The arrival of the two constables alerted him to the passing hours. It was almost 16:30, time for the briefing. The trail for the nuns had gone stone cold. The names provided on the council document – Sister Josephine, Sister Angeline and all the others – they weren’t even the nuns’ real names. It struck him that this was as good a way of running a secret criminal operation as any he’d seen, and whenever it looked as if they were about to be exposed, they hid under the sheltering skirts of the papal palace in Rome. Did Interpol even have jurisdiction there? His mood was not improved by the certain knowledge that the Catholic Church had not only appeared to condone child abuse as an inadvertent by-product of its insistence upon celibacy, but also took great care to cover it up whenever it became public. What sort of screwed-up religion was it that not only allowed children to suffer, but positively encouraged it by turning a blind eye every time it occurred? If society was sick, then these paragons of bloody virtue were the visible signs of the pathogen.

Frankie entered the office, looking over at him and tilting her head at the clock. It had been a long day and they all wanted to get away.

“Right, let’s have your reports. Bill, any luck in tracking down anyone who knows anything about the orphanage?”

“Sorry, sir. Nobody I spoke to claimed to have had any involvement. The local bakery was still miffed that they were never used for bread deliveries. All their food came from some Glasgow warehouse that the Order owned. The children who used to live in the orphanage, none of them stayed in the town – with the exception of William Booth, the butcher. No luck in finding where they went either.”

“OK. Thanks, Bill. Lamb, what have you got?”

“Same really, sir. I did get a few people telling me they’d always had their suspicions about the place.”

“In what way?”

“Well, they thought there might have been funny goings-on with the children, sir.”

“Yet nobody thought fit to bring this to our attention?”

“No, sir.”

Corstorphine sighed heavily. Rumours would be flying through the town with the latest edition of the Courier on the streets.

“What about you, Frankie? Anything we can use?”

“I saw the clockmaker, sir. He’s taken the gears and seemed keen to make a start in putting them together. Asked me to come back in a day or two when he should have an idea of what the clockwork mechanism was intended to do.”

“What about the list of children, made any progress there?”

“Drawn a blank so far. It’s as if they’ve gone off-grid, certainly no sign of them on police records.”