Peter May: Coffin Road

‘At the lighthouse?’

‘Yes. A lie, of course. I arranged for someone to take Sam out to the island. I was going to meet him there, and we would see who, if anyone, turned up. Billy is who we expected, and Billy it was. But I got held up by the bad weather, and by the time I got there, Billy had beaten me to it and he and Sam were knocking lumps out of each other. I don’t know what happened between them, or what was said, but when I tried to intervene I got knocked to the ground. And the next thing, Billy’s grabbed a rock and he’s smashing it into Sam’s head. Again and again. Totally out of control. And when he looks at me, covered in Sam’s blood, I see only madness in his eyes and I know he’s going to try and kill me, too. Nothing I could do for Sam, so I ran. Back down to the boat, and off into the night. Only to hit a damn rock in the dark and hole my boat below the waterline.’ I am trembling from the recollection of it. ‘I suppose I must have been trying to make it back here, and by the time she finally went down I couldn’t have been that far offshore. But the first thing I know is I’m lying out there on the beach and I can’t remember a thing. Not who I am, nor what I’m doing here, nor anything that happened on the island.’ I shake my head. ‘Which damn near blew the whole project.’

Karen has been listening in rapt silence. And now she looks from me to Alex and back again. ‘So how did Alex save your life?’

‘Billy showed up at the cottage two nights later. Tried to kill me. Finish off what he failed to do on the island.’

Alex says, ‘It was a golden rule. Your dad and I would never have any personal contact. Never. But I saw him that day, washed up on the shore. And the next day, when he took Sally up to the hives, I knew that something must be badly wrong. I was going to go and see him at the cottage that night, but she was there. So I waited a day, and went back the next night. Which is when I saw Billy sneaking into the house, well after midnight.’

‘A good job you broke that golden rule,’ I tell him. ‘If you hadn’t, I’d be dead.’

Karen’s eyes are wide with wonder, and consternation. ‘And it’s all been worth it, Dad, has it? Three lives, and everything you’ve all been through?’

I sigh deeply. ‘It’s hard to measure the worth of anything against the loss of even a single life, Karen. Sam was a great friend. It breaks my heart that he died the way he did. I can’t speak for him, but if I had died achieving what we’ve achieved, then I would have felt that I had given my life for something worthwhile. Call me naive, but I have to believe that what we’ve done here will make a difference.’ An extra-strong gust of wind rocks the caravan, and we hear it whistling around every window. ‘As for the Harrisons, they brought what happened on themselves. I find it hard to sympathise.’ Though my heart still aches for Sally, and I wonder what, after all, she really felt about me.

Karen nods gravely. ‘So it’s been a success?’

I nod. ‘We stopped collecting data a few weeks ago. Alex completed his statistical analysis and I have written my paper on it. We have proved, scientifically, beyond any doubt, that neonicotinoid-based pesticides are destroying bee colonies by robbing them of their memory. Ergo and the rest will deny it till they’re blue in the face. Governments will try to ignore it, but they’ll be forced to act by public opinion. All that remains for us to do is publish.’ I turn to Alex. ‘It’s all set?’

He nods and crosses to his computer screens. He pulls up several documents. ‘Press release. PDFs of the stats and all the data. Your paper.’ He stands back. ‘All you have to do is hit the return key, and it’s out there. Everywhere across the web. There won’t be a single hiding place left for Ergo, or any of the rest of them.’ He looks at me. ‘And your story, when you start giving interviews to the media, is going to go global.’

I stand up and take Karen by the hand, leading her to the computer. ‘You do it.’

She looks up at me. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You hit the return key. Tell the world. Save the bees. No one deserves that more than you.’

I see tears well in her eyes as the enormity of it all dawns on her. ‘This is only the beginning,’ she says. ‘Isn’t it?’

I nod. ‘It is.’

She turns to gaze at the screen for a moment, then looks down at the keyboard and hits return .

I would like to offer my grateful thanks to those who gave so generously of their time and expertise during my researches for Coffin Road . In particular, I’d like to express my gratitude to Dr Christopher N. Connolly, an associate of the Centre for Environmental Change and Human Resilience (CECHR), University of Dundee, Scotland, on whose research the science in my story is based; Joe Cummins, Professor Emeritus of Genetics at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, whose presentation to the European Union on links between neonicotinoids and the collapse of bee colonies pre-dated the current controversy by several years; Gavin Jones, beekeeper, Isle of Harris, and Iain Smith, beekeeper, Isle of Lewis, Scotland, for their advice on Hebridean beekeeping; Dr Steven Campman, Medical Examiner, San Diego, USA, for his advice on pathology; George Murray, for his insights into Hebridean policing; Murray Macleod of Seatrek, Uig, Isle of Lewis, for his expertise in accessing the Flannan Isles by boat; Lorna Hunter of the Northern Lighthouse Board, for photographs and information provided on the lighthouse at Eilean Mòr in the Flannan Isles; and Judy Greenway, acting trustee for the Wilfrid Gibson literary estate, for her kind permission to quote lines from Wilfrid Wilson Gibson’s poem ‘Flannan Isle’, about the unresolved disappearance in 1900 of the three lighthouse keepers on the Flannan Isles.