Luke Delaney - The Toy Taker

His first week in prison had been a living hell, but somehow he’d survived in the open prison population until he was eventually moved to a segregated wing on Rule 43 with all the other sex offenders. His two-year sentence had given him plenty of time to think about the bastard police and their revelling at his expense and now he had this new bastard cop all over him — Detective Inspector Corrigan. Soon they would learn that it was he who held the power in this particular game — he who would lead them by the nose. And when the time was right it would be he who humiliated them all — all the bastard police, but especially Detective Inspector Sean Corrigan.

Sean swung into the new Inquiry Office at Scotland Yard shortly after eight a.m. and was immediately confronted by a scene of chaos as his team continued to unpack cardboard boxes and rearrange the furniture, crawling under desks to search for power-points and telephone sockets. Donnelly stood in the middle of the maelstrom, conducting affairs without offering to help, while Sally took refuge in her office, her head buried in reports. She gave a start when Sean rattled on the side of her open door.

‘Bloody hell,’ she told him, pressing her hand to the scars hidden under her white blouse, smiling as she spoke. ‘You scared me.’

‘Sorry,’ he apologized, his eyes inadvertently falling on the hand covering her chest. ‘I wasn’t trying to sneak up on you.’

‘I know,’ she assured him, her hand slipping down to her lap. ‘Can’t hear anyone approaching above that din out there.’

Sean stepped inside her office and closed the door. ‘Did you get the extension of detention OK?’

‘Yeah, the local superintendent was most obliging. But it still only gives us a few hours before we either release him, charge him or try our luck with the magistrates to get a further extension.’

‘Hopefully it won’t come to that. We’ll get back to Kentish as soon as we can and re-interview him — see if we can’t put the frighteners on him a bit and get him to talk.’

‘Any ideas how we’re going to do that?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe tell him that the papers and TV are on to him — digging up his past. Let him know we can’t protect him if he doesn’t confess, that he’ll have to take his chances out on the streets alone — with everybody knowing who he is and what he’s accused of.’

‘Bit below the belt.’

‘We’ve got a missing boy, Sally, and a convicted sex-offender and residential burglar with a history of using lock-picking to gain entry. He’s a more than viable suspect, which means I’m within my rights to tell the media his name — in an effort to trace his movements the night the boy went missing. If that puts him in danger at the hands of the public then there’s not much I can do about it.’

‘You seem to be forgetting we have a duty of care to look after anyone we know or suspect is in clear and immediate danger.’

‘Care that we will offer and McKenzie will refuse.’

‘It doesn’t matter whether he accepts it or not — we have to provide it.’

A devilish grin spread across Sean’s face. ‘Which is exactly why Featherstone and the Assistant Commissioner will have to give me a surveillance team to follow McKenzie in the event we have to release him.’

‘Oh, that’s sneaky,’ Sally told him with an appreciative grin of her own.

‘Just want to make sure I’ve got all the bases covered. Now get next door and see if you can’t bring some order to that rabble — we need an office meeting. I doubt half of them have a clue what’s going on. I’ll join you in a couple of minutes.’

Sally immediately bounced into the main office, shouting and cajoling the mess of detectives into something approaching order. Sean took a few deep breaths before following her, but was frozen by the photograph Sally had attached to the whiteboard in her office — the photograph of a smiling George Bridgeman dressed in his nursery school uniform — the type taken by a professional photographer visiting the school. He realized it was the first time he’d stopped to look at any pictures of the missing boy properly — his beauty and innocence he’d noticed the first time he saw a photograph of the child suddenly seemed even more striking. His thoughts travelled back to the boy’s family, and once again he found himself asking whether it was their very beauty that had attracted the monster in the first place. Was McKenzie visually driven — irresistibly drawn by the physical beauty of the family? Sally’s voice brought him back to the here and now.

‘Ready when you are,’ she told him. Sean nodded and walked into the main office, all eyes immediately falling on him as the image of George Bridgeman continued to burn itself into his conscience.

‘For those of you who spent all of yesterday back at Peckham, I understand you’re probably not yet up to running speed on our new case.’

‘Another MISPER, isn’t it?’ DC Tony Summers asked in his husky Manchester accent.

‘It is,’ Sean confirmed.

‘Not again,’ moaned DC Tony Summers whose size and thick blond hair had earned him the nickname Thor amongst his colleagues.

‘The last case we had started as a MISPER,’ Sean warned them, ‘and we all know how that one ended. This time, for those of you who don’t already know, the missing person is a four-year-old boy called George Bridgeman. We have limited time to find him before everyone’s going to start assuming the worst and before the media are either informed or find out about it themselves. When that happens, we need to stay focused and separate from the inevitable circus — let Press Bureau do their job and we’ll get on with ours. Understand?’ His team nodded that they did. ‘We’ve had night-duty teams searching the streets around the family house, but nothing so far. Now we’ve got daylight, further teams will continue the search and expand it on to Hampstead Heath. We’ll be using dogs and India 99 will be searching from above if the weather stays fine. OK — updates. Dave, anything from Forensics yet?’

Donnelly remained seated, pausing to clear his throat before speaking. ‘They worked through the night at the family home of the missing boy and have lifted multiple prints, including some shoe prints, and fibres. They’ve seized a few items the suspect may have touched to get to the boy and will be submitting them to the lab this morning for a DNA sweep, but there’s been a ton of people through the house — not just the family, but their cleaner, nanny, the removal men, the estate agent and any one they showed around the house when they were trying to sell it. And no doubt there’ll still be traces of the previous family all over the place too. Basically we’re looking at dozens of sets of prints, and the same for DNA. Other than that — no traces of blood or signs of a break-in.’

‘So we know our suspect entered, took the boy and left without leaving any obvious trace, other than possibly prints and/or DNA.’

Cahill winced. ‘If the media get hold of that they’re going to start making him into some sort of urban bogeyman.’

‘They don’t need the details of the break-in,’ Sean assured her.

‘What break-in?’ Donnelly reminded him.

‘You know what I mean,’ Sean answered. ‘Tell Forensics not to waste their time trying to compare the prints to the family, etc. Just get them all up to Fingerprints and have them run against sets already in their database. Maybe we’ll strike lucky and get a hit against someone with previous convictions.’

‘Fair enough,’ Donnelly agreed, seeing the sense in Sean’s suggestion.

‘Which leads me to the suspect we already have in custody: Mark McKenzie, white, twenty-three years old, and he already has convictions for residential burglary and the sexual assault of a young child. He’s known to have used lock-picks to enter houses at night in the past and he lives only a couple of miles from where the boy was taken.’