Even the alertest readers will probably already be confused by the baffling tale of Douglas and Jacqueline Wright, who sold their home to Edinburgh West MP Michelle Thomson. We certainly were last night, but on delving a little more into the media coverage of their story, things got a whole lot worse.

On yesterday evening’s STV News, we heard Jacqueline Wright say in her own words that the couple paid £21,000 for their ex-council house in Cumbernauld. We then saw documents stating that it had been sold for £75,000 but that the Wrights had agreed to accept only £51,000 of that sum, with the rest going to M & F Property Solutions, the company run by Thomson and associate Frank Gilbride.

The document inescapably implied that the £75,000 sale, to a third party, happened at a time when the house was still the property of the Wrights (because otherwise it makes no sense at all).

Mrs Wright also said that they sold the property simply because they wanted out of the house and the market was poor, and STV says that the Wrights approached M&F.

So let’s recap that:

PRICE PAID BY WRIGHTS: £21,000

PRICE RECEIVED BY WRIGHTS: £51,000

PRICE RECEIVED BY M&F: £75,000

TIME ELAPSED BETWEEN SALES: zero

That all seems straightforward enough, then. But at the weekend we also noted a dramatic front-page splash in the Sunday Mail quoting the Wrights on the same subject, and it told a completely different story.

Wait, what? That gives us this:

PRICE PAID BY WRIGHTS: unknown, but presumably less than £21,000

PRICE RECEIVED BY WRIGHTS: £21,000

PRICE RECEIVED BY M&F: £75,000

TIME ELAPSED BETWEEN SALES: “within a year”

That’s a radically different proposition. There’s a whopping £30,000 between the two prices supposedly paid by M&F Property Solutions, and it claims that they were “stunned” to discover the resale price.

Yet according to STV News that resale price was part of the agreement between the Wrights and M&F, and that they knew it all along, because it was technically paid to them. The figure of £51,000 doesn’t appear anywhere in the Sunday Mail piece.

The only thing weirder than that would be if there was a THIRD set of figures. At which point we turn to yesterday’s Scottish Daily Mail.

And here the story changes again.

No mention here of the Wrights approaching M&F. Now it appears as if they were contacted out of the blue with an unsolicited offer.

A detail they hadn’t felt a need to mention to the Sunday Mail or STV. Indeed, they told STV they simply wanted out, and to bank a tidy profit, because in Mrs Wright’s words “we only paid £21,000 for it”. So it’s baffling that the Daily Mail then tells us:

So we’re back from the £21,000 sale price quoted in the Sunday Mail to the £51,000 of STV (or at least, £51,000 received by the Wrights out of a total of £75,000). Except that we’re now being told that there was over £30,000 outstanding on the mortgage of a £21,000 house.

And there’s another curious and very big inconsistency. In the Mail we’re told:

£17,000? But on STV last night Mrs Wright clearly told us the opening offer was more than twice that much:

“She just came in, looked about the house, and she went ‘£40,000, that’s all I would gie for this’, and I thought ‘You cheeky bitch’.”

Both those statements seem to unmistakeably refer to an inital offer, not a later one, yet there’s a whacking great £23,000 gap between them.

Also, if we believe the Daily Mail’s version Mr or Mrs Wright cannily managed to get M&F to TRIPLE their starting offer in the course of negotiations. This is particularly impressive because Mr Wright tells the paper “We had no idea what the value of our home was and just wanted a quick sale”. (Our emphasis.)

And of course, if the Wrights were insulted by an opening offer of £40,000 it certainly seems unlikely that the Sunday Mail’s account of them selling for half that is true.

The figures for the transaction are now:

PRICE PAID BY WRIGHTS: unknown, but presumably over £30,000

PRICE RECEIVED BY WRIGHTS: £51,000

PRICE RECEIVED BY M&F: £75,000

TIME ELAPSED BETWEEN SALES: “only months after”

Now, we haven’t a clue which – if any – of these figures are right. And a whole series of questions now have multiple-choice answers.

– Did the house cost the Wrights £21,000 (STV) or some unspecified higher (Daily Mail) or lower (Sunday Mail) sum?

– Was it sold by the Wrights for £21,000 (Sunday Mail), or for £51,000 (Daily Mail), or £75,000 (STV)?

– Did M&F sell it on to someone else months later (Daily Mail), or up to a year later (Sunday Mail), or was there in fact only ever one sale, on which the Wrights and M&F split the money (STV)?

– Did M&F initially offer £17,000 (Daily Mail) or £40,000 (STV)? Or was it in fact £21,000, as the Sunday Mail implies the Wrights took the first offer?

– Did the Wrights approach M&F (STV) or did M&F approach them (Daily Mail)?

All we can say for sure is that readers and viewers are being fed a very great deal of bull-product by at least two and possibly all of the three media outlets to have covered this story. The four figures we’ve compared can only have one answer each, yet everyone’s are different (with the exception of the sale price to the unidentified third party). At best one of them, and at worst none of them, can possibly be true.

(STV are the front-runners, because there we’ve at least seen and heard Mrs Wright make the statements with our own eyes and ears, but frankly at this point it seems fair to question whether she’s a reliable witness.)

Since the story broke we’ve highlighted some dreadful, inept and reckless journalism around it, and been duly and sourly attacked by a whole host of mainstream-media hacks for it. We’d love to see them explain this burning trainwreck of contradictory hyperbole away as legitimate professional reporting.

To be honest, we’re expecting to open this morning’s papers and find one reporting that the Wrights paid £700,000 for the house, Michelle Thomson bought it off them for 65p and a kick in the throat, and then sold it to an ISIS warlord for £2bn and a helicopter gunship that she used to mow down hundreds of poor people and Syrian refugees outside a foodbank, laughing maniacally and screaming “How’s THIS for social justice??!!?!” all the while.

On the other hand, we might just not open the papers at all and be better informed.