of the steps and I can see several uniformed officers moving about inside my house. The constable who has my arm calls, ‘George!’ And after a moment a stocky man in a black quilted anorak appears at the door. His face is pink and round and shiny, and a black widow’s peak cuts a V into his forehead. He looks at the constable, then at me, and the constable says, ‘Detective Sergeant Gunn, this is Mr Maclean.’

  I see Gunn’s expression change in an instant. He looks at me again, but with different eyes this time. ‘Mr Neal Maclean?’ he says.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I ask, although I know perfectly well.

  Gunn comes down the steps and a wedge of his gelled hair lifts up in the wind. ‘Three days ago, Mr Maclean, you were seen by several witnesses, running from the old ruined chapel at Eilean Mòr, out on the Flannan Isles. Yesterday, the body of a dead man was discovered in that building. A death we are treating as murder. I’m wondering how you could have entered that building without seeing the body and, if you did, why you didn’t report it.’

  Thoughts tumble through my head, disordered and incoherent. I know that I have to come up with a convincing story, but I am finding it almost impossible to think clearly. And it occurs to me in that moment that I should just tell him the truth. The whole truth. What kind of relief might that be? But equally, I realise that the truth will sound even more unlikely than anything I might invent. And it seems to me now that the black cloud which has been masking my memory since I washed ashore on the beach must be obscuring something worse even than murder. Because it is still there. So I rush into a lie. ‘You probably know by now, Detective Sergeant, that I am writing a book on the disappearance of the Flannan Isles lighthouse men.’

  ‘So I’ve been told, Mr Maclean.’ There is a strange little sardonic smile playing about his lips. ‘I’d be interested in seeing that manuscript, sir, if you wouldn’t mind showing me it a little later.’ And I know he knows that I am not writing a book. Still, we both keep up the pretence.

  ‘Of course,’ I say. ‘Anyway, I was out at the lighthouse for a bit of research and got caught in a squall. I was going to take shelter in the chapel, but the rain eased off a bit, and I decided to make a dash for the boat instead. So I never actually went into the building.’

  That little sardonic smile has gone. He seems quite impassive now, and it is impossible to read anything into his face. But I am sure he doesn’t believe me. After a moment he nods his head beyond me, towards the garden shed. ‘Would you mind unlocking that shed for me, sir?’

  I turn and glance at the shed, surprised. The large padlock hooked firmly through the clasps is locked. I remember that I couldn’t get into it when I was looking for stepladders. ‘I don’t have the key,’ I say, and fish my keys out my pocket. An ignition key for the car, and a couple of smaller keys for the house. ‘These are the only ones I have.’

  Gunn purses his lips. ‘The owner of the house tells us that a key to the padlock on the garden shed was among the keys that she gave you when you first moved in.’

  I shrug. This is probably true. But I have no idea where that key might be now. ‘Then I must have mislaid it,’ I say. ‘I’ve never had any cause to use the shed.’ And no sooner do I say it than I wonder if I have.

  ‘You won’t mind if we force the lock then, sir?’

  ‘Not at all.’ There is a sick feeling evolving in my stomach. ‘Perhaps the owner won’t be too pleased, though.’ I cannot imagine how my attempt at a smile comes across to the policemen standing watching me. Their expressions remain grave.

  Gunn nods to one of the uniforms, and he goes to the boot of the nearest vehicle, returning with a wheel brace, a single length of iron with a socket wrench at one end. The constable steps past us and goes to the shed, inserting the other end through the loop of the padlock and levering it hard against the door. The sound of splintering wood is quite clearly audible above the howling of the wind, and the clasps held together by the padlock rip free of the door, screws and all. And I wonder why anyone ever bothered to padlock it.

  The officer who is still holding my arm passes me over to Gunn, who leads me to the shed. With his free hand he forces it open against the wind, then uses his body to keep it there, before reaching inside to feel for a light switch. When he finds it, the late afternoon gloom is banished and the darkness of the interior is thrown into sudden, sharp, fluorescent relief.

  For a moment, I could almost believe that the wind had stopped blowing. For, in that instant, I simply can’t hear it. And I can feel the sense of shock and confusion all around me, as everyone crowds around to look inside.

  The first thing that hits us all, I think, is the smell. The powerful, sweet, pungent odour of cedar wood and honey. And the reek of old smoke, like a cold chimney when you clean out the hearth. But we are distracted by what we see.

  ‘Jesus,’ I hear someone say. ‘It’s like a bloody laboratory.’

  And that’s exactly what it is. A makeshift laboratory that must have cost a small fortune to equip. Worktops lining three sides, rows of shelves above them cluttered with bottles and jars and flasks. Pieces of equipment, large and small, on the worktops or on the floor. A scattering of microtweezers and scissors, micropipettes and rows of yellow tips in a bright red holder. Boxes of latex surgical gloves. To my amazement, much of it seems familiar to me. A hand-held field microscope with an XY slide indexer. A white box, about the size of a laser printer, with a screen set into its bevelled front. The make and model, SureCycler 8800, is engrave
d into the plastic above the screen, and I know that this machine is used for amplifying DNA. A small freezer unit sits on the floor against the back wall, and, on the worktop above it, what looks like a fridge, with a black box set into the top of it. But I know that it is not a fridge. It is a digital image system used for DNA gel photography. I see the gel tank itself on the counter beside it, and its small black power pack.

  There are piles of padded envelopes, kitchen scales, and larger, industrial hanging scales dangling from a hook on the wall. A MacBook Pro laptop computer sits next to an SLR digital camera set into a holding frame and bracket, and the wall above it is pinned with dozens of printout photographs of honeycomb frames. A laser printer/photocopier/scanner sits on a low table in one corner. Hive frames and foundations, and a shallow wooden drawer that I know to be a pollen trap, are propped all along the right-hand wall, from which hang a beekeeper’s protective clothing. Hat and mask, gloves, jacket, wellington boots beneath them. There is a hive tool dangling from a hook, a smoker with its carrying cage and nozzle for directing smoke into the hive, and rolls of cardboard tied with string on a shelf next to a red plastic cigarette lighter engraved in white with the logo Ergo. The top shelf groans with jars of rich, amber honey. Makeshift wasp traps fashioned from old plastic Coke bottles hang from the ceiling. They are filled with clusters of drowned wasps, attracted into the shed by the honey in the jars, then drawn into the traps by a mix of jam and water. And black electric cables loop back and forth bringing power to sockets set at intervals along the worktops.

  I can feel the skin of my face burning red as Gunn turns to look at me with the strangest sense of incomprehension in his eyes. ‘So you’ve never had cause to use the shed, sir?’

  I cannot think of a single thing to say. The silence that hangs in the air is blown away in the wind, which I hear again, suddenly, as if someone has just pressed the un-mute button. I do not need to look around me to know that every eye is upon me. They have no idea that I am as lost for an explanation as they are. And I hear myself say, stupidly, ‘I can’t explain it.’

  ‘May I see your hands, please?’

  Confused, but compliant, I offer him my hands, and he takes them in his, turning them over, and I see the odd bee sting on my fingers. Small red lumps with tiny scabs at their centre.

  He lets go of my hands and takes me by the arm again. ‘Come with me please, sir.’ And he leads me through the silent, standing police officers, up the steps and into my house. Everything is in chaos as we pass through the boot room and into the kitchen. Beside the laptop on the kitchen table, the briefcase I found in the attic sits with its lid up, exposing the bundles of banknotes inside. The folder of newspaper cuttings on Neal Maclean is open, its contents spilled across the table. ‘Maybe you’ll have more success in explaining this,’ he says. And hell simply opens up beneath my feet.

  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 togeth
er 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.