XV
TUESDAY 13:15

Corstorphine finally took delivery of the bone gears and associated paraphernalia found in and around the Hanging Tree, together with a more detailed forensics report. The bones were thought to be cow skeleton, although they’d sent a sample for DNA testing to confirm. Forensics had suggested Corstorphine check local slaughterhouses to see if their waste disposal systems were up to scratch, then the animal waste companies that plied a living out of abattoir scraps. There were no fingerprints; no foreign material apart from honest Scottish mud and heather and hence no need to quarantine the fragments. If he wanted to try and put the gear fragments back together he was welcome, as long as he remembered they may well be required as part of the eventual prosecution case.

He examined the collection of clear evidence bags. Each gear must have been painstakingly carved tooth by tooth from an original piece of bone, with the largest wheel constructed from a large bone. Corstorphine wrestled with his memory – the scapula? To design, create and install something like this was a work of genius; genius or insanity. He put the evidence bags to one side. Frankie could take them to her clockmaker, see if he could make sense of the parts.

The crazy board beckoned, with fresh red lines connecting Oscar to the orphanage. The next step was to see whether the minister had any historical contact with the orphanage. Corstorphine tried to find a pattern, one that might tie Oscar’s death to the minister’s or connect the orphanage to June Stevens – apart from her missing child which was another line of investigation altogether, and which apparently implicated DI Brian Rankin. The Courier was going to print Margo’s allegations of child abuse at the orphanage, he hoped they had a good legal team to cope with the Catholic Church’s response. Surely any abuse of some twenty years ago, if it really had occurred, would have surfaced by now? Those children would now be adults, twenty, thirty years old or more – some would surely have spoken out.

The Courier with the story of Oscar’s abuse at the hands of the minister and the orphanage staff would be out by now, on the front page for sure. Corstorphine grimaced as he recalled Frankie also mentioning that the article would include a line on police brutality, which wasn’t going to play well with the Assistant Chief Constable. Four days since Oscar’s death and they still hadn’t managed to identify a suspect, apart from the Inverness gamekeeper. If Frankie’s clockmaker managed to show that Oscar’s snare might have been set more than a week ago, then they could have him back in for more questioning. Until then, his alibi held water.

Corstorphine’s instinct told him that the orphanage was the key to the whole mystery, but the religious order had long since left and of those who were still alive and traceable – how many would be willing to provide any evidence?