“I’m fine, William, just fine. Listen, I want to have a quick word with you, if I can?”
He looked faintly surprised, followed by the worried expression that everyone adopts whenever the police want a word. “It’s nothing you’ve done,” Frankie reassured him, seeing the frown lift as quickly as it had arrived. “You were an orphan, weren’t you?”
She saw the guarded expression fall into place. She wasn’t his enemy, she just needed to convince him of that fact.
“Look, I don’t want to put you on the spot – and this is just something I’m following up. When you were first put into care, it was the old orphanage you went to, is that right?”
William’s expression turned in a moment into one she recognised from school, the bullied boy’s acceptance that whatever he did wouldn’t stop the attacks, wouldn’t prevent the words that often hurt more than the fists.
“What of it?” The words came sullenly, as if someone completely different had taken over his place behind the counter.
Frankie hurried on, keen to finish questioning him while they were alone and uninterrupted. “I’ve heard that some abuse may have gone on at the orphanage. Did you ever hear or see anything during your time there?”
He looked panicked, it was the only clue she could read. “No. Nothing. I don’t want to talk about it. It was fine, just, just…it was just hard. A hard life for a kid. I’m sorry, I really don’t want to discuss those days. With anyone.”
He stared defiantly at her, the friendly welcome replaced with anger. Frankie couldn’t understand what she’d done to upset him. “I’m sorry, William, I didn’t mean to cause any upset. I was genuinely just trying to understand what life was like there, whether there was any truth in what I’ve heard.”
“Who’s been speaking to you?”
“Let’s just say I’ve heard rumours from a few people, William.”
“How many people?”
Frankie wondered where this cross-examination was going. “I’m not at liberty to tell you. I’m just trying to find out the truth, William – whether anything went on at that orphanage. Can you help me?”
“No. I’m not saying anything.”
A woman came into the shop. “Morning, madam,” William’s voice lost the anger as he greeted the customer with obvious relief. “If there’s nothing else?” He directed this at Frankie, her cue to leave.
“No. That’s all. Thank you for your help, William. We’ll be in touch.”
She sat back in the patrol car, emotions and thoughts running around her head. Something had happened to him at the orphanage, of that she had no doubt. His response had her worried, though. He was fearful of something or someone. What would worry a large man in the prime of his life? Was it a secret he carried inside him or was there a threat hanging over him? Far from putting the orphanage story to bed, as she had hoped, he’d just made it much more real. She consulted the list again. There were a couple of names she recognised, and more names that set a chill in her heart that the sun wasn’t going to be able to thaw. Some of those names belonged to children who had died when they were young. She remembered assemblies where she and the other pupils had stood with heads bowed at the early passing of children not much younger than themselves.
Corstorphine was not going to like this: another line of investigation to add to the existing murders, but what if those children had died because of something that had happened to them at the orphanage? What if they were murdered as well?
She made her way back to the police station, still deep in thought as she entered the office.
“How did you get on?” Corstorphine had been standing so motionless in front of the crazy board that she hadn’t realised he was there.
“Oh, fine, sir.” She handed over the sheet with the orphans’ names; they’d been countersigned by some of the sisters. “Managed to talk them into giving me a list of the kids who were resident at the orphanage at the time social services took them over.”
Corstorphine studied the list with interest. “Good work, Frankie. Do you know any of them?”
“That’s it, sir. Almost the first name on the sheet, William Booth. We were at school together. I’ve just been to see him. He owns the butchers in the high street.”
“Booth the Butchers?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, that is interesting.”
Frankie couldn’t see why the name was of interest to Corstorphine. “I asked him about his time at the orphanage, sir. He didn’t want to talk about it.”
“Go on.”
“Well, sir, he seemed defensive, and I think he was frightened of someone or something. He looked as if he’d seen a ghost when I mentioned it.”
Corstorphine looked down at the list of names again. “Do any of the others still live here?”
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.
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.
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.”
“OK, thanks everyone. So this is where we are. The minister is suspected of abusing Oscar as a young child, and both he and Oscar are known to have visited the orphanage on a regular basis. We can assume the same killer, or killers, were involved at each scene.”
