Frankie left the council building with the newly-printed sheet tucked protectively into her body against the strengthening wind. She suspected Susan already thought her job was mince, but her mind was already attending to the first name she recognised on the list.

XV TUESDAY 13:15

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.