Luke Delaney - The Toy Taker

Just as he was about to take hold of his penis, the flimsy door to his flat exploded inwards, sending splinters of wood flying almost the full length of the living room. He jumped off his chair in shock, taking temporary refuge under the flimsy table. As soon as he saw the people in raincoats and suits bursting through the hole where the door used to be, he knew they were police and not the local vigilantes — even before they started calling into the flat, ‘Police! Police! Stay where you are and stand still.’ In a millisecond he remembered the laptop sitting on the table above his head and the damning evidence it contained. The fear of it being discovered turned his legs to springs as he rolled from under the table, stood and reached for the computer — but before his fingers could touch a single key one of the bastard policemen had crossed the room and knocked him back to the floor with a two-handed push to the chest. By the time he recovered his breath and his senses, the cop was standing over him, holding a warrant card in his face.

‘DI Corrigan, you little prick. Consider yourself under arrest.’

McKenzie coughed violently before speaking, to the point where he almost vomited. ‘I haven’t done anything,’ he pleaded, almost out of habit.

‘Really,’ Sean snarled. ‘Then what the fuck is this?’ He grabbed McKenzie by the back of his head and pushed his face close to the screen.

‘I don’t know how that got there,’ McKenzie stammered, feigning amazement. ‘Swear to God.’

‘Don’t lie to me, you miserable little shit. You lie to me, it’ll only get worse for you.’

‘I’m telling the truth,’ McKenzie lied again. ‘It’s a second-hand computer — the download was already on it — I just found it when I was clearing its memory.’

‘Liar,’ Sean told him, his voice threatening as his hand slipped behind McKenzie’s neck and began to squeeze hard, the pain opening his mouth and making him whimper in pain. ‘You’re off to a bad start, McKenzie. Now it’s time to start telling the truth.’

The sweat on his brow made the thin, brown hair of his long fringe stick to his forehead as his thin fingers tried to prise Sean’s iron grip from the back of his neck, his dirty, broken fingernails scratching and drawing lines of blood on the back of Sean’s hand. ‘I’m not saying anything until I speak to a solicitor,’ he managed to say between deep swallows. ‘I know my rights.’

‘Fuck your rights,’ Sean hissed. ‘The children you were convicted of assaulting — where were their rights when you were abusing them?’ He thrust McKenzie’s face closer to the laptop’s screen. ‘Where are their rights?’

‘Maybe you should take it a little easy, guv’nor?’ Keeping her voice low, Sally laid a hand on Sean’s arm. This was no game of good cop, bad cop — she’d seen Sean like this before and knew it could mean trouble — trouble for them all.

‘Anyone wants to leave, they can leave,’ Sean told Sally and the other two detectives. ‘Mark and I wouldn’t mind being left alone, would we, Mark? We could have a private chat — get a few things straightened out.’

Sally sighed inwardly, but said nothing.

‘I’ve got nothing to say to you,’ McKenzie sneered through his pain, the fear leaving him as his mind began to spin with the possibilities of his situation.

‘Wrong,’ Sean shouted in his ear. ‘Time to talk, McKenzie. Now, where’s the boy? Where are you keeping him?’

McKenzie shook his head, trying to assess the situation and play it to his own advantage — to turn the tables on the police at last, especially the one who held him by the neck as if he was nothing more than an unruly dog. He couldn’t stand any police, but this one was especially easy to hate. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he answered. A sickening smirk twisted across his face as he fed off Sean’s dark anger, sensing that he was the one in control, no matter how hard Sean squeezed his neck; no matter how much he might beat him or try to humiliate him. He held the power — for now.

‘The boy?’ Sean repeated. ‘You snatched him from his bedroom in Hampstead last night, but where is he now? What have you done with him? For your sake, Mark, I hope he’s all right.’

‘I’ve got nothing to say to you — whoever you are.’

‘I already told you who I am, Mark. You need to pay a little more attention and you need to answer my questions and you need to answer them now. Do you know what happens to child murderers inside, Mark? Look at you — you wouldn’t last a week before someone stuck a sharpened screwdriver into your liver. You already know all about living Rule 43 inside, don’t you, Mark — but a child murderer? How long before the screws accidentally leave your cell unlocked, eh?’

‘You finished yet?’ McKenzie asked, his smirk turning to a full-blown smile.

‘Fuck you, am I finished!’ Sean told him as he pushed his face into the computer screen, releasing him at the same time and stepping back before he did something he knew he’d regret. ‘I’m just getting started, you disgusting piece of shit. Trust me, McKenzie, when I’m finished you’ll know.’

Donnelly sat alone, surveying the interior of the café he’d found off Hampstead High Street, sipping the coffee he’d just bought, the price of which had made his eyes water. He regretted not opting for one of the many big-chain coffee shops and saving himself a few pounds, even though he couldn’t stand the places. It had been a few years since he’d attended any training courses at the nearby Peel Centre Police College, but even in that time many of the independent cafés and restaurants had disappeared, overtaken by the ever-spreading international franchises. He sighed as he took a bite from his extortionate bacon sandwich and sipped the coffee that cost as much as a pint of bitter in his favourite pub. As his mind drifted back to the case in hand and his appointed task of organizing the door-to-door inquiries, he couldn’t suppress a snort of disgust at the way his talents were being wasted. Not that he had any intention of actually knocking on endless doors himself, speaking to the disinterested and the over-keen alike − though he had reserved a couple of addresses for his special attention: the immediate neighbours of the Bridgemans.

He had quickly come to the conclusion that they were looking for some spectre who didn’t actually exist. During his long service he’d seen a lot of strange things, but when a child went missing and there was no sign of a forced entry there was no need to look further than the parents. The boy was almost certainly dead already and probably still hidden somewhere in the house — a suitcase or holdall. Once the search team or dog unit found the body, they could crack on with the murder investigation, by which time he planned to be one or two steps ahead. Interviewing the neighbours would be the first of those steps.

Donnelly hadn’t even met the missing boy’s parents yet, but just sitting in this café in the middle of Hampstead told him the sort of people they would be: smug and self-important. God, he loved putting the squeeze on types like that. They always thought they were so clever — so much cleverer than a dumb copper. Which was just how he liked it, because they invariably thought they were smart enough to talk their way out of any situation. In reality, they always ended up digging themselves great big holes to neatly fall headfirst into. If they really were as clever as they thought, they’d say nothing — just like the everyday feral criminal from any housing estate in London would. How I love hubris , he told himself with a smile, the image of tearing their alibis to pieces across an interview table cheering him considerably. The cold, hard truth was that all he had to do was bide his time and wait for the body to turn up.