‘I’m sorry. That’s as far as I’ve got.’

Ollie was much too polite to say, ‘Fuck’s sake, I’ve only just been given the job’, although McNab read it from his expression.

‘So can we carry on looking?’ McNab made his request sound like a plea. ‘We could order in a pizza if you’re hungry.’

When his offer was followed by a studied silence, McNab suddenly woke up to the fact that Ollie was keen for the off. Since he usually seemed to live in the IT suite pretty well permanently, this was unusual, to say the least.

Then it dawned on him why Ollie might be so keen on leaving.

‘You’ve got somewhere important to be?’ McNab raised an eyebrow.

When Ollie flushed, McNab gave a low whistle. ‘If you have a date, I sincerely hope it’s with the lovely Maria from the canteen?’

‘We’re going for a pizza,’ Ollie admitted.

‘So that’s why you blew me off? Well, don’t forget who introduced you two,’ McNab reminded him as Ollie rose in somewhat of a hurry now that he had been officially released.

Watching Ollie exit, McNab smiled. Ollie had been helping Maria in the canteen for months with her digital devices, never cottoning on to the fact that she was only asking for help because she fancied him. Something McNab had set about fixing. And apparently it had worked.

McNab congratulated himself on getting that relationship right. As for his own, it too was in fairly good nick for the moment. He checked his watch. Ellie was working tonight and he’d told her he would come to the Rock Cafe later and they could go home together. A date he didn’t intend to miss.

He set the alarm on his mobile, just to be sure.

After his earlier meeting with the boss, McNab now knew a little about DI McCreadie’s fall from grace. It hadn’t passed his notice that McCreadie’s story read a little like his own, although DI Wilson hadn’t put that into words. McNab had also picked up on the fact that McCreadie’s colleagues had believed him to have been hard done by.

It appeared that the former DI’s departure had a smell about it that hadn’t gone away with time. Maybe it was just legend. Good cop versus bad cop, with a whiff of something rotten at the top, bearing in mind that they were talking about the world of the seventies, when paedophiles were being sheltered by the state, whether as famous disc jockeys, politicians, members of the upper echelons of society or even priests.

McNab hoped times had changed, but he wasn’t yet convinced that they had.

Something about the whole McIntyre story rang bells with McNab. Brought up by his single mum, the Catholic Church had been a big part of his life back when he was a boy, although he’d removed himself from its sphere pretty soon after adolescence.

And the main reason for that had been Father Barry.

True, he’d continued to act as though he was going to mass, for his mum’s sake, then walked round the block instead. He suspected his mother knew what he was up to. If nothing else, Father Barry probably ratted on him, but if he had, his mother never challenged her son about it.