‘Yep. Had a wee break during the winter months. Without that, I’d have gone stir-crazy a long time ago. Thank God it’s just about over.’
‘Is it?’
‘Pollen season’s all but finished. We’ve got two years of results from three separate sources. Identical experiments with eighteen hives, each in contaminant-free environments. Covers all the variables so that the statistician can draw incontrovertible conclusions.’
‘Statistician?’
‘Yep. An independent fourth party, who takes all our figures and results and crunches the numbers. When his report on our experiment gets published, it’s going to blow the agrochem industry out of the water, Karen.’
‘So you already know what the results are?’
‘Well, we anticipated what they might be. But I haven’t actually seen the final figures myself.’
‘Why not? If you’re taking all these daily and weekly measurements, then you have all the figures yourself, surely?’
‘Not the most important ones.’ He headed towards a door in the far corner of the room. ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’
Karen followed him into what must once have been a storeroom of some kind, built out from the back of the cottage under a sloping roof. The light he turned on here was much brighter than the one in the sitting room, throwing everything into sharp relief. In contrast to the chaos outside, there was a sense of order in the tiny secret lab that it revealed. Worktops set out with scientific equipment. Microscopes, micropipettes, tweezers and scissors. Electrical equipment, a laptop, a small freezer humming in the corner. Shelves laden with glass jars and Petri dishes and bottles. Everything was shiny clean, and, unlike the air in the sitting room, there was a smell in this little room of antiseptic, almost hospital-like.
‘This is the nerve centre, so to speak. Most of the rest of what we do is keeping and collecting numbers. Figures. Statistics. Here, under that microscope, we dissect contaminated bees towards the end of their pollen-collecting lives, which are only about three weeks long, by the way. We remove brain matter and send it in ice-packed flasks to a laboratory in Edinburgh.’ He laughed. ‘I’m sure the good folks in the Post Office down in Strathcarron must wonder what it is I’ve been sending away in these wee parcels every week. But, anyway, the lab in Edinburgh measures levels of the contaminant, and is then able to relate them to cell damage.’
Karen looked at him. ‘But they don’t send the results back to you?’
‘No. They all go to the PI, along with all my stats, and those from —’ he grinned — ‘my co-conspirator.’
‘PI?’
‘Principal Investigator. He’s the team leader. The third in our little triumvirate.’ Billy turned out the light and pulled the door shut behind them as they went back out to the sitting room. ‘All the data goes to him, and he’s the one who feeds it to the statistician.’
Karen shook her head. ‘I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t you all share in the data?’
‘Because the PI trusts nobody but himself, Karen. Not even me, or Sam. And the PI’s known Sam since his university days. But he’s probably right to be so careful, because these bastards will go to any lengths to stop us publishing.’
‘Ergo?’
Billy nodded. ‘That’s why all the secrecy. I’m sure they know what we’re doing, just not exactly who’s doing it or where.’ He sat down at the table and took out a tin filled with loose tobacco and a chunk of cannabis resin wrapped in silver paper. ‘See, nobody’s done this kind of detailed research before, Karen, because the only people likely to fund it would be the industry themselves. And they just bury the results that they don’t like.’ His laugh lacked humour. ‘That’s why, when your dad went to Ergo with the results of our accidental experiment, they buried us. Threatened to withdraw funding from the Geddes, got your dad sacked and my fellowship withdrawn.’ He turned to look at her. ‘I wasn’t kidding when I said publication of our results would blow them out of the water. The European Union will be forced to extend its ban on neonicotinoids. The fucking British government, would you believe, has been trying to get that ban lifted, under pressure from the farmers’ union. So they’re going to have to change their tune pretty bloody fast. And then there’s the Americans. They’ve been resisting all attempts at banning neonics. We are going to leave them with no choice.’
‘And the agrochem industry is not going to be very happy.’
‘Fucking right, they’re not!’ He held the flickering flame of his lighter under the little tinfoil package he had made containing the cannabis. ‘They don’t care about the planet or the bees, Karen. They don’t give a shit about people starving. All they care about is money. Profit. The bottom line. Like the tobacco industry’s big five, they are just in total denial. And trust me, they will do anything, anything, to stop us from publishing.’
He laid tobacco along a sheet of cigarette paper and crumbled the cooked resin into it, before rolling it up, licking the gummed edge and sticking it down. He put the deformedlooking cigarette to his lips and lit it, drawing deeply and holding the smoke in for some moments before blowing it out.
He held the spliff out to Karen. ‘Want a drag?’
She took it, and sucked hot smoke into her lungs. When she exhaled, she felt a sense of something like relief wash over her. She handed it back and looked very directly at Billy. ‘The PI. The Principal Investigator. That’s my father, isn’t it?’
Billy took another long pull, then slowly nodded as he blew smoke at the ceiling.
The moon was almost startling in its clarity. It had risen well above the hills now, shrinking in size as it rose above the Earth’s atmosphere. But vivid in its illumination, sprinkling colourless light across the hills and the trees, reflecting in the waterfall at the far side of the loch and delineating the ripples it sent out towards Karen, who stood at the water’s edge contemplating all the contradictions of her young life.
That her father was still alive was confirmed now beyond doubt. But elation in that discovery was tempered by the anger that still festered at what he had put her through these last two years.
Yellow light spilled out across the clearing as the door of the cottage opened, and Billy’s shadow extended long across the dry, beaten earth. It grew even longer, then faded, as he moved towards her, until she saw his reflection in the water as he reached her shoulder. ‘A month ago,’ he said, ‘you couldn’t have stood out here on a night like this. The midges would have eaten you alive.’ He chuckled. ‘Just one of the many joys of living here. Midges from June to September, cleggs in June and July, cold bloody weather in spring and autumn. We had snow here in May, and they’re predicting an early frost next week.’ He looked at her. ‘Where are you staying tonight?’
She laughed. ‘Well, I was hoping that might be here. Not really anywhere else for me to go, is there?’
He shrugged. ‘You’re welcome to stay if you want. But like I said, I wasn’t exactly expecting visitors, so you’ll have to take things as you find them. There’s a bed in the back room. Never been slept in, so it might be a wee bit damp.’
She looked at him, surprised. ‘Where do you sleep?’
‘Sleeping bag on the couch. It’s always been warmer in front of the stove.’
She turned to gaze back out across the silvered surface of the loch. ‘Will you take me to my father?’
There was a long silence, during which she daren’t even look at him. Then she heard him sigh. ‘Karen, I can’t.’
And a spike of anger shot through her. ‘Why not?’
‘Because everything we’re doing and have done has only been achieved through secrecy. Your father would kill me if I told you where he was. The whole point of the three of us living like this, no contact with friends or family, was so we’d drop below the radar. So Ergo wouldn’t know how or where to find us.’