Luke Delaney - The Toy Taker

‘Bloody useful bit of kit,’ the pathologist told him. ‘Bought them at my local hardware shop.’ He indicated the body with a nod of his head. ‘Sawing through old people’s bones is always a bit of a hazard — so brittle, you see, splinter easy. Wouldn’t want one in the eye.’

‘No,’ Sean agreed, looking around the mortuary at three other bodies, all covered with standard-issue green hospital sheets. One of them seemed tiny compared to the other two and he instantly realized who lay beneath the sheet. ‘I don’t suppose you would.’ He turned back to Canning before speaking again. ‘Busy this morning.’

‘This poor old dear here was a sudden death brought in from one of the many surrounding council estates. Been dead a good few days, but the cold of her flat’s preserved her rather well. No obvious cause of death and we can’t find a GP for her, so, an autopsy it is, although I don’t expect to find anything too exotic. There’s a middle-aged male, no doubt a heart attack, but I’ll have to check: he wasn’t receiving any treatment. Over there I have a relatively young woman who died in her sleep — a bit of a mystery, that one. And finally we have your little problem. The death of a child — always a terrible thing, but especially when foul play is involved.’

‘Have you taken a look yet?’ Sean asked.

‘No. He’s exactly as he was when he arrived — still wrapped in the blanket. I thought it better to wait until you or one of yours was present. Will you be taking care of the exhibits yourself?’

‘No,’ Sean answered. ‘We can have a preliminary look together now and I’ll send you a competent DC over later to log anything you find.’

‘Fair enough,’ Canning agreed. ‘Shall we make a start then?’ he asked, tearing off his latex gloves and tossing them into a nearby biohazard bin, repeating the process with his only slightly bloodied and stained apron. ‘Give me a moment to scrub up.’ He headed for the nearby sink and taps. ‘Wouldn’t want to be accused of cross-contamination, would we?’

‘No,’ Sean answered, not really listening.

‘Any good with a camera, are you, Inspector?’

‘Excuse me?’ Sean asked, the question knocking him out of his daydream.

‘We need to document our findings photographically. I’d usually have my assistant do it, but he’s got the day off. Typical. And I’m afraid I’m going to have my hands full. There’s a digital camera over there,’ Canning told him, pointing with a jut of his chin to a wheeled trolley covered in more green sheets, a collection of tools on top along with the camera.

‘My wife never trusts me with a camera. She says I take terrible pictures.’

‘You’ll be good enough,’ Canning assured him. ‘Just pretend you’re at one of your children’s birthday parties.’

‘I’d rather not,’ Sean replied.

‘Ah. Quite. Bad example, but just snap away — I’ll sort the wheat from the chaff later,’ Canning told him.

‘Fine,’ Sean agreed, recovering the camera from the trolley and switching it on, making it whir slightly. A light began to blink.

‘Shall we?’ Canning asked, moving to the side of the small shape under the green cover. Sean breathed in sharply through his nose and nodded. Canning took hold of the top of the sheet and slowly, carefully peeled it back, mindful there could be microscopic traces of evidence clinging inside. Inch by inch he revealed the body of Samuel Hargrave, still wrapped in the blanket he’d been found in. His face was even more devoid of life than when Sean had first seen him, the features that had defined him in life now all but gone — his tiny body looking like nothing more than an organic shell, almost unrecognizable as a person, a child. Canning gave a cough to bring Sean back, prompting him to lift the camera and take two quick photographs. ‘Someone’s gone to great care to wrap him in the blanket: it’s extremely neat and tidy, almost like the sort of swaddling you sometimes see babies wrapped in. Almost as if they were trying to preserve any evidence there may be on the boy’s clothes or body.’

‘He wasn’t thinking about evidence,’ Sean told him. ‘He wanted to make sure Samuel stayed warm: it was cold out that night.’

‘So the boy was alive when he left him?’

‘No. He was already dead. The blanket’s an act of guilt, of shame — an attempt to apologize for what he’d done.’

‘Then his death could have been an accident?’ Canning suggested.

‘Possibly, or he lost it and killed him deliberately. Too early to say, which is why we’re here, isn’t it?’

Canning didn’t answer, but instead leaned in close over the boy’s face.

‘His lips are quite blue and his skin extremely pale, even for someone who’s been dead for this length of time, so my immediate thoughts are suffocation or strangulation.’

‘If it’s suffocation then it could be an accident,’ Sean considered, ‘but if it’s strangulation we’ll know it’s a straight murder, although there’ll still be the CPS to convince.’

‘Fortunately that’s your job, not mine. Now, no doubt you’ve noticed the plastic?’

‘I did,’ Sean admitted, glancing at the large plastic sheet spread out under the metal stretcher the body had been placed on.

‘If anything falls from the body or blanket the sheet should catch it. After we’ve had a look around I’ll remove it for later examination.’

‘Fine,’ Sean agreed, grateful for Canning’s professionalism, but eager to press on.

Canning scanned up and down the wrapping before speaking again. ‘There doesn’t appear to be any fastening or adhesive. The blanket seems to be held in place solely by the skill of the folding. Whoever did this has either done it many times before — a nanny or paediatric nurse perhaps — or they took great care to make it so.’

‘The families used nannies, but we could find no links between them,’ Sean explained. ‘But it’s still worth considering.’

‘I’m going to open the blanket now,’ Canning continued, ‘see what we can find.’ He rested his fingers on top of the blanket, close to the boy’s face, pausing a moment before loosening it. He moved painstakingly slowly, examining each newly revealed section until he could clearly see the boy’s neck and the clothing around it. ‘There’s no bruising around the neck area, but I can see the early signs of bruising developing around his face, particularly the mouth.’

‘So he was smothered, not strangled?’ Sean interrupted.

‘It would appear so, but we’ll have to wait until I examine his trachea — internally, that is.’

‘I understand,’ Sean replied, keen not to be around when Canning undertook the surgical aspect of the post-mortem.

‘And he appears to be still in his pyjamas, unless these are something the killer dressed him in before or after he killed him.’

‘Ever tried dressing a dead person, Doctor? Even with a child, it’s almost impossible. These are the boy’s own clothes. The more I see, the more I think he panicked — smothered the boy to try and shut him up, and accidentally killed him — as easily and quietly as that.’

Canning had dealt with more detectives than he could possibly remember, but none were quite like Sean. He sometimes envied Sean’s insightfulness and other times was grateful he wasn’t blessed with such a cursed gift.

Eventually Canning looked back to the boy and continued to loosen the blanket, revealing more and more of the boy’s pyjama-clad torso, until he suddenly froze before taking a step away from the body. The boy had a small soft toy clutched to his chest — a blue dinosaur with a smiling face revealing only the top row of friendly teeth, its huge, oversized eyes cheerfully staring at nothing.