Peter May: Coffin Road

I nod again. ‘It’s all on a hard drive.’ And in the look I give him, I try to convey all the contempt that I feel. ‘You know what you’re doing, don’t you? All the time and money and effort that’s gone into this. Proof positive that the poison these agrochem companies are pouring on our crops is destroying the bees. And all that that means for the future of our own species. This planet. And you don’t care, because someone’s paying you a lot of money.’

‘A helluva lot of money.’

‘You fucking idiot! Maybe one day, if you ever have children, you’ll understand how you’re selling their future down the river.’

He is unmoved. He says, with a strangely quiet authority, ‘We’ll go in there, get your data, and take Billy away with us.’

But I shake my head. ‘Billy’s not going to just walk away, Jon. I saw him kill Sam that night. And he’d have killed me, too, if I hadn’t got away from him.’ I shake my head with the recollection of it. ‘I knew I was going to have to blow the whole project. Go to the police as soon as I got ashore. And I would have, if I hadn’t struck rocks trying to clear the islands in the dark. Holed the bloody boat, and knew I was never going to make it back. Don’t know how many hours I bailed her out after the engine got submerged. I don’t even remember her going down in the end. Just the thought that I was going to die out there.’

Sally’s voice cut in for the first time. Frail and uncertain. ‘But you didn’t.’

I turn withering eyes on her. ‘No. Which is why Billy came looking for me at the cottage two nights later to try and finish the job.’

Jon’s voice forces me to tear my eyes away from Sally. ‘Billy was way off script, Tom. Freelancing. The stupid little idiot must have thought he could hijack the research data himself and hold Ergo to ransom. All he was supposed to do was keep me and Sally informed, and we’d have snatched the results from you ourselves when the time came. No need for anyone to get hurt.’

‘Except me.’ I turn my head towards Sally again. ‘And I don’t mean physically. It must take quite an act of will to fake sex with someone so convincingly.’

This time she forces herself to hold my eye. ‘It wasn’t all an act, Neal.’ And speaking the name she has always used for me strikes us both, as if we have been slapped in the face. She quickly corrects herself. ‘Tom.’

‘Enough.’ Jon stands up, rising beyond the protection of the wall, and takes a step back as the full force of the wind hits him. He reaches behind him and draws a pistol from some hidden holster. His smile is dry and goes no further than his lips. ‘Don’t worry, Tom. I have a licence for it. And no intention of using it. But who knows how unstable our friend Billy Carr might be? He might require a little persuasion. And we might need a little protection.’

The grilles protecting the outer door have been prised open, and the lock on the door itself smashed. Jon opens out one half of it and slips into the yellow light that illuminates the kitchen and the corridor that leads off to the sitting room. Sally and I follow, and I pull the door shut behind us.

The sound of the storm raging outside recedes immediately, and we are enveloped by a strange hush. Like stepping through some portal that takes us to another time in another world. I become aware that all three of us are soaked to the skin and trembling with the cold.

There is no sign of life. No sound. Yet I know that Billy must have seen us coming, and that he is waiting for us somewhere in here. I only hope to God that he has Karen with him, and that she is still alive.

‘Billy!’ Jon’s voice thunders in the silence of the building.

‘We’re in the tower.’ Billy’s shout echoes down the spiral stairs from the light room above.

‘Don’t be an idiot, son. Leave the girl up there and come on down. Tom’s going to give us the hard drive and we’ll be out of here.’

But I know that they won’t. No one is leaving the island tonight. Not in this storm. And I wonder if Jon has any intention of letting Karen and me leave at all. Because hasn’t it all just gone too far by now? Ergo may never have intended causing anyone physical harm, but Sam is dead. Murdered. Billy is a loose cannon, and I am a witness. As, now, is Karen.

In focusing on the short term, in trying to save my daughter, I have not thought any further ahead than that. I have not projected possibilities into the future, played out the game in my head to visualise where it will end. And now I do. And see it clearly. Jon cannot afford for any of us to leave here alive. Not Billy, not me, not Karen. Not now. And I wonder if Sally realises it.

I glance at her pale, frightened face and find it hard to believe she is really capable of this.

Billy’s voice reverberates in the stairwell again. ‘He saw me kill Sam.’

‘That’s just your word against his. There’s no physical evidence to link you to this place. No other witnesses. And anyway, the police already think Tom did it. No point in making things worse.’

But Billy is not listening to Jon’s reason. ‘If he doesn’t want me to hurt Karen, he’d better come up. Right now.’ I can hear the hysteria creeping into his voice. His intelligence must surely be telling him that this cannot end any way but badly. But something else possesses him, something beyond intelligence, and he seems driven on a course to self-destruction. Which makes him unpredictable and dangerous.

I glance at Jon. In a low voice I tell him, ‘He’s going to kill me.’

Jon shakes his head in disagreement. ‘Not until he has his hands on the data.’

I close my eyes in desperation. No one, it seems, is thinking clearly or rationally. Except me. But I don’t know what else I can do. Billy has Karen and I have no choice but to do what he demands. With a final glance back at Sally, I start up the stairs, steadying myself with outstretched fingers on the curve of the walls.

From the stairwell, I enter through a yellow door into the circular wood-panelled room beneath the light room itself. The light is dazzling up here, as the slowly revolving beam thrown out by the lamp passes just above my head. I duck to avoid the underside of the lamp mechanism and climb the rungs of the ladder through the hatch in the grilled floor, pulling myself up and into the circle of glass whose prisms magnify the light and launch it out to sea. Briefly, irrationally, I wonder if it is reaching any ships out there in the dark, guiding them safely away from us.

Almost immediately, a revolution of the lamp blinds me, and I stagger back against the glass. It passes quickly, but leaves me nearly blind, and I blink to bring Billy and Karen into focus out of the flare of negative colour that fills my eyes. He is wearing a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes to protect them. Karen’s hands are bound behind her, and she has a pillow case over her head that concertinas on her shoulders. He has a hand spread across her forehead, pulling her head back, and a knife against the cloth where her throat must be. I feel a terrible empty ache inside me. I cannot imagine what I will do or how I will feel if any harm comes to her. ‘Where have you hidden the data?’

I see the lamp coming and close my eyes this time until it has passed. ‘What makes you think there’s not a copy?’

He just laughs. ‘Because you’re too fucking paranoid, Professor Fleming.’ A mocking parody of how he addressed me at the Geddes. ‘If there’s one copy, and you have it, there’s not the slightest danger of anyone else getting their hands on it. Unless, of course, you give it to them.’

I shut my eyes again, but even so, the light burns through my lids.

And still Billy wants to talk. ‘All the data that Sam and I collected so faithfully every week. Sent to you. Never shared. All the samples we sent to the lab, results returned only to you. So nobody else, nobody , could put it all together. Except you. And the statistician. Whoever he might be.’ A sneering little laugh. ‘Just one more thing you kept from us. Playing God. Forgetting that it was me — me — who discovered it all in the first place. Not you. Me . And who was going to get all the credit?’ He waves a finger of admonition at me. ‘Not right, Professor Fleming. Not right at all.’