The Uncounted Passenger
On the last seasonal ferry to Skye, retired detective Mairi Fraser meets a woman who challenges the claim that her friend Callum’s father abandoned him ten years earlier. When the ferry operator denies the woman travelled, Mairi’s inquiry exposes a comforting accident story concealing how two people knowingly left Fergus trapped without help—and insisting on the truth costs the harbour jobs and goodwill. As his remains are recovered and the investigation continues, Callum begins to mourn an imperfect father, while Mairi finds belonging through friendship rather than a return to policing.
By MyAudioBooks.ai ·
Listen free: The Uncounted Passenger
Mairi Fraser moved the bag of roof fasteners off the wet bench and held it between her boots while she checked the sailing notice. At four in the afternoon on October seventeenth, two thousand and twenty-five, she had half an hour to get herself and the dry paper bag aboard.
Nine months on Skye had taught her to buy the right fittings when she found them. At sixty-one, retired from detective work in Glasgow, she could give a leaking cottage roof the attention she had once given other people’s emergencies. She wanted to be home in Port Darroch before dark.
Her phone rang as she folded the top of the bag.
“Did you get stainless?” Callum asked.
“Yes.”
“Washers?”
“Yes, Callum. Everything on your list.”
“Your list. I only changed the bits that would rust.”
She settled the phone against her ear. Callum Ross, Port Darroch’s harbour master, worked for the independent harbour trust. He had inspected her loose roof flashing from the path and offered to help secure it. Their friendship had developed through jobs of that sort: a lifted corner of metal, a sticking gate, a meal after something had been put right.
“Supper at mine,” she said. “Once you’ve finished.”
“I’ll bring bread. Have you changed your mind about the papers?”
“No.”
“You haven’t seen them,” Callum said.
“I know whose they are.”
The notice beside the bench announced the last scheduled crossing of the season. This ferry served one small mainland terminal and Port Darroch in southern Skye; its winter closure would mean longer journeys, not the end of travel to the island. Mairi had checked the alternatives before buying the cottage. Today she wanted the short route, a sound roof and the supper they had arranged.
Callum wanted her to read about his father.
“He left ten years ago this month,” he said. “That’s what they still say.”
“Fergus’s disappearance won’t become clearer just from having me read it.”
“It might become less convenient.”
She pressed the fold in the bag flat with her thumb. “Bring the bread. Leave the folder.”
Across the loading lane, Jean Boyd drove her green van towards the ramp. Mairi knew her from the guesthouse above the harbour. Jean lowered the window for the shore worker, and Mairi saw the empty passenger seat before the van moved on.
“Jean’s here,” Mairi said. “They’re loading. I’d better go.”
“Keep the fittings dry.”
She put her phone away and joined the foot passengers.
The ticket seller had given her a blue ticket. Ahead of her, an older woman in a dark hooded coat held a cream slip bearing the name West Sound Ferries. A crewman checked it and waved her through. Beside him, a shore worker wearing the harbour trust’s vest counted the people entering each vehicle, then the pedestrians. His count travelled separately from the company’s tickets. Callum had explained that distinction when Mairi first used the route: the trust needed to know how many people were on the water, including those who paid nothing to travel.
Mairi kept her blue ticket in her coat’s right pocket. She climbed from the vehicle deck to the saloon, carrying the fasteners with both hands.
The ferry left at four thirty in the afternoon. Through the saloon’s forward windows she could see the vehicles below, Jean’s green van near the back of the line. Foot passengers would use a marked passage beside them when they disembarked. A staircase at the rear of the saloon led down to that passage; a short chain across it kept people from wandering among vehicles without the crew’s permission.
The woman with the cream slip sat across the aisle. Her hood had fallen back, showing grey hair cut close behind her ears.
“That was Callum Ross you were speaking to?”
Mairi shifted the bag onto the seat beside her. “Yes.”
“I heard you say his name.”
“Do you know him?” Mairi asked.
“I knew his father.”
The woman held the cream slip between two fingers. Her thumbnail had a split near its edge.
“Fergus didn’t simply leave him,” she said.
Mairi waited. The woman turned the slip over.
“What do you mean by that?”
“He ought to know.”
“Then you should speak to him.”
Her answer came too promptly. Mairi heard her own refusal in it, although this woman had asked nothing of her. She softened the next question.
“Were you working here when Fergus disappeared?”
“Yes. On shore.”
A crewman came through the saloon to attend to the staircase. The woman rose, returned his nod and followed him. At the chain she lifted the loose end clear of its hook before he reached for it, then went down with one hand on the rail. Mairi let her continue down the stairs while the crewman replaced the chain.
She had neither the woman’s name nor a statement she could reasonably carry to Callum. An acquaintance might have known something important. She might also have had an opinion she preferred to deliver indirectly. Mairi wanted the distinction before offering him either.
By the time the ferry approached Port Darroch, the woman had stayed below. Mairi checked the other saloon seats while passengers gathered their bags. Nobody matching her coat or grey hair remained.
