The Fiancée's Truth

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The whitewashed cottage gate resisted, rusted hinges protesting as Iona pushed it open with a scrape that carried on the wind. She paused at the boundary, one hand still on the cold metal, and studied the path ahead. Rose bushes grew wild along the fence line, their spent blooms browning in the late autumn air, and the gravel underfoot crunched with each step toward the blue-painted door.

Catriona MacAulay filled the doorway before Iona could knock, as if she had been watching from the window. She was smaller than Iona expected from the photographs, thinner too, with grey threading through hair that must once have matched the auburn of the roses. Her hands were dry from housework, Iona noticed, the knuckles slightly swollen. She wore a cardigan buttoned to the throat despite the mildness of the day.

“Miss MacAulay.” Iona kept her voice level, professional. “Thank you for agreeing to speak with me. I’m with the Regional Archives, cataloguing the Kessock Tidal Station records. I was hoping you might help me understand some of the material from February 1986.”

Catriona’s gaze moved over Iona’s shoulder, checking the empty road behind her, before settling back with an assessing look. “They were all so good to me, after. Why would you want to drag all that up?”

The question carried no anger, only a kind of bone-deep weariness that made Iona’s chest tighten. “I’m not here to cause pain. But the records I’ve found, there are inconsistencies. Dates, times, details that don’t align. I thought perhaps you might remember things differently than what was written down.”

“Remember.” Catriona repeated the word like she was testing its weight. “That’s a loaded word, Miss Kerr. Memory’s not a filing cabinet. It’s more like water. Shifts every time you try to cup it in your hands.”

“Then perhaps we could try together. See what holds.”

Catriona studied her for a long moment, and Iona felt the weight of being measured, judged against some standard she couldn’t see. Then the older woman stepped aside, a slight inclination of her head granting permission.

The cottage interior smelled of peat smoke and dried lavender, sachets hanging from the low beams. Catriona led her to a sitting room where two armchairs flanked a cold hearth, a mantle clock ticking through the silence. Photographs lined the shelves, faces Iona didn’t recognize, but one frame near the lamp caught her attention. A young man with dark hair and a ready smile, standing in front of the turbine hall doors.

“Sit,” Catriona said. “I’ll make tea.”

Iona settled into the worn armchair, her notebook on her knee, and let her gaze move around the room. Nothing had been changed in years, perhaps decades. The wallpaper border dated to the eighties, cottage loaves and wheat sheaves repeating around the ceiling. A calendar on the wall still showed February 1986, the photograph a storm-lashed coastline.

When Catriona returned with the tea tray, Iona noticed the slight shake in her wrists as she set it down, though the cups never rattled against their saucers. Controlled. Practiced.

“You have questions.” Catriona settled into the opposite chair, her hands folded in her lap. “Ask them.”

“February third, 1986.” Iona opened her notebook to a fresh page. “The duty log for that night records Callum Reid as the on-shift engineer, signed in at ten o’clock. Can you tell me where he was that evening?”

Catriona’s face changed, a subtle shift like cloud shadow moving across a hillside. She reached for her teacup, then seemed to think better of it and folded her hands again. “He was here. With me.”

“Until what time?”

“Late.” The word came out rough. “We’d had dinner. Lamb chops, I remember, because I’d burned them and he ate them anyway, said they were perfect. We sat at the kitchen table long after, just talking. About the wedding, mostly. The seating arrangements, whether his aunt should sit near the band or she’d complain about the volume.”

“What time did he leave?”

Catriona’s gaze drifted toward the window, toward the grey afternoon light. “He didn’t leave until past nine. We were still talking when the news came on at nine-thirty. Something about the miners, I think. He stood up to switch it off and that’s when the phone rang.”

Iona’s pen stopped moving. “The phone rang?”

“The station. Someone calling to say they needed him. There was something wrong with the intake valves, they said. He had to come in.”

“Who called?”

“I don’t know.” Catriona’s voice dropped. “He took the call in the hall. When he came back, he was already reaching for his coat. Said it would only take an hour, maybe two. He’d be back before I woke up.”

“And the log says he signed in at ten o’clock.”

“Then the log is wrong.” Catriona’s hands tightened against each other, knuckles whitening. “He was here with me until past nine. It would take him twenty minutes to drive to the station, even in good weather. He couldn’t have signed in before nine-thirty at the earliest, and that’s if he left the moment the call ended.”

