Karen grabbed his arm. ‘What happened?’
‘What happened, Karen, was that his whole damn world just fell apart. He barely even had time to draw breath before he found himself summoned by the director of the Geddes and told that he was being made redundant.’
Karen was shocked. ‘And was he?’
Connor nodded vigorously. ‘Oh, yes. Totally unconnected with his research, they said. Cuts and natural wastage. And, of course, your dad being your dad, he accused them of trying to cover up his findings. Being scared of losing their research funding from Ergo. Which only hastened his departure. He was told to clear his desk and go. And when he threatened to publish the results of his research anyway, they had him escorted from the building. Security people came to his office and the labs and seized everything. Notes, results, computers, hard drives.’
‘You mean the results of his research were never published?’
‘Never. And there was no way he could ever repeat the experiment. The cost of these things is prohibitive. Way beyond the means of any individual.’
‘I never knew he’d been sacked,’ Karen said. ‘I’m not even sure my mum did. Why wouldn’t he have told us?’
Connor shrugged. He was still holding the shell in his hand. He looked at it briefly, then turned and hurled it into the water. The tide was turning. He resumed walking, and Karen slipped her arm through his again. They covered several hundred yards before Connor spoke again.
He said, ‘Billy Carr, the student who conducted the experiments with him, tried to smuggle stuff out to him in the weeks after he’d been kicked out.’
‘Weeks? How long after he’d been sacked did he kill himself?’
‘Must have been a couple of months, Karen.’
‘Jesus...’ She shook her head and wondered how he could have kept it from them for so long. And why.
‘Anyway, Billy himself disappeared after about a month. No idea what happened to him. He just... vanished. Didn’t turn up one day, and no one ever saw him again.’
Karen was struck by a sudden, dreadful thought. ‘They didn’t kill him, did they? My dad, I mean. Ergo. To stop him from publishing?’ In her mind, it explained everything. The empty boat. The life jacket still aboard. And then she remembered the note. Tell Karen I love her.
Chris was shaking his head. ‘I don’t think so, Karen. They’re pretty damned ruthless, these big corporations, but murder? I doubt it. Your dad was depressed. Never saw him so low. He went to all the big environmental campaign organisations, like Friends of the Earth, Buglife, the Soil Association. Looking for funding to repeat the experiment. But none of them had the resources. In the end, I think he just gave up. They’d beaten him, and he had no way to fight back.’
A huge wave of anger welled up inside Karen. Ergo might not have murdered her father, but they had killed him as surely as if they had. With their greed and their arrogance and their total disregard for the planet, and every man, woman and child on it. ‘Bastards!’ she said. ‘Fucking bastards!’ It was out before she could stop herself, and she glanced, embarrassed, at her godfather. But he seemed not even to have heard her. His eyes were glazed and gazing off into some unseen distance.
Then he turned towards his god-daughter. ‘Come back to the car with me, Karen. There’s something I want to give you.’
Chris Connor’s car was parked in Straiton Place, beyond a children’s play area with swings and a chute. Almost as soon as they left the beach to follow the path one street back, he seemed to Karen to lose the confidence he had found talking to her on the sands. He appeared nervous again, and his eyes were everywhere, directed at every movement. Every pedestrian, every passing car. Until his gaze fell on some kids kicking a ball about on the grass. Tiny kids, the ball almost as big as themselves. And he seemed briefly absorbed by them. He stopped, watching, oblivious to Karen’s impatience. Then, absently, he drew the remote from his pocket, and the lights flashed on his white Renault Scenic as the doors unlocked.
He looked at Karen, almost as if seeing her for the first time. ‘She took the kids.’
Karen frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘My wife. Took both the kids. My boys. Seven and nine now. Said they deserved better.’
And while her godfather was clearly feeling sorry for himself, it was his boys that Karen’s heart went out to. She knew only too well what it was to lose a father. And after the revelations of the past half hour, her guilt and regret had been replaced by an anger that filled her up, very nearly consuming her. But she was used to containing her emotions, and there was no outward sign of the internal fury that was firing her impossible desire for revenge. Her father might have taken his own life, but he had been driven to it. Someone had to pay. ‘You said you had something for me.’
‘Oh, yes...’ He rounded the car and lifted the tailgate, then reached inside and drew out a shoebox. Literally a shoebox — it had a Clarks logo on the side of it. Its lid was held shut by string wrapped length and widthwise and tied in a knot on top. It was rough, frayed string, and the knot looked impossibly tight. The green colour of the box had faded, as if it might have been sitting somewhere in sunlight for a long time. He thrust it at her. ‘Here. It’s for you and your mum.’
Karen took it, holding it slightly away from her, as if it might be contaminated. ‘What is it?’
‘They never did give your dad time to clear out the things from the drawers in his office. Not that there was much in the way of personal stuff, anyway. So I did it for him. And then forgot to give it to him. It’s been sitting in the house all this time.’
And suddenly Karen wrapped her arms around it and pulled it close. It was as though she was holding a little piece of her father in them. There was enormous comfort in it, and she found herself both excited and scared by the prospect of opening it. Excited because she knew it would be a voyage of discovery, however brief, and that it would put her in direct contact with her dad again, in a way she hadn’t felt since her mother had given his clothes away to charity. Scared, because maybe it wouldn’t be enough, and she didn’t want to be disappointed. She saw her godfather lift his eyes from the box and glance each way along the street.
‘And something else.’ He reached into an inside pocket of his coat and pulled out a long white envelope. He held it in his left hand and ran the fingers of his right gently over it, and Karen could see her name written on it in the bold, clear handwriting of her father. But Chris didn’t give it to her immediately, as if reluctant to part with it. ‘He gave me this just a couple of days before he went missing.’ He sighed deeply. ‘I should have seen it, I should have known. But at the time, and even now, I couldn’t conceive of your dad as being a man who would take his own life.’
She wanted to snatch it away from him. It had her name on it. It was hers. ‘What’s in it?’
‘I don’t know. He gave it to me sealed, and made me promise to keep it safe, and only give it to you when you had turned eighteen.’ He expelled air in frustration with himself. ‘I can see now why he gave me it. But at the time, I really didn’t understand.’
‘I’m not eighteen yet,’ Karen said.
‘I know.’ He looked at the envelope again. ‘But, after you came to the Geddes the other day, I knew I had to give it to you. What was the point of waiting? Seventeen, eighteen. What difference does it make now? It’s something he wanted you to have.’ Almost reluctantly he held it out to her, as if he were giving away the last piece of his friend, saying a final, belated farewell to the man he had loved, too.