At about five twenty-five in the afternoon, the ramp lowered. Mairi waited beside the pedestrian passage while the forward vehicles drove off. Rain blew beneath the edge of the upper deck, and a high-sided vehicle blocked her view of the green van.
A door shut behind it. A second door shut a little later.
Then Jean’s van moved into the open and followed the other vehicles ashore. Mairi saw Jean at the wheel, but spray on the passenger window obscured the seat beside her.
The woman could have taken a lift. That seemed an ordinary explanation for her absence from the saloon, though Mairi had seen nobody get into the van.
Callum stood beyond the ramp, finishing the trust’s landing count. He raised a hand towards her, then turned to a crewman calling from the quay. Mairi took the uphill path, away from the exposed road along the shore.
At her cottage she put the fasteners on a shelf in the dry cupboard. She had taken off one boot when Callum called.
“I’m still on rounds. Two moorings to check, then the store doors. Can we put supper off?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll come tomorrow and do the flashing.”
“If it’s safe,” Mairi said.
“If it’s safe,” he repeated. “You got home all right?”
She told him about the woman then, including the words she had used and the limits of what Mairi had asked.
“Who was she?”
“I didn’t get her name.”
“You let her go?”
“She went below,” Mairi said. “I thought she might be travelling with someone.”
Callum said nothing for several seconds.
“I’m sorry,” Mairi said. “I should have asked.”
“I’ll ask Gordon about the company slips.”
She ate at home, put the bag of fittings further back from the cupboard door and went to bed. By morning the postponed supper still seemed a small, repairable disappointment.
Callum’s call on October eighteenth changed that.
“Gordon says nobody like her travelled.”
Mairi sat on the edge of her bed. “Nobody with a company slip?”
“Nobody matching what you told me. He says you’ve mixed her up with a fare-paying passenger.”
“I saw the slip checked.”
“I told him that,” Callum said. “He says you’re mistaken.”
“Is he at the harbour?”
“In the office.”
She dressed, took her notebook and pen, and left the fasteners where she had stored them. On her phone, the travel notices confirmed that the bridge was closed under storm restrictions and several exposed approaches were unsafe. Calls and messages still worked. Local officers were dealing with road incidents; people could ask for help, but a journey that had been straightforward the previous evening now needed checking.
The denial made this a welfare question. A woman had travelled to Port Darroch, yet the company would not acknowledge the route by which she had arrived. Mairi needed to establish that she had reached somewhere safe before she considered what the woman had said about Fergus.
Gordon Bell, the ferry company’s director, occupied the visitor’s chair in the harbour office when Mairi arrived. Callum remained behind the desk, his radio turned low. The office adjoined the quay, and someone testing a loose store latch outside sent a repeated metal knock through the wall.
“She had grey hair,” Mairi said. “A dark coat. She showed a cream slip before boarding. I heard her say she’d worked on shore.”
“We’ve had several people in dark coats,” Gordon said.
“I’m describing one person.”
“And I’m telling you we carried no company traveller answering that description.”
“Were you at the mainland terminal?” Mairi asked.
“Our staff were.”
“So this is what you’ve been told.”
Gordon moved his chair back. “We have arrangements for company travel. They’re quite clear.”
“Then preserve whatever was used for yesterday’s crossing. Tickets, passes, the count. I’ll give the police my observations.”
“Police?” He directed the word towards Callum. “For someone who went downstairs?”
“For someone whose arrival I can’t confirm,” Mairi said. “I’m not reporting a disappearance at sea.”
Callum leaned both palms on the desk. “She saw the bloody slip, Gordon.”
“And I’m responsible for what this company says. We don’t invent passengers to fit remarks made in a saloon.”
Mairi asked him to pass the preservation request to the terminal staff. He said he would speak to them, then left for the company store.
She and Callum checked the likely ordinary destinations first. The local lift service had collected nobody from that sailing. Two accommodation keepers had taken no late arrival. Jean, reached at her guesthouse, said nobody had come asking for a room. Mairi gave her a brief description and asked her to call if she heard of anyone needing assistance.
A local constable took Mairi’s account by telephone. She asked him to request preservation of the crossing material and asked whether anyone had sought voluntary shelter. He knew of no such report. She gave the observation of the slip, the woman’s words, the descent to the vehicle deck and the two door closures. She distinguished every sight from every inference. He sent her the written statement to check and said an officer could follow up after the immediate storm duties.
Callum printed it for her. At the sentence suggesting the woman had entered Jean’s van, Mairi stopped.
“I said she might have. I didn’t see it.”
He waited while she corrected the wording, signed the statement and returned it through the office connection. Her signature made the missed question hers to account for. She could no longer pass the encounter to Callum as an interesting possibility and withdraw.
“The trust counted twenty-six aboard,” he said when she had finished. “Four crew, twenty-one public passengers. That leaves one company traveller.”
“Or a counting error.”
“Independent count. The shore man counts people, not tickets.”
“I understand,” Mairi said. “It supports what I saw. It doesn’t give us her name.”
