Frankie drew a breath. He wasn’t going to appreciate another curve ball thrown his way but what else could she do? “There are at least three names belonging to children who died whilst I was at school. I never knew them personally, but I remember their names from assembly. It’s a big deal when a kid dies, especially if they’re a similar age to you. Brings mortality into focus at an early age.”

“And you think there may be something suspicious about these children’s deaths? Something connected to the orphanage and our murders?”

“Yes, sir.” She felt relieved that Corstorphine had understood what she was implying. He’d made the link himself.

“You could be right.” Corstorphine hesitated, then decided that Frankie was the one person in his team who could be trusted.

“I had a visit from our MP a little while ago.”

“Oh God, not that idiot, Lagan?”

“Yes, precisely. He had a message from the ACC. He wants us to stop looking into June Stevens’ death, says it’s a distraction when we should be concentrating our efforts on the two recent murders.”

“That sounds awfully fluent of him, sir.”

Corstorphine smiled. Sometimes Frankie reminded him of his wife. “Why would you think he sent Lagan over to pass on that message?” He examined Frankie keenly from under an upturned eyebrow.

“Probably because he didn’t want anything traced back to him if something went pear-shaped, sir.”

“Exactly. More to the point, what does anyone have to fear from looking at an old case that’s been closed for twenty years?”

“I see what you mean, sir. You think there may be someone in authority who doesn’t want us prying too deeply into this?”

“That’s precisely what I mean. Unfortunately, that is going to make our job even more difficult than it already is. We’ve got the next edition of the Courier coming out tomorrow, the ACC on our backs and any time now we can expect TV cameras in town.”

“Shall I start working through this list then, sir?”

Corstorphine nodded. “But before that, I’ve a broken clockwork mechanism you may want to give your clockmaker, to see if it can be patched together somehow. You’d better give him a few snaps of the tree just to help him along – just don’t show him anything with Oscar’s corpse on it.”

“Sir.” Frankie gathered the plastic evidence bags, a couple of sanitised photographs which she’d cropped with the office scissors and set off for the clockmakers.