The Accounts

Emma had returned to Edinburgh with a familiar professional temptation: the urge to turn three incomplete fragments into a story that sounded inevitable. Nora had recalled a car, an old programme named a volunteer, and an online index appeared to fall silent at an inconvenient moment. Arranged in the right order, they suggested a conspiracy. Examined individually, they remained questions.

Sarah rang shortly after nine. She had made a preliminary enquiry at the Glenarraidh Education Trust and reached Fiona Bell, a member of the finance team.

“The index on their website isn't comprehensive,” Sarah reported. “Fiona says older files were transferred to physical storage. She wouldn't confirm whether the September 2011 minutes are there, or even whether she has personally seen them.”

Emma looked again at the anonymous message: You should ask why the trust stopped keeping its old meeting records. Its confident premise now seemed particularly suspect. An incomplete public index was not evidence that the organisation had stopped taking minutes. Nor was Fiona's account proof that the documents existed.

“Did she offer access?” Emma asked.

“Written questions only. And no guarantee of a response.”

Emma composed a measured email. Had the board met in September 2011? Who had been responsible for recording and retaining its decisions? Did any original minutes or copies remain available for inspection? She deliberately avoided repeating the anonymous allegation. If Fiona knew nothing of it, Emma preferred not to contaminate a potentially independent account.

Next came Daniel Reid. A search of contemporary newspaper archives yielded a brief item about refurbishment work at the community hall. It credited a local driver named Daniel Reid with transporting furniture in August 2011. The coincidence was worth recording, but the source did not identify a vehicle, establish attendance on the evening of Claire's disappearance, or demonstrate that this Daniel Reid was the man Nora remembered. Emma added those exclusions directly beneath the clipping.

At 11.17 a.m., a withheld number appeared on her phone. She answered and heard a male voice, low and controlled.

“You're wasting time on the minutes,” he said. “Look at who authorised the payments.”

“Which payments? And who am I speaking to?”

The connection ended.

Emma wrote down the exchange immediately, marking the phrasing as a recollection rather than a recording. The timing encouraged a connection with the earlier text message; the evidence did not. Nor did a reference to payments constitute an allegation she could responsibly publish. A genuine whistle-blower, an interested party with a grudge and someone deliberately trying to misdirect her might all have used the same instruction.

Sarah proposed adding a question about payments to Fiona's email. Emma declined. It had already been sent, and modifying the enquiry might make it impossible to tell what Fiona volunteered without prompting. Instead they agreed to seek the trust's published accounts, check what financial disclosures actually covered and make a separate request about approval procedures.

After the call, Emma reopened the file she had named Unverified. It was growing faster than the folder called Evidence.

She could live with that imbalance, provided she did not mistake the volume of suspicions for their weight. What unsettled her was a different possibility: someone outside the newsroom seemed determined to choose which question she would ask next.

Before bed, a second courier envelope was waiting at her door. The letter bore Claire's name: ‘Stop asking about the scholarships. If you publish anything, you will only hurt people who have already suffered.’ The injunction ran against the first letter's invitation to investigate. Emma preserved the envelope and tracking label, recorded its arrival and sent Sarah a copy. She filed the two originals separately. The signature established what the writer wished her to believe, not who the writer was. Until she could trace it, the warning belonged among her unverified sources.

She entered Fiona Bell and Fiona Kerr separately in her source list: the current records contact and the former external accountant were different women with different knowledge of the trust.