Callum took a folder from the drawer and put it on the desk. He kept his hand on it.
“You’ll read this now?”
She wanted to say that the current passenger and his father were different questions. The woman’s remark had already joined them.
“I’ll read it,” she said. “I’m not taking charge of anything.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
His hand left the folder before hers reached it.
The papers had been gathered by Callum and his family over ten years. Mairi read enough to understand the company’s account: Fergus Ross, a shore engineer, had left Port Darroch in October two thousand and fifteen, aged fifty-four. Gordon had said he travelled on the last seasonal sailing. Agnes Kerr, then the shore supervisor, had also left by that ferry.
“Agnes is Jean Boyd’s sister,” Callum said. “The trust’s old count has eighteen. Four crew and fourteen named public passengers. No space for either of them.”
“No extra people counted,” Mairi said. “That’s a question worth asking. It doesn’t establish where they were.”
“They told me he’d gone. I was twenty-three. Old enough to understand a man could walk away.”
He pushed a page towards her, then drew it back before she could read it.
“He had a habit of making a repair last another week. I know that. This isn’t me asking you to make him perfect.”
“Then let me see the page.”
Fergus’s final warning concerned the old shore winch pit. The machinery had once helped draw vessels up the slip. Its hatch was awkward to lift, its edges worn, and work inside needed proper assistance at the surface.
“He’d done it alone before,” Callum said. “Plenty of times. He stopped agreeing to it that autumn.”
“Who controlled access?”
“Agnes. She was responsible for the keys and opening up for the shore work.”
“Responsible for them isn’t the same as holding them every minute,” Mairi said.
“I know.”
Mairi put the warning back among the other pages. Callum had retained the earlier references to informal repairs as well as the final objection. She was glad of that, though he plainly wanted her attention on the objection.
A photograph hung beside the office door. It showed the older slip and an uninterrupted sea wall behind a group of workers. Callum identified Fergus near the end of the group and pointed out the position of the winch hatch.
They stepped onto the sheltered side of the quay. From the public path, Mairi could see the covered works area and the hatch beyond a barrier. The sea wall in the photograph had survived, with later repairs along its face. A small plaque marked tidal drainage work completed in September two thousand and eighteen.
“The outlet came through there,” Callum said, indicating the newer stonework. “Three years after Dad went. They left the old chamber alone.”
Mairi noted the date and the position. The obsolete pit lay on shore, behind the old sea wall, inside the works area rather than beneath any part of the ferry.
“Stabilisation starts October twenty-first,” Callum said. “They’ll be working over the hatch.”
“Have the police been told?”
“They know there are questions. Gordon says the old account settles them.”
“We can tell them about the work,” Mairi said. “Any decision to protect the site belongs to them.”
Callum rested his forearms on the barrier. “If that woman knows he stayed, this could finally stop.”
“What could?”
“Having to hear that he chose to go.”
Mairi stood beside him without touching the folder he had brought outside. “I can help you ask her. I can’t turn a count into an answer.”
He straightened and walked back towards the office ahead of her.
Gordon intercepted them by the store doors later that morning. Two adult maintenance workers were fastening a board across a damaged window. They slowed their work when he spoke.
“We need to be sensible about what we put into circulation,” he said. “Our winter contribution pays for work here when there’s no sailing income. We’re all dependent on arrangements surviving.”
“Is that a reason to deny a passenger?” Mairi asked.
“It’s a reason not to build accusations out of one.”
One of the workers lowered his drill. “If the contribution goes, our shifts go. Callum knows that.”
“I know exactly what it pays for,” Callum said.
“Then remember who you work beside.”
The other worker held the board in place. “Fergus had a house to keep going too.”
Gordon turned towards him, but the man kept his hand against the timber and waited for the drill.
“We can find a sensible account,” Gordon said to Callum. “We don’t have to damage everyone getting there.”
Mairi heard the offer beneath the warning. Callum carried on to the office, leaving Gordon beside the store.
Inside, she read her own description of the unloading. She had called the two closures van doors, though she had seen neither door move. The green van had emerged immediately afterwards. Jean had boarded alone. The woman had used the staircase with familiarity and carried a company slip. She had said she’d worked on shore; Jean’s sister had been the shore supervisor.
Together, those observations made a specific question possible. They remained short of an answer.
“I asked Jean whether anyone came looking for a room,” she said.
“And?”
“She said no. I didn’t ask whether she brought someone home.”
Callum picked up his coat. “Let’s ask that.”
They took the safe uphill path to Jean’s guesthouse. The exposed shore road remained closed, but the path ran between buildings and a retaining wall. Mairi called ahead, said they were coming to ask about the sailing, and received a terse invitation.
Jean admitted them through the side entrance. In the small dining room she cleared a place at the table and said, “If you want names of guests, tell me why.”
“I want to ask about your van,” Mairi said.
“Then ask about my van.”
Jean went through to the kitchen and returned with three teacups holding spoonfuls of warm sponge cake. “The oven thermostat’s wrong again,” she said. “Cooked the sides and dropped the middle.”
