Peter May - Coffin Road

Gilly didn’t even notice her as she wandered by. It was only Karen’s ‘Hey!’ that caught her attention. She turned, surprised, not immediately recognising her, until Karen pushed back the hood. And then her eyes widened. ‘Jesus, girl! What have you done to your hair?’ But she didn’t wait for an answer. ‘And...’ She peered at her. ‘Christ! I knew there was something different about you. All the ironmongery’s gone.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Hated that stuff. But, bloody hell, you look naked without it now.’ Then she frowned. ‘You been crying? Fuck’s sake, you look hellish.’

Karen struggled to prevent tears welling up in her eyes again. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Can always rely on you to make a bad day worse.’

Gilly sighed. ‘You are in such trouble, I can’t begin to tell you.’

And in spite of everything she felt, Karen smiled. ‘See?’

Gilly grinned. ‘Jesus Christ, come here.’ And she put her arms around her friend and squeezed her so hard she almost stopped her breathing. By the time she let her go, the tears were coursing down Karen’s cheeks and she had to use both palms to wipe them away. Gilly gazed at her with concern. ‘Your mum’s been up at the school. And I think she’s been to the police to report you missing. Officially.’

‘Stupid bitch,’ Karen said, and remembered Deloit calling her exactly that just yesterday. ‘I need help, Gilly. Can I come back to your place? I need to use your computer.’

Gilly shrugged. ‘What am I going to tell my mum?’

‘Does she know I’m... missing ?’

‘Well, I haven’t said anything to her. Your mum spoke to me at school this morning. Wanted to know if I knew where you were. Of course, I didn’t. So she’d have no reason to go asking my mum. I mean, they’re hardly big pals anyway, are they?’

‘Good. I might need her to let me stay over tonight.’

‘Shouldn’t be a problem. We’ll just tell her your mum’s away at a wedding or something.’ She tugged on the strap of Karen’s backpack and grinned again. ‘And look, you’ve even got an overnight bag. So who’d ever know different?’

Gilly’s mum wasn’t at home when they got to the house, and they went straight up to Gilly’s attic room. Karen took off her hoodie and backpack, dropped into the two-seater settee pushed against the far wall and lit a cigarette. Four velux windows were set into walls that sloped up to the ceiling, and Gilly’s desk, with its impressive array of computer equipment bought by adoring parents to indulge her, stood against the wall below one of them. A top-of-the-range iMac with two ancillary Thunderbolt screens, a 12-terabyte external hard drive, a state-of-the-art sound system. If Karen had the edge on IQ points, Gilly’s family were wealthier than hers by a mile. The room, however, was a tip, as it always was. Gilly’s pathological untidiness as counterpoint to Karen’s manic sense of order.

Gilly slumped into her computer chair and lit a cigarette for herself. ‘You going to tell me?’

Karen thought about it. You are putting his life in danger , Deloit had said. And Chris was dead. ‘Nope.’

Gilly shrugged. ‘Fair enough. You don’t get to use my computer, then, and you can find somewhere else to spend the night.’

‘Bitch,’ Karen said.

Gilly raised an indifferent eyebrow. ‘You always knew it, didn’t you?’

Karen sighed and leaned forward. ‘Look. This is serious, okay? You don’t tell a soul. Not your folks, not anyone. People have died.’

‘Yeah, right. Who?’

‘My godfather, for a start.’

Gilly didn’t look impressed.

‘And what I’m doing, right now, might be putting my own dad’s life in danger.’

Gilly very nearly laughed. ‘Karen, your dad’s already dead.’

Karen closed her eyes and pulled on her cigarette. When she opened them again, she looked at Gilly very directly. ‘That’s just it: he’s not.’

Gilly’s cigarette paused halfway to her lips. For the first time, Karen had caught her interest. ‘So tell me.’

And Karen told her. Everything. About her meetings with Chris Connor, her father’s experiment with bees that had so upset Ergo, the box of her father’s belongings from the Geddes Institute, the letter from her dad. The phone call to Richard Deloit and her subsequent visit to London. And then the news, when she got back, of her godfather’s ‘accident’.

‘I need to find this Billy Carr,’ she said. ‘My dad’s student. He’s the only remaining link to him.’

‘A guy who disappeared nearly two years ago?’

‘He can only be a few years older than us, Gilly. Chances are he’ll be on social media. Twitter, or Facebook, or Snapchat or something. That’s why I need to use the computer.’ She stood up.

But Gilly didn’t move from her chair. She stubbed out her cigarette in an overflowing ashtray. ‘What you need is help.’

‘Why do you think I came to you?’

‘No, I mean adult help. We might be smart, K, but we’re just a couple of teenage girls. And if you really are up against a giant agrochemical corporation like Ergo, we’re no match for them. I mean, really! Get serious.’

Gilly’s words came like darts out of the dark, puncturing her fragile veneer of self-confidence and deflating all her hopes. ‘There is no one,’ she said.

‘Come on, think, K. Think. There must be. What about your dad’s family?’

Karen sighed. ‘His parents are dead. He has a brother somewhere in England, but they were never close and I haven’t seen him since Dad vanished. And that was the first time in years. I wouldn’t even know where to start looking for him.’ But even as she said it, she knew that she did. ‘Wait a minute! He sent me a friend request on Facebook about a month after Dad died. Of course, I accepted, but we never shared or commented on anything. In fact, I can’t even remember him making a single post. I’d forgotten all about him.’ She pushed Gilly out of her chair and swapped places with her in front of the computer.

‘Help yourself, why don’t you?’ Gilly said dryly.

But Karen wasn’t listening. She brought up Facebook on Gilly’s browser and logged in. At the top of her profile page, she clicked on Friends and the short list of her twenty-seven friends appeared, most of whom she barely knew and almost never interacted with. All but one had postage-stamp profile pics alongside their names. The one blank was a white profile on a grey background of an anonymous male head beside the name Michael Fleming. ‘That’s him.’ She clicked on his name and brought up his page.

It was blank. He had never posted a profile pic or cover photo. He had never entered any details about himself, where he lived or worked, or where he had been educated. There were no photos, no posts, and he had a single friend. Karen.

Gilly peered over her shoulder at the screen. ‘This is a dead account, girl. Maybe he thought it was a good idea at the time, and then never followed up on it. He obviously doesn’t use it.’

Karen sat staring at the screen. ‘That creeps me out, G. Like he’s just been watching me. All my posts, all my pics.’

‘Or he set it up on an impulse then forgot about it. One way of finding out.’

Karen turned to look up at her. ‘Send him a DM?’

Gilly shrugged. ‘Worth a try.’

Karen opened up a new message box and tapped in her uncle’s name. She thought briefly about what to say. Something that would grab his attention, elicit a response. If he ever checked it. And she typed, Uncle Michael, I think Dad might still be alive. Please get in touch . Short and to the point.

Gilly said, ‘Let’s give him a little time to respond. Depends what app he’s using. Some of them put alerts up on the screen.’