The Accounts

By the time Emma returned to Edinburgh, she had stopped trying to make the pieces fit neatly together. Nora’s account belonged in one column of her notes; the August programme belonged in another. Both might matter. Neither identified the driver of the car Claire had entered.

The next morning Sarah rang with a small but useful development. She had contacted the Glenarraidh Education Trust and spoken to Fiona Bell, who worked with its financial records.

“Fiona says the online meeting index isn't a complete archive,” Sarah told her. “Some of the older paperwork was moved into storage. She couldn't confirm whether the September 2011 minutes survive.”

“Then we can't describe them as missing,” Emma said.

“Not yet. We can say they aren't available on the website.”

Fiona had agreed to receive written questions, although she had made no promise to answer them. Emma drafted an email asking whether meetings had taken place in September 2011, who had custody of the minutes and whether copies could be inspected. She kept the anonymous message out of it. She wanted Fiona's answer to be independent of the wording someone had sent to her phone.

While she waited, Emma searched newspaper archives for Daniel Reid. One short article about repairs to the community hall referred to a local driver of that name who had helped transport furniture in August 2011. She checked the article's date twice.

A driver connected with the hall was interesting. Yet the article gave no registration number, no description of a car and no indication that Reid had been present on the night Claire disappeared. Emma wrote the limits of the evidence beside the reference rather than in a separate notebook where she might overlook them later.

At eleven seventeen, her phone rang from a withheld number. She answered without introducing herself.

“Forget the minutes,” a man's voice said. “Find out who approved the payments.”

“Which payments?” Emma asked.

The caller hung up.

She immediately wrote down his exact words. She had no recording and could not be certain she would recognise the voice again. The second contact might have come from the same person who had sent the message, but nothing established that.

Emma told Sarah. Sarah's first suggestion was to ask Fiona about the payments as well.

“Not in the same email,” Emma replied. “If she's willing to answer the archive questions, we should see what she says without supplying someone else's accusation.”

Sarah agreed. They would keep the call separate, request publicly available financial statements and ask for the trust's record-retention policy. Emma closed her notebook with an uneasy sense that someone was setting the order of her investigation.

The question was whether that person knew something worth finding—or merely knew which words would make her look.

Before going to bed, Emma found a second envelope delivered by courier. The letter was signed Claire: ‘Stop asking about the scholarships. If you publish anything, you will only hurt people who have already suffered.’ It contradicted the first letter's request to investigate. Emma photographed the delivery label, kept both originals separately and sent Sarah a copy. A familiar signature could not establish authorship. Whoever had arranged this delivery had given her another document to check, not a reason to abandon the enquiry.

Fiona Bell's work with the current records was separate from Fiona Kerr's earlier accounting role. Emma would keep the two sources distinct.