She set a cup before each of them and brought spoons. Mairi took a mouthful. The soft centre tasted of lemon, with a firmer piece of crust beneath it. Callum ate standing up until Jean pointed him towards a chair.
“There’s nothing wrong with the inside,” Jean said. “I’m not throwing it out.”
For a little while they ate what she had brought. Jean scraped her own spoon round the cup, checked whether either of them wanted more, and took their empty cups to the end of the table.
Mairi opened her notebook. “Did you collect your sister from the vehicle deck before you drove off?”
Jean’s hand stayed on the last cup.
“Someone who came down from the saloon,” Mairi added. “A woman with grey hair.”
“Yes,” Jean said.
“You boarded alone?”
“Yes. She travelled upstairs. She came down and got into the van before we left.”
“Is she here now?” Mairi asked.
“Yes.”
Callum pushed his chair back, but Jean raised a hand.
“She’s staying with me. Nobody came asking for a room. That’s what you asked this morning.”
“You knew I was trying to find her,” Mairi said.
“I knew you were describing her. I should have said she was here.”
“Does she need help?”
“She can answer that herself.”
Jean went to the hall. A few minutes later, at one forty in the afternoon, the woman from the ferry entered the dining room without her coat. Mairi recognised the short grey hair and the split thumbnail.
“This is Agnes,” Jean said. “Agnes Kerr.”
Agnes sat opposite Mairi. “I’m sorry you’ve been put to trouble.”
“Are you here of your own choice?”
“Yes.”
“And safe?” Mairi asked.
“Yes. Jean collected me exactly as we’d arranged.”
Mairi sent a short message to the constable confirming that the traveller had been located alive and safe. Then she put her phone beside the notebook.
Callum remained standing. “You told her my father didn’t leave.”
“He didn’t,” Agnes said.
Jean drew the spare chair away from the table. “I know about the pickup and the visit. Nothing about Fergus. I’m not going to sit here and make it seem that I do.”
She left them in the dining room and went through to the kitchen.
Agnes folded her hands. “There was an accident in the old pit.”
Callum sat down slowly.
“What accident?” Mairi asked.
“Fergus fell. He’d gone down to deal with the winch. The tide came in and he drowned.”
“Who told you?”
“Gordon.”
“When?” Mairi asked.
“After I’d left. I took the ferry that evening. Fergus was still working when I left shore.”
“The company later said he left by the same sailing.”
“Yes.”
“And you knew that account was false?” Mairi asked.
Agnes separated her hands and laid them flat on the table. “By the time I was told, there was nothing to be done for him.”
“You could have told me,” Callum said.
“I know.”
“I rang you. You said you knew nothing beyond what Gordon had said.”
“That was what I’d been told to say,” Agnes said.
“You were sixty miles away. You could have said it from there.”
Agnes lowered her head. Mairi let the silence continue until Callum sat back.
“Tell us what you were told about the fall,” Mairi said.
“He lost his footing beside the ladder. The hatch had to be lifted from the left corner; the handle folded flat and caught under the lip. Fergus would put his shoulder beneath it once it was high enough. It was too much for one person.”
“Is that your knowledge of the hatch, or Gordon’s description of that evening?”
“I knew the hatch. I supervised the shore work.”
“And the fall?” Mairi asked.
“Gordon told me he’d fallen.”
“Did he say whether Fergus was injured?”
“He couldn’t get out,” Agnes said. “Then the incoming tide reached him.”
Mairi wrote the source beside the account. Agnes’s description of the hatch had been precise; the point at which her own knowledge ended remained less clear.
“Which tide?” she asked.
“The evening tide. That’s what Gordon said.”
“You were responsible for the keys then.”
“They came through me, yes,” Agnes said. “Fergus could have one for a job.”
“Do you remember giving him one that day?”
“The work had been arranged.”
“That isn’t quite the same question,” Mairi said.
Agnes rubbed the split edge of her thumbnail against her other thumb. “I don’t remember the handover after ten years.”
Callum spoke before Mairi could continue. “Why come now?”
“The stabilisation works. I saw the notice. Once they start disturbing things, this will all come out badly.”
“Badly for whom?” Callum asked.
“For everyone who allowed the wrong account to stand.”
“Have you spoken to Gordon about coming?” Mairi asked.
“He knew I intended to visit. The company arranged my travel.”
“He denied you were aboard.”
“I can’t answer for him,” Agnes said.
“You can answer for what you told him.”
“I said it was time Fergus’s family heard he hadn’t left them.”
Mairi glanced down at what she had written. That statement could explain the visit; it did not establish the accident. The tide, the hatch and Agnes’s departure needed checking separately. She wanted Callum to have the true part, if it proved true, without asking him to accept the whole.
“The old safety count leaves no additional company travellers,” she said. “You say you took the ferry that evening.”
“Company travel wasn’t always entered properly.”
“Were you counted?”
“I showed my slip,” Agnes said. “I went aboard.”
“You remember that?”
