Corstorphine started to add another layer of complexity to a crazy board that was soon going to be too small for purpose. The butcher joined the gamekeeper as potential suspects, characters that reminded him of some children’s board game – neither felt right to him. What if Frankie was right; that the butcher, William Booth, was afraid of something or someone? Who could still exert control over him? Prevent him from speaking out about his abuse?

There were plenty of instances when the floodgates opened after one person came out into the open, one person with the strength to face their own fears and name the abuser. There would be so many more times when the case never got to court; the evidence too weak, the accused too powerful. If the case didn’t get past the Procurator Fiscal then it would be unlikely that former orphans like William would come forward, adding voice upon voice until sheer numbers alone ensured a case had to be prosecuted and brought into the public domain. Given that the ACC was already signalling he wanted this line of investigation closed down, with fairly weighty political support behind him, Corstorphine thought the probability of pursuing an investigation into the orphanage was going to be made increasingly problematic.

He sat at his desk, entered the Sisters of Holy Mercy into the police database and the reports started flooding in. They had not only run orphanages here in Scotland, but had had a number of orphanages and unmarried mother’s homes in Ireland – the so-called Magdalene Laundries where pregnant women, some of them just girls, worked in the laundry until ready to give birth. The babies had been forcibly taken away: some sold, some just disappeared. This wouldn’t be the first institution of theirs where children had been found buried in unmarked graves. The Order itself had been subsumed back into the Catholic Church, with many of the nuns living a life of peaceful contemplation in Rome. Corstorphine read that the church refused to pay any damages to the women it had maltreated, hiding behind a wall of sanctimonious silence. Tracking these particular nuns down was going to be an impossible task. He made a start anyway: Sister Josephine, August 1992, not a lot to go on.