He used a laser pointer to indicate names on the board. “In terms of suspects, we have Oscar’s girlfriend, Margo McDonald – not a likely suspect in my view; the gamekeeper John Ackerman – no connection as yet to the minister; and William Booth – he had a connection to Oscar and the orphanage but nothing tying him to the minister yet. He also has ready access to animal bones. We haven’t had any DNA evidence returned from the two murder sites that offers any additional evidence, so this is going to have to be done by good, steady police work. I know you’re all tired. It’s been a busy day. Make sure you all get a good rest because tomorrow we have to make some headway in case this lunatic decides to target someone else.”
XVII
WEDNESDAY 09:36
Margo scanned the track as her taxi made slow and bouncy progress towards the main road, anxious that the laird’s Land Rover might make an appearance. He hadn’t come back to the cottage yesterday, so chances were that he’d want to have another search for something – and that something, she was fairly certain, was what she had hidden in the bag on her lap.
“I’m going to have to charge you extra for my bloody suspension.” The driver swerved to avoid another pothole, cursing the state of the track for the umpteenth time.
“You’re getting paid cash, take it or leave it.” Margo replied. “Plenty of other taxi drivers out there.”
He exchanged an unfriendly look with her, then realised that she could mark him down on the app. “OK, OK, keep… I’ll keep to the track.”
It was a clumsy attempt to correct what she knew he was about to say. Being Oscar’s girlfriend had its upsides and downsides. The upside was that nobody would dare touch her, not unless they reckoned they could take him on. The downside was that now he was dead, her reputation marked her out as little better than a whore. All the more reason to leave this god-forsaken town and start afresh somewhere else, but first she needed more money.
The car dropped her outside the supermarket, leaving her standing on the pavement with a shopping bag, as if she was about to do a weekly shop. She didn’t disabuse the taxi driver of this notion, preferring to keep her Courier visits as private as possible. If she had picked up the newspaper before entering their offices she might have had second thoughts; the orphanage child abuse scandal took up the entire front page – and was attributed to her by name.
“Hello, Margo, lovely to see you!”
It was the same French woman she’d seen on Monday and, come to think of it, there were precious few other people in the Courier offices that she’d seen.
“Can I get you a tea or coffee?”
“No thanks.” Margo cut straight to the chase, “I’ve something you may be interested in paying me for.”
Two delicately-shaped eyebrows danced upwards in surprise. “Something we may want to buy? What do you have?” Interest was evident in her voice and the reporter leaned forward slightly to get a better view of the shopping bag nestling on Margo’s lap.
“I’ll show you, but I want real money for this – not just a few hundred pounds.”
In the distance a telephone rang two or three times before an invisible voice answered. At least there must be some other people working here, Margo thought. The reporter stood up, closing the door on an empty corridor.
“Show me what you have and I’ll see what it’s worth.”
Margo extricated the reporter’s notebook from her bag, laying it down on the table so that June Stevens’ name was visible on the cover. She could see the hunger in the reporter’s eyes as she reached forward. Margo slapped her
own hand down hard on top of the notebook. “I want to know what it’s worth before you look at it.”
The reporter reappraised Margo, seeing something she had missed on their previous encounter. “I can’t make you an offer on a notebook without seeing what’s inside. Let me see the last page she wrote and we’ll see if there’s anything worth buying or not.”
Margo hesitated. If she let the reporter read whatever the scribbles meant on the final page, she could get what she needed without paying for it – then again, why should she pay her anything on the basis of a closed notebook? She took the notebook, opening it to the last written page and held it up for the reporter to read. The reporter’s eyes flew back and forth across the page without expression. Margo waited until her eyes stopped moving and snapped the notebook shut.
“Well?”
A smile teased the corners of the reporter’s mouth and Margo knew she’d get something for her trouble.
“I have to talk to my manager. Wait here and we will see what, if anything, the paper is willing to pay.”
Margo sat in the empty office, straining to hear any conversation taking place outside. Apart from the occasional telephone ringing and printer churning out sheets of paper, the offices were quiet. Eventually the reporter returned, followed by a short rotund man who wheezed as he lowered himself into the only other chair.
“Hello, Margo. I’m Jack Hammond, the editor of this illustrious newspaper and the one who holds the purse strings. Strings to a purse that is very light, if you get my meaning.”
Margo sensed horse trading when she heard it.
“I can always take it elsewhere. The nationals have deep pockets.” She was bluffing, didn’t even know what the reporter might have gleaned from the scribbles she’d seen.
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