“Yes.”
Callum drew his chair nearer the table. “But Dad stayed here.”
“He stayed,” Agnes said. “He didn’t abandon you.”
His mouth tightened. He pressed his thumb against the side of his jaw, then let his hand drop.
“Mairi?”
She answered carefully. “His supposed departure now appears to have been a false account.”
Callum closed his eyes. When he opened them, he addressed Agnes more quietly.
“He could be there still?”
“Yes.”
Mairi said, “The police will need to know what you’ve told us. They’ll decide how the site is examined.”
Agnes nodded. “I’ll speak to them.”
Before they left, Jean returned to the hall and confirmed that Agnes would remain at the guesthouse. Mairi told her the immediate welfare concern had been resolved and made no claim beyond that. Jean shut the door behind them.
On the walk downhill, Callum carried the folder against his ribs. Mairi kept to the inside of the path, where the wet paving was less slippery. They reached the harbour office with time to report Agnes’s account before three.
Callum opened the door and stood back to let her in.
“He didn’t go,” he said.
“That is what she’s told us.”
“And it fits the count.”
“It fits the absence of two extra travellers,” Mairi said. “It doesn’t explain everything.”
“Gordon let me think it for ten years.”
Mairi took off her wet gloves. She, too, had found it easy to place Gordon at the centre of the concealment. His denial and his warning about winter work had given her reasons. Agnes had supplied the account that made those reasons useful. It still needed testing.
She updated the local constable, identifying Agnes as the traveller and giving the substance of what she had said about Fergus. She included the October twenty-first works and asked that the site question receive prompt attention. The constable said he would pass the new information to his supervisor and arrange contact with Agnes. Mairi promised her notes.
Callum had moved to the computer.
“What are you writing?”
“A correction. For the people who’ve repeated that he walked away.”
“Gordon hasn’t heard the full account we’ve just heard.”
“He can hear it with everyone else,” Callum said.
“Who is everyone else?”
“The trust first. Then the people who knew Dad.”
He turned from the screen. “I’m not asking them to like him. I’m asking them to stop saying he left us.”
Mairi opened her notebook on the desk. The family folder lay within reach, its earlier repair papers still beneath Fergus’s final warning. She could feel the edge of her blue ticket in the right pocket of her coat.
Callum worked for several minutes while she prepared to send her notes. He read a sentence under his breath, changed it, then sent the draft to the printer. Mairi heard it draw a sheet through.
As the office clock reached three in the afternoon, he placed the draft beside her open notebook.
“Will you put your name to this,” he asked, “and say he drowned by accident, that he didn’t leave us?”
“No,” Mairi said. “I can say what Agnes told us. I can’t say that’s how he died.”
Callum kept his hand on the draft beside her open notebook. The printer had fallen quiet, leaving the low hiss of his radio.
“You said he hadn’t left.”
“I said his supposed departure appeared to be false.”
“You know what that meant to me,” Callum said.
“Yes.”
“Then you could have stopped me before I wrote it.”
Mairi drew her hands away from the page. She had wanted to let him finish, to give him those few minutes of work towards something he could bear to send. Now he had put her name where his own assurance should have been.
“I should have made the limit clearer,” she said. “I wanted that part to be true too.”
He pulled the draft back. “Which part are you doubting?”
“The tide.”
Callum turned his chair towards the window. Beyond it, a worker carried the drill away from the boarded store window.
“She says Gordon told her,” he said.
“She does. But we’ve already seen something that account has to fit.”
Mairi went to the photograph beside the door. Fergus stood at the end of the group, his work jacket open. She kept her attention on the wall behind him.
“The drain went in three years after he disappeared.”
Callum joined her, leaving the draft on the desk. “September two thousand and eighteen.”
“Show me again.”
He took his coat from its hook. “You could just say you don’t believe her.”
“I don’t know which parts to believe.”
They left the office and crossed to the sheltered side of the quay. From the public barrier, Callum pointed past the covered works area to the later stonework. Mairi kept her hands in her coat pockets; the edge of the blue ticket pressed against her right forefinger.
“The chamber’s behind that wall,” he said. “The new drain gives water a way through. Before it went in, the wall continued across.”
“And no other opening from the sea?”
“No. That was the point of putting it in.”
The hatch lay landward of the wall, above the quay surface. Mairi followed the route the water would have needed to take. An incoming tide could reach the chamber through the later drain. In two thousand and fifteen, that route had ended at stone.
“Could it have come over the top?” she asked. “Across the quay and down through the hatch? That would have flooded the whole works area.”
“Which isn’t what she described.”
“She said the incoming tide reached him,” Callum said.
He put both hands on the barrier. He stayed there long enough for Mairi to feel the cold through her shoes.
“The drain work didn’t clear the old pit,” he said. “They made the connection and left the chamber alone. I told you that this morning.”
“Yes.”
“And I still let her say it.”
“So did I.”
He turned towards her. “You’d remembered?”
“Not when she said it. When you asked me to sign.”
