Karen was too tense to sleep, and certain that her travelling companion was equally awake. She lay for a long time staring at a ceiling that only occasionally took form as light leaked around the window blind from some street-lit conurbation. Finally, the relentless tempo of the train carried her off into a restless slumber.
She woke with a start in darkness sometime later. Her fellow traveller was on her feet, and for a moment Karen panicked. Were you followed? She sat bolt upright, heart pounding, before realising that the woman was simply returning from a visit to the toilet. After several long moments, she lay back down again, forcing herself to be calm. This was crazy. She was starting to become paranoid, without the least idea why. She tried to make herself breathe normally, but they were long, deep breaths with the hint of a tremor in them, and she knew that she would not sleep again tonight.
But when the train eased its way gently into the grey, earlymorning Edinburgh light that fell through the glass of Waverley Station, Karen woke to the realisation that she had in fact succumbed. The lady with the suit was up and dressed, teeth brushed, hair immaculate, and was closing the clasps on her small suitcase. Karen swung her legs out of her bunk and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. She felt grubby and gritty and had a filthy taste in her mouth. She glimpsed her reflection in the window and saw how pale she was.
The business woman forced a smile. ‘Goodbye,’ she said, although they had never said hello, nor exchanged any other words between them during the entire night.
Karen paid to go into the station’s public toilets, where she washed in the sink and changed her underwear in a cubicle. In the buffet, she bought a coffee and a custard-filled croissant, and began to feel vaguely human again. Self-confidence had been restored by her return to Edinburgh. She was on home ground again. She took out her phone and saw that there had been another five calls from her mother. There were three messages, but she didn’t listen to them. Instead she redialled Chris Connor. Again her call went to messages, but this time she left one. ‘Chris, it’s Karen. We need to talk. I know you didn’t like me coming to the Geddes, but that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll see you there in about an hour.’
By the time her taxi swooped down towards the turning circle in front of the concourse at the Geddes Institute, the sky had broken up a little, letting sunlight through in peeps and patches to sprinkle itself across the rolling green woodland to the south-west of the city. Karen paid her driver and hurried across the concourse to the revolving glass doors. It was a different security guard who barred her way this time. ‘I’m here to see Professor Chris Connor,’ she said.
‘Are you expected?’
‘Yes.’ After all, he had almost certainly picked up her message by now.
‘Wait here, please.’ He crossed the foyer to the reception desk, and the same girl who had made out the pass on her previous visit looked up to see Karen standing at the door. She exchanged a few words with the security man, then stood up and came out from behind the desk to accompany him back across the atrium. Beyond them, the coffee shops and bakery in the mall were doing brisk business as students and researchers fuelled themselves up for the morning ahead.
The girl gazed very earnestly into Karen’s eyes. ‘You’re looking for Professor Connor?’
And something about her manner set alarm bells ringing in the back of Karen’s head. ‘Yes.’
‘I’m so sorry, you obviously haven’t heard. Chris was killed in a car accident on the bypass yesterday.’
Chapter twenty-one
Karen sat at a table outside the Kilimanjaro Coffee shop in Nicolson Street, oblivious of the fact that she was smoking in full view of the British Heart Foundation next door. Buses and taxis rumbled past, filling the air with noise and fumes, and obliterating the view of the church opposite.
But she heard nothing, saw nothing. Felt nothing. Except for the fear that seeped in behind the numbness.
Poor Chris, she kept thinking, over and over again. And wondering whether he would still be alive if she hadn’t gone to see him. If he hadn’t given her the letter and told her the things he had. She had spilled tears for him in the taxi on the way back to the city, but her eyes were dry now, burning, and red like the paintwork on the facade of the coffee shop.
She stubbed out her cigarette and lit another with shaking fingers.
An accident on the bypass, the girl at the Geddes had said. And maybe, after all, that’s just what it had been. An accident. But given how agitated Chris had been about speaking to her at all, and Richard Deloit’s behaviour in London yesterday, Karen found it hard to believe. You are putting his life in danger, Deloit had said of her father. Did that mean she had also put Chris’s life in danger? Was she responsible for his death? She buried her face in her hands and couldn’t bear to face the thought. Because if she was, then perhaps she really was putting her dad’s life in danger, too. But if it was true, she still had no idea how that was possible.
She lifted her head from her hands and breathed deeply. There was no way, now, that she could go home, having stolen money and a credit card, and refused to answer a single one of her mother’s calls. Never mind the fact that she had barely been at school in the last week. No, there was no way back.
But what was the way forward? Where would she stay? How would she survive once they cancelled the credit card? Who could she turn to? There was no one else. Deloit wouldn’t speak to her. Chris was dead. Again, she choked on the thought.
She closed her eyes and replayed her final moments with him, walking together on the beach at Portobello, occasional daubs of sunlight burnishing patches out on the firth. And suddenly she remembered that there was someone else. A loose thread that it had never even occurred to her to follow back to its source. Her father’s student. The one who had conducted the experiment with him. Billy... What was it Chris had called him? Billy, Billy... Carr! It returned to her suddenly as she replayed Chris’s voice in her head. Billy Carr. What had happened to him? He had just vanished, Chris said. There one day, gone the next. But people, Karen knew, didn’t just vanish without trace. People leave tracks, most of them electronic, and Karen had a thought about how she might find and follow Billy Carr’s trail, like the loose thread that he was, back to its source.
By late afternoon it was spitting rain, and Karen had her hood pulled up as she leaned back against the sitting rail in the bus shelter. But not because of the rain. A lot of the kids passing would probably recognise her, so she kept her head down, face obscured by the hood, and only revealed it on occasion when she glanced up the road in search of a familiar figure.
It had been an unbearably long day, treading water, counting off the minutes and the hours until school would be out. Walking the length of Princes Street, sitting in the park at lunchtime, eating sandwiches from a plastic wrapper and watching the trains rumble in and out of Waverley. Feeling small and very vulnerable in the shadow of the castle. Now she was starting to fear that she had wasted her time, and that Gilly was not at school today. Maybe she’d been off sick, and Karen could have gone straight to her house hours ago. The thought almost induced her to kick out at the perspex wall of the bus shelter.