Luke Delaney - The Toy Taker

‘Maybe,’ she told him, ‘but if something happens to her I’ll never forgive myself — I’ll be dead inside. I’ll always be dead inside.’

Sean sat next to her on the unmade bed, unable to think of anything else to say — exhausted by the effort of being understanding and trying not to absorb her pain, until for the first time he noticed she was holding a small toy in her hands, almost concealed between her palms. ‘Is that her favourite toy?’ he asked, remembering the toy placed so caringly under Samuel Hargrave’s dead arms and making a mental note to check what progress Zukov had made in tracing the toy’s origins.

Mrs Varndell looked down at the toy she was caressing, then answered with a resigned shrug. ‘This thing? God, no.’ She opened her hands and Sean saw that the toy looked more like an antique from the Victorian age than a child’s plaything — a monkey with a grinning porcelain face, dressed in a red soldier’s uniform with a little red cap perched at an angle on its head while each hand grasped a miniature brass cymbal. ‘I never wanted her to have it, but she insisted. Horrible-looking thing. Scary. I don’t know why I even picked it up — perhaps because it was one of the last things I bought for her.’

Her words made Sean rise to his feet, staring down at the toy monkey still in the woman’s hands, thoughts rushing at him too quickly to be processed. He was terrified that they might all melt away before he could form the whole picture in his mind. The words of the young priest came back to him. It’s like we’re looking so hard, but we just can’t see . ‘This isn’t her favourite toy?’ he asked her, his instinct telling him to keep asking questions, any that came into his mind. Just ask the questions and hope to decipher the answers when they came.

‘No,’ she told him. ‘Victoria has only ever had one special toy — Polly the rag-doll. Sometimes I think she loves that doll more than she loves anyone alive. But all children have one special toy, don’t they? One that they love above all others — the one they can’t sleep without — the one that all parents are afraid of losing. Even if you give them an identical replacement, they know it’s not the real one.’

‘Yes, yes they do,’ Sean agreed, thinking of his own daughters and their special soft toys — the ones they’d had since the day they were born. Never the largest or most expensive, but somehow the ones that each particular child formed a seemingly unbreakable bond with. ‘So where is Polly now? Is she still here?’

‘No,’ she answered, ‘or at least I don’t know.’

‘Have you looked?’

‘Everywhere, but we can’t seem to find her.’

‘Then it’s possible that whoever took her also took the doll,’ Sean thought of the soft blue dinosaur in Samuel’s arms, and realized that the killer hadn’t brought it with him. It had always belonged to the boy and he’d taken it at the same time …

But Mrs Varndell hadn’t finished yet.

‘No,’ she contradicted him. ‘He couldn’t have done that.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Sean admitted, his eyes growing