His jaw moved before he spoke. “That’s a hell of a time to remember.”
She accepted it. Below them, water moved against the outside of the wall, where it had always had room to move.
Back in the office, Callum stood beneath the photograph again.
“The old count doesn’t have room for them. She had the keys. She knew exactly how he lifted that hatch.”
“Those things need answers,” Mairi said. “They don’t all prove the same thing. The count challenges her departure. Her job gave her knowledge of the hatch. Responsibility for keys doesn’t tell us who held one that evening.”
“But the tide?”
“There was no tidal connection then.”
He sat down and read his draft. Mairi remained beside him rather than returning to the visitor’s chair.
“If he was hurt down there,” she said, “we need to know who knew, and what they did while he could still have been helped.”
Callum folded the page once, without creasing it flat. “I’d rather have had the accident.”
Mairi had no correction to offer.
Gordon came back to the harbour office later that afternoon, after Callum asked him to attend a meeting the next morning. He remained in the doorway, letting cold air into the office.
“Agnes has been found, then.”
“She’s at Jean’s,” Callum said. “You arranged her travel.”
“The company did.”
“And you told us she wasn’t aboard.”
“I said there was no traveller matching what you described,” Gordon said.
Mairi moved her notebook aside. “She’s confirmed that Jean collected her below deck. The immediate welfare concern is finished.”
“Good. Then perhaps we can stop making a public matter of it.”
“She’s also given an account of Fergus’s death,” Mairi said. “It includes an incoming tide reaching the pit before the drain existed.”
Gordon’s hand tightened on the door handle. “I’m not responsible for every word Agnes uses.”
“You’ll have a chance to give your own account to the officers,” Mairi said.
For several seconds he addressed neither of them. Then he stepped inside and closed the door.
“We can’t continue the winter contribution under these circumstances.”
Callum rose. “That’s agreed work.”
“It’s a contribution from the operator. We have to consider where our money goes.”
“Into checks on this harbour. Into keeping things safe when your boats aren’t here.”
“The trust can make its own arrangements,” Gordon said. “You know what’s left in the winter budget.”
Gordon smoothed the front of his coat. “We can discuss it when people are prepared to behave reasonably.”
“The meeting’s at nine thirty tomorrow morning,” Callum said.
“I heard you.”
After Gordon left, Callum rang a trustee. Mairi heard only his side: the amount already committed to essential work, the hours that depended on the contribution, the request to keep at least the evening rounds. When he ended the call, he sat with the phone still in his hand.
“They’re suspending the funded hours. From tonight.”
Outside, the two maintenance workers had begun putting their equipment into the store. Callum went to tell them, and Mairi followed as far as the office step. One of the men rested the drill case against his boot.
“I’ve kept those days clear.”
“I know,” Callum said.
“Knowing won’t pay me.”
“I’ll ask again on Monday. Tonight’s check is mine.”
The other man shut the store door. “She finally tells you your father didn’t walk away, and this is what comes of it.”
He spoke towards Callum, but his attention settled on Mairi.
“The tide account can’t be right,” she said.
“Couldn’t you have left him one decent answer?”
Mairi felt the impulse to go inside and let Callum deal with people he knew. She stayed on the step.
“He deserves an answer that will hold,” she said.
The man picked up his bag. Neither worker said goodbye.
Callum waited until they had gone along the sheltered path. “Two men lose paid hours, and I get another round. Bloody generous of him.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologise for Gordon.”
He took the store keys from his pocket and separated the one he needed. Mairi wanted to ask whether he still wished she had signed. She let him put the keys away without giving him another question to carry.
Agnes rang while he was checking the office radio. Mairi asked if Callum could hear the call too, and, with Agnes’s agreement, set the phone between them.
“Gordon says there’s difficulty about what I told you.”
“There’s no tidal connection to the pit at that date,” Mairi said.
A small sound came through the speaker, perhaps a chair being moved.
“Then he may have meant Fergus died from being hurt,” Agnes said. “I wasn’t there by then.”
“You told us he couldn’t get out, and then the incoming tide reached him.”
“That was how it was explained.”
“By Gordon,” Mairi said.
“Yes.”
Callum leaned over the desk. “Did you leave him injured?”
“I’ve told you when I left.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
Mairi lifted a hand towards him, then spoke into the phone. “The officers need to hear any correction from you. They’ve arranged to be here tomorrow. Will you attend?”
“Yes. Of course.”
After the call, Callum took Fergus’s final warning from the folder. For an instant Mairi thought he meant to give her that page alone. Instead he replaced it among the earlier repairs, including the work his father had undertaken without proper help.
“All of it stays,” he said.
Mairi sent the officers her notes and a supplement to her own observations. She had already qualified the suggestion that the woman had entered Jean’s van. She now corrected the remaining attribution: two doors had shut out of sight; she had called them van doors without having seen them move. Jean’s account established the pickup, not the noises themselves.
On the telephone, she made another distinction aloud. “I passed on Agnes’s claim that Gordon was her source. I have no independent support for that. Her revised account still keeps her departure intact.”