Iona let the contradiction settle between them. The log claimed Callum Reid had signed in at 22:00. Catriona placed him at home until after 21:30, with a twenty-minute drive ahead of him. Even under the most generous reading, he couldn’t have arrived before 21:50, and that assumed he left immediately, didn’t stop for anything, drove at speed on narrow coastal roads.

“Miss MacAulay.” Iona chose her words carefully. “The log is signed in Callum’s handwriting. Or at least, it appears to be. If what you’re saying is true, then someone else wrote that entry and forged his signature.”

“They were all so good to me, after.” Catriona’s voice cracked on the word. “The station, the Harbour Master, the other engineers. They organized everything. The funeral, the flowers, the condolences. They told me he died a hero, checking the valves in a storm surge. They gave me a pension, a widow’s pension though we weren’t married yet. Why would anyone do that if they had something to hide?”

“Maybe they didn’t hide it from you. Maybe they hid it from the official record.”

Catriona’s hand moved to the photograph on the side table, the young man smiling in front of the turbine hall. Her fingers touched the glass, tracing the line of his jaw.

“He was a careful man,” she said. “The water… it was just so fast that night. That’s what they told me. The surge came up between one check and the next. By the time they found him, he was gone.”

Iona watched Catriona’s hand on the photograph, saw the way her fingers pressed against the frame, and something in her chest shifted. This wasn’t just a discrepancy in a logbook anymore. This was a woman who had spent thirty-eight years living with a version of events that might not be true.

“Miss MacAulay, the phone call. Did you hear anything? Any voice, any detail that might tell you who was calling?”

Catriona’s hand began to tremble. The tremor started in her fingers, resting on the photograph frame, then travelled up her wrist, her forearm, until her whole arm shook. She pulled it back into her lap, pressing it against her stomach.

“I didn’t—“She stopped. Swallowed. Started again. “They said—“Iona waited, her pen still, her breath held.

“They said it was urgent. That’s all I heard. Callum came back into the kitchen and his face was strange. I asked him what was wrong and he said it was just work, just a valve adjustment, but he looked… I don’t know. Like he knew something was wrong before he even left.”

The mantle clock ticked through the silence. Outside, wind rattled the window frame.

“Did he ever mention any problems at the station? Conflicts, disagreements, anything that might explain why someone would falsify a record?”

Catriona shook her head slowly. “He loved that place. Said the tide was like breathing, in and out, in and out. He thought the station would run forever. He never said a word against anyone there.”

Iona wrote in her notebook: Callum home until past 21:30. Phone call from station. Left approx. 21:35. Drive time 20 min. Earliest arrival 21:55. Log claims 22:00 sign-in. Discrepancy impossible unless log falsified.

“Thank you,” she said, closing the notebook. “You’ve given me a great deal to think about.”

Catriona rose when Iona did, but she didn’t walk her to the door. Instead, she stood by the armchair, one hand still pressed to her stomach, the other reaching toward the photograph on the side table.

“Miss Kerr.” Catriona’s voice came out thin. “If you find out what really happened that night… would you tell me?”

Iona turned at the doorway, her hand on the cold metal latch. “Do you want to know?”

“I don’t know.” Catriona picked up the photograph, held it against her chest. “They were all so good to me, after. But sometimes I wake up in the night and I wonder if they were good to keep me quiet, or good because they felt guilty, or good because that’s just what people do when someone drowns. I’ve spent thirty-eight years not knowing which it was.”

“I’ll tell you what I find. Whatever it is.”

Catriona nodded once, a sharp motion, and turned away before Iona could see her face.

The wind followed Iona down the garden path, tugging at her coat, pulling hair across her eyes. She paused at the gate, her notebook open, and forced her cold fingers to write what she had learned.

Callum Reid was at home with Catriona until past nine-thirty. The log claimed he signed in at ten. The timeline was possible, barely, but only if everything went perfectly. No stops, no delays, no checks of the equipment before signing in.

But the handwriting analysis from Chapter Two had already proven the log entry was forged. Someone else had written that entry, someone who had access to the duty log and knew how to approximate Callum’s signature.

Which meant someone had lied. And that lie had been maintained for thirty-eight years.

Iona flipped to a fresh page and wrote three names.

Fraser Munro, the engineer who had signed the witness line on the forged entry.

Ewan Stirling, the Harbour Master on duty that night.

And a blank space with a question mark for whoever had made that phone call.

Three witnesses. Three chances to find the truth.

She closed the notebook and looked back at the cottage. Through the front window, she could see Catriona standing in the sitting room, the photograph pressed to her chest, her shoulders curved inward like she was holding something that might break.

The gate creaked behind her as she walked down the path, the sound carrying on the wind like a warning.