Luke Delaney - The Toy Taker

‘Paedophile murderers may be uncommon, but no one’s saying the boy’s been murdered,’ Sean argued.

‘Why else would anyone take him?’

‘That’s what I’m trying to work out.’

‘Boss, I reckon you’re wasting your time,’ Donnelly told him, his voice resigned to Sean’s will.

‘Maybe I am, but we stay on McKenzie until he’s either charged or eliminated from the investigation. You keep the pressure up on the family, but try not to be too obvious. And find the previous nanny, see if she can’t give you the name of Mrs Bridgeman’s supposed ex-lover. If she can’t, try and persuade Mrs Bridgeman to spill the beans. Mr Bridgeman works in the City, right?’

‘Aye,’ Donnelly answered.

‘Then get his car number plate over to them and have them run it on their VRM Recognition System. Let’s see if he’s been coming and going from work as he should’ve been. Meantime I’ll keep digging on McKenzie — see what I can’t turn up. Have Zukov drop the door-to-door proformas in my office ASAP. Maybe a neighbour’s seen someone matching his description in the area prior to the boy being taken.’

‘Fair enough,’ Donnelly surrendered.

‘I’ll be in my office if anyone needs me,’ Sean told them and walked out the door, around the aluminium stand-post and into his own goldfish-bowl of an office where he pulled out his tatty chair and slumped heavily into it, immediately standing again to empty his uncomfortably full pockets. As he tossed his phone on to the desk it began to ring. He grabbed it and sat in the same movement, examining the caller ID. It was Kate. He puffed out his cheeks and tried to force his thumb to accept the call, but it wouldn’t move, until finally the ringing stopped and his wife was gone. He grabbed the nearest pile of reports he could find and pulled them across the desk, picked up the first one and began to read.

He could feel the hateful eyes burning into his back as he stood in front of the custody sergeant who never once looked him in the face as he prepared his bail forms. But it wasn’t just police eyes that poured their scorn upon his soul — it was the eyes of the other prisoners too. Not only did his ill-fitting, desperately old and unfashionable clothes mark him out as someone who’d had his own clothes seized for forensic examination, but the cell-to-cell grapevine had been working constantly during the night, ensuring that by morning all the burglars, drug dealers and muggers knew there was a sex-case in the cells. Not just a sex-case, but a paedophile too. If they could reach him they’d beat him to death and he knew it. But standing in front of the custody sergeant waiting for his bail notice he didn’t fear them — he felt strong and powerful, in control for the first time in a long while. The police wouldn’t dare let anything happen to him — not while the boy was still missing. If they found the boy then things would be very different, but until that time he held all the cards. He just needed to work out how to best play his hand — to his advantage and to Corrigan’s maximum humiliation.

DI Corrigan, the personification of everything the police meant to him: snarling, arrogant and self-obsessed, convinced of their own superiority and righteousness, like they were some sort of super-humans preordained to rule over everybody else. They destroyed lives like his without a second thought or moment of compassion, then headed to the pub for a celebratory drink as he was led away to prison hell, never once trying to understand him or truly discover why he had to do what he did. No matter what they thought, they were no better than the vile, tattooed thugs who waited for him in prison — career criminals who heaped misery on people, but who for some reason considered themselves his master. Soon he’d have his revenge on the police — leading Corrigan like a pig to the slaughter. But it would all be for nothing if they found the boy first.

‘This is yours,’ the custody sergeant told him, handing him a copy of the bail notice and jolting him out of his dreaming. ‘Be back here in a month’s time or you’ll be liable to arrest, do you understand?’ McKenzie nodded that he did. ‘Don’t fucking nod your head at me,’ the sergeant snapped. ‘Answer the question properly.’

‘I understand,’ McKenzie answered calmly, thoughts of revenge keeping him strong and confident. He took the bail notice from him. ‘Time for me to leave, I think. Mustn’t keep your colleagues waiting.’

‘I’ve no fucking idea what you’re talking about,’ the sergeant answered truthfully.

‘No,’ McKenzie told him as he neatly folded his bail papers and slipped them in his pocket. ‘I don’t suppose you do.’

Sean’s eyes and shoulders ached in equal measure as he piled the latest of dozens of reports he’d read on to the growing mountain marked complete and leaned back in his chair, stretching his arms above his head and yawning widely before allowing them to fall heavily back on to his desk. None of the reports had contained anything of even the slightest interest — no potential witness saying they could have seen someone matching McKenzie’s description in the relevant location at the material time; no grainy snap shot from the tube station’s CCTV that could be him; no stop-and-search forms filled out by a local uniform cop that could be him. Nothing. Sean rubbed his already closed eyes, the image of McKenzie immediately filling the blackness, before melting into the face of someone else — John Conway, the ghost from Sean’s past − before that too warped and shifted until it became the face of his own father, causing him to snap his eyes open as if a loud noise had disturbed him while he slept.

The image left him feeling numb for a while, until he was able to force his mind to move on, to think solely of George Bridgeman and what could have happened to him. ‘Where are you George?’ he asked the room. ‘What the fuck’s happened to you? Who took you from your bedroom while you slept, feeling safe and warm?’ But the questions had no answers — no snapshots of the man he hunted flashed in his mind. For almost the first time in his entire career he sensed nothing. ‘Come on, George,’ he pleaded, ‘help me help you. Help me find you.’ But still nothing.

His mind was so cluttered with everyday concerns and chores he was beginning to feel like an everyday, average cop relying on nothing more than tangible evidence, gathered by methods that had been tried and tested for over a hundred years combined with the advances in forensic science. But he’d relied on his vivid imagination and insights for so long he now felt lost and impotent without them. The fear of no longer being able to think like his quarry, to stay one step ahead of them and the other cops overpowered the fear he had of seeing his father in his mind’s eye. He forced his eyes to close and breathed in slowly and deeply, over and over, until he could feel his body begin to relax, the stresses and strains of moving office, of having Addis looming over him, the fight with Kate, all slipping away into the abyss as he concentrated solely on little George. The boy’s face took shape behind his closed eyelids, burning into Sean’s mind, the face becoming the child’s entire body, curled under his duvet as he peacefully slept — the picture of the sleeping boy growing smaller, disappearing into the distance as his imaginings left the room, always looking back where he’d come from, through the doorway and along the corridor, down the stairs, past the mother’s room and then more stairs, passing through the closed front door like a ghost where he immediately saw the figure again, still crouching, working away at the locks.

He hardly dared breathe as the picture grew clearer in his mind: the calm, unhurried image of the man jiggling the tools that penetrated the middle lock until it finally clicked open, the man carefully packing his fine tools away before standing and easing the door open, stepping inside from the bitter cold to the warm, inviting scent of the house. ‘How did it feel,’ Sean asked the faceless man in his mind, ‘entering the house of the family in the middle of the night? Did you go straight to the boy, or did you stand for a while, breathing them in, becoming whatever it is you dream of becoming?’ He superimposed the face of McKenzie on to the face of the man now moving towards the stairs and liked the fit. ‘Is this how it felt in those early days — those special early days when you first started breaking into other people’s homes? Did it feel so good because they gave you something you’d never had? And what was that — was it love and acceptance? Had your own family rejected you? Were your tastes too much for them to stomach? So they threw you out, but here, in the houses of others you were finally part of a family again, even if they didn’t know you were there.’