The officer asked about the wall, and Mairi described what she and Callum had checked. She gave the location of the photograph and the date on the drainage plaque, then stopped. The question of examining the chamber belonged to them.
By late afternoon, two officers had reached the harbour by a cleared local route. Mairi stood with Callum outside the barrier while they arranged protection of the pit and contact with those responsible for the October twenty-first works. Nobody lifted the hatch. The officers wanted the chamber undisturbed until a specialist team could assess it. One officer remained to speak to Callum about access. The other confirmed the morning arrangements with Mairi.
“Separate accounts,” he said. “Not questions put to both of them across a table.”
“I understand.”
“Agnes wants to see Callum before she speaks to us. Gordon has asked for the same. We’ll be present, but we’re not using that as an interview.”
Mairi gave him the guesthouse number.
“He already has it,” Callum said.
The officer nodded. “I do.”
Callum had his evening checks to make. Mairi walked with him to the sheltered store doors, then left him there with the keys and took the uphill path home. The exposed shore road remained closed; between the buildings, she could walk without leaning into the gusts.
At the cottage she ate, took the blue ticket out of her coat and laid it beside her keys. The fasteners remained dry on their cupboard shelf. She checked the travel notices before bed: some restrictions had eased, while the exposed approaches still needed care. She set an alarm, slept, and woke with enough time for breakfast.
Mairi reached the harbour office before nine thirty on October nineteenth. Callum was clearing mugs from the small table, and the smell of newly made coffee lingered near the sink. He had shaved, but the skin beneath his eyes showed the previous evening’s extra work.
“Checks all right?” she asked.
“Yes.”
The family folder lay on the desk with the folded draft beside it. Agnes arrived with Gordon, though they came through the door separately. Jean had walked down with her sister and remained outside. The two officers had already spoken privately to Agnes and Gordon to explain the meeting’s limits. Before everyone sat, one officer repeated them. The site would remain protected, the intended public correction could be discussed, and any accounts of the events would be taken separately, with legal advice available.
Mairi sat beside Callum. She had brought her notebook, but left it closed.
“I need to correct something first,” she said. “Yesterday I accepted too readily that the explanation came from Gordon. Agnes told us that. I haven’t verified it. And I let my agreement about the false departure sound wider than it was.”
Gordon shifted his chair away from the table. Agnes kept her hands folded in her lap.
“The original wall had no opening into the chamber,” Mairi continued. “The drain was installed in two thousand and eighteen. There was no tidal connection to the pit when Fergus disappeared.”
“There may be a mistake about the water,” Agnes said.
“It’s a mistake that changes the account of his death.”
“But not the fact that he stayed.”
Agnes turned to Callum. “That was what you needed to hear.”
He drew the folded draft towards him. “It was what I wanted to hear.”
“And it’s true.”
“I’m not sending this.”
Gordon leaned forward. “You can correct the departure without attaching accusations to it. Nobody’s asking you to make a finding.”
“You wanted a sensible account,” Callum said. “So did I. I nearly put this one out before we’d checked it.”
“Your father took risks. We all knew that.”
“I’ve kept those pages.”
Mairi saw Gordon’s attention move to the folder, then back to Callum.
Agnes spoke before he could reply. “There’s no need to bring every old repair into it. Fergus was hurt. He couldn’t manage the ladder. By the time I was told what had happened afterwards, nothing could be changed.”
One officer moved his chair slightly towards her. “We’ll take your account separately, Missus Kerr.”
“I’m explaining why I came.”
She addressed Callum again. “When I saw the works notice, I knew they would open it. I wanted you to hear from me before people began saying things. You could have been spared this.”
“Spared which part?” Callum asked.
The officer raised a hand. “No questions about the incident here.”
Callum sat back. Agnes continued without invitation.
“I had left shore. Gordon was there afterwards. Whatever happened to the hatch after that—”
“I never touched that hatch,” Gordon said.
The officer stood. “We’re stopping this meeting. We’ll speak to each of you separately.”
The room fell quiet. An officer asked everyone to leave the accounts of the incident to them. Mairi followed Callum out, leaving Agnes and Gordon in the office for separate conversations.
Gordon stood farther along the quay with the other officer. He began to say something as Callum emerged, but the officer directed him away. Mairi kept beside Callum until they reached the sheltered side of the store.
For a while he held the draft without seeming to know it was in his hand. Then he unfolded it and pressed it against the wall.
“I put drowned,” he said.
“You hadn’t sent it.”
“I was going to.”
He read to the end. Mairi waited through the scrape of a trolley inside the store and the harbour radio sounding faintly through the office window.
“She came back to get this accepted before they opened the pit,” Callum said.
“Yes.”
“And he denied she’d come so nobody would ask before they’d settled it.”
“That fits what they’ve said,” Mairi said. “The officers will need his answer.”
Callum folded the page properly this time. “I’m withdrawing it,” he said. “Not changing a word and trying again. Withdrawing it.”
