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.’