Luke Delaney - The Toy Taker

‘No,’ Sean answered quickly, understanding the terror his mere presence had caused. ‘Nothing like that. We’re still looking, and we’ll keep looking till we do find him, I promise you.’

‘Then why are you here?’ Stuart Bridgeman asked, his eyes still distrustful of Sean, suspicious of his intentions despite the fact that his gut instinct told him Sean was their only real chance of seeing George alive again.

‘Standard procedure,’ Sean half lied. ‘We find it’s often useful to go over things again a few days after the initial incident. Sometimes the subconscious recalls things that seemed irrelevant at the time.’

‘Anything,’ Celia jumped in before her husband could speak. ‘We’re happy to assist with anything if it’ll help get George back.’

Sean sat on the opposite side of the kitchen table and looked at the faces of the three family members before beginning the process of trying to unlock some buried nugget of information they probably wouldn’t even know was there — praying for a shard of light to illuminate the way forward. ‘I have to consider that George was initially targeted far more randomly than we first thought. It may have been something as simple as a brief encounter in the street, outside his school or in the park. You may have been followed home without knowing it — that’s how they knew where he lived — nothing more complicated than that.’

‘You mean a stranger?’ Celia asked.

‘Probably,’ Sean answered.

‘Which would make it even more difficult for you to find him, wouldn’t it?’ Her voice grew more alarmed as the realization sunk in. ‘I mean, if it was someone connected to both families then it would only be a matter of time before you worked it out. But if it’s a stranger, if George has been taken by a stranger, then you’ve got nothing, have you? Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.’

‘There are always plenty of lines of inquiry in an investigation like this,’ Sean lied. ‘This is just one more, so I need you to think — can you remember anyone, anyone at all, who may have approached you, no matter how inconsequential it felt at the time? Someone who just seemed a little bit off to you — who paid a bit more attention to George than the norm — no matter how friendly they appeared?’

Celia pinched her forehead between her index finger and thumb, shaking her head in concentration, before slumping in her chair. ‘I’ve been trying to think of someone like this for days — ever since George was taken, but there isn’t anyone. Nothing like that happened.’

‘Try,’ Sean urged her, attempting not to let his own frustration show. ‘A bus or taxi driver — a waiter or barman?’

‘No,’ Celia insisted. ‘Nothing.’

‘Had you been anywhere with George, in the days before he went missing — the cinema, a play-barn, a library?’

‘I don’t know … an indoor play centre maybe.’

‘Where?’

‘The one over in Collingwood, a horrible place.’

‘When?’

‘I can’t remember — maybe two, three days before he was taken.’

‘Did anything happen — anything out of the ordinary?’

‘No. I met some girlfriends from my old antenatal group. We had coffee, the kids played together and I went home.’

‘Where else did you go?’ Sean kept it up, praying he could break her down and shake loose anything that could be locked in her memory.

‘I don’t know — this café, that café, this shop, that shop. What does it matter — you’ll never find him like this.’

‘It could matter,’ Sean insisted before she silenced the room and froze everyone inside it like statues.

‘Is he going to kill him?’ she asked coldly. ‘Is that why you’re really here — because you think he’s going to kill George?’

‘No,’ Sean forced himself to say. ‘No, I don’t know that.’

‘But you believe it, don’t you? You believe it because he already has, hasn’t he? He’s already killed a child?’ Sean felt his brain grind to a halt as her words cut deeply into him, paralysing any thought he had of talking his way around her questions and accusations. ‘But not George,’ she continued. ‘If it had been George you would have had to tell us. Then it must be the little girl — Bailey.’

‘No,’ Sean admitted with a long sigh. ‘Not Bailey.’

‘Then who?’

‘He took another child,’ Sean explained, never breaking eye contact with Celia. ‘Something appears to have gone wrong during the abduction and a boy was killed.’

‘How?’ Celia demanded.

‘I can’t tell you that.’

‘How?’ she repeated, her voice louder.

Sean sighed again. ‘He was suffocated — we believe.’ Celia sat motionless, her eyes unblinking.

‘You said something went wrong,’ Stuart Bridgeman reminded them. ‘So it could have been an accident. It doesn’t mean the same is going to happen to George.’ He constantly looked back and forth between his wife and Sean, whose eyes had remained locked on each other. ‘It was an accident, for God’s sake.’

‘Don’t you understand?’ Celia asked. ‘He’s killed now. He’s killed a child, whether by accident or not. He tried to abduct another child and ended up killing them. He’s even more desperate now and capable of anything — isn’t that right, Inspector? And he still has George.’

‘Well, if you think of anything,’ Sean changed the subject, ‘just let DC O’Neil know and she’ll pass it on to me. I have to get back to the office and check a few things out. But listen,’ he told them, ‘we’re doing everything we possibly can to find George and we won’t stop until we do — I can promise you that much.’

‘Find my boy,’ Celia told him as the tears began to escape her eyes, her fists clenching until the knuckles turned white. ‘I’m begging you, find my boy alive. Bring him home to me. You’re our only hope.’

‘I’ll find him,’ he tried to assure them while feeling like a liar. ‘There’s still time, I know there is.’ He stood to let them know he was leaving. ‘Mrs Bridgeman. Mr Bridgeman.’ Finally he broke eye contact with Celia and made his way slowly from the kitchen, heading for the front door with Maggie close behind him. He waited until he was out the front door and standing on the steps before speaking. ‘Keep an eye on them,’ he told her. ‘What they’re going through must be hell. Mrs Bridgeman isn’t the weeping, wailing type, but that doesn’t mean she’s not on the edge.’

‘I’ll look after them,’ Maggie promised.

‘Call me if they remember anything,’ he told her, then he turned and headed down the steps towards his car, stopping only when he heard the heavy door close behind him.

He looked up at the clear darkness in the sky. Late afternoon had turned into early evening and the moon was already full and low above London as another day all too quickly slipped past, and still the case wouldn’t break. How much time had he wasted on Mark McKenzie and then Hannah Richmond, and all for nothing more than discovering what sort of person he wasn’t looking for. ‘Time. Time. Time. Time,’ he muttered to himself as he climbed into his car, the thought of returning to his office both oppressive and depressing. There were no answers there, no clues hiding in amongst the piles of documents, paper or otherwise. Whatever the answer was to the riddle he was sure he hadn’t found it yet and he was sure it wasn’t back in his office — it was out here, on the streets of North London, at the scenes of the crimes, or in the mortuary. He either hadn’t found it yet, or he had and had missed it. He pulled away from the kerb and headed towards Highgate.

Helen Varndell’s frustration was growing into genuine anger as she stormed around her converted mews home in Mornington Crescent, just south of Camden Town. She swept up the stairs feeling ever more agitated and into the bedroom of her five-year-old daughter who waited, sobbing quietly in her bed. ‘Damn it, Vicky, where did you leave the bloody thing?’ The overhead light in the child’s room made Helen’s attractive but slightly stern-looking face seem harsher than ever, her short, blonde hair cut well above the slim neck that flowed gracefully into her broad shoulders and tall, slender body. She stood with her hands on her hips staring down at her crying daughter.