Mairi felt relief, then shame at the smallness of that relief beside what he had heard. The missing years remained missing. No correction could put Fergus at the table when Callum had come home from work, or give back the conversations he had believed his father had chosen to refuse.
“I’ll stay while you tell the trust,” she said.
He nodded and went back with her towards the office.
Later that day, after separate interviews, an officer spoke with Mairi and Callum. Agnes had acknowledged securing the hatch while Fergus was still alive and leaving him there after he said he could not stand. She had told Gordon that help was needed. Gordon had acknowledged knowing Fergus was trapped and choosing to wait until morning rather than summon help, fearing the shore operation would be lost. Each had given an account under caution, separately, with access to legal advice.
The officer said their statements would be checked against the physical findings and other evidence. Agnes had also acknowledged that neither she nor Fergus took the ferry, and that she and Gordon later agreed to say Fergus had sailed with her. She had returned before the scheduled works because she wanted Callum to hear her version before the pit was examined.
The officers took further statements from Mairi and dealt separately with Agnes and Gordon. She gave what she had seen and heard. She had no part in their interviews.
The October twenty-first works did not proceed over the pit. Once the site and working conditions had been assessed, authorised specialists examined the chamber under police supervision. Later that week, an officer met Callum outside the harbour office and told him remains had been recovered. Mairi stood beside him. She watched his fingers work at a loose button on his cuff while the officer explained the next stages.
The examination confirmed that the old chamber had not been cleared when the later drainage connection was installed. Its layout and means of access supported the questions already raised. Identification would take longer. So would the assessment of injury. Nothing the officer said offered an exact account of when Fergus had died, or certainty about what treatment might have saved him.
Callum asked when he could arrange a funeral.
“Not yet,” the officer said. “We’ll keep you informed.”
He asked again two weeks later, when Mairi was with him. The answer remained the same.
By late November, the identification had been confirmed. Fergus Ross had remained in the old shore pit after the last sailing of October two thousand and fifteen. The investigation continued into the circumstances of his death, the failure to obtain help and the account maintained afterwards. The admissions were being tested against the physical findings and other available evidence. They were not a verdict.
Winter work stayed scarce. The trust found money for some essential hours, but not enough to restore what Gordon had withdrawn. One of the workers told Mairi he was travelling farther for day work. The other passed her on the quay without speaking. Elsewhere, people who had repeated that Fergus left began saying they had always doubted it. Mairi let Callum decide which of those conversations he wished to have.
Jean came to the office one afternoon while Mairi was there. She set a bag containing Agnes’s remaining belongings on Callum’s desk for the officers to collect as arranged, but kept hold of the handles.
“I’ve told them about the van,” she said. “And exactly when she arrived at mine.”
“Thank you,” Callum said.
“She’s my sister. I’ll answer when she rings. But I’m not telling anyone where she was ten years ago. I don’t know.”
Mairi saw Callum consider an answer, then leave it. Jean released the bag.
“I should have said she was with me when you first asked. I knew you were trying to find her.”
“Yes,” Mairi said.
Jean nodded once and went back uphill.
The remains were released in December. Seven weeks had passed since the recovery, and Callum had learned to wait for a call without leaving his phone on the desk in front of him. The funeral was modest. Mairi stood with him through the service and went with the others to the burial. A few former workers came, including one whose winter hours had gone. Gordon and Agnes were absent. Jean stood near the back, making no claim on Callum’s attention.
Afterwards, Callum remained beside the grave until the other mourners had begun to leave.
“He’d have had something to say about the drainage here,” he said.
Mairi followed his attention to water standing along the edge of the path. “Probably.”
“He could make a job last years. Then get angry when someone else did the same.”
He wiped a mark from the toe of his shoe with the other heel. Mairi stayed until he was ready to walk.
A few days later, in the harbour office, he handed her the family folder. The earlier repairs remained among the final warnings. He had removed nothing.
“Would you keep this for a bit?”
“Yes.”
“You can read it. Or just keep it dry.”
She took it without asking what conclusion he wanted.
That winter, when she gave the officers her contact details again, she gave the cottage as her home address. She answered their questions and made herself available as a witness. She sought no place in the investigation.
The roof flashing was secured during a safe spell, using the fasteners she had brought across in October.
In May two thousand and twenty-six, Mairi waited beside the pedestrian exit after a resumed seasonal sailing. At five forty in the afternoon, Callum was finishing the independent landing tally. The ramp sounded under a departing vehicle, and a crewman called to him from the deck. Some passengers came along the marked passage. Others left in cars. A woman came down from the saloon and climbed into a van still on the vehicle deck. Mairi stepped back to give it room as it drove ashore.
Callum checked the last arrival against the people still aboard, answered the crewman and completed the count. Then he put his pen away.
“Supper still on?” he asked.
“Yes. There’s enough.”
“Anything need doing first?”
“It can wait,” Mairi said.
He collected his coat from the office. Mairi waited while he locked the door, then fell into step beside him. Together they took the path inland towards her cottage and supper, leaving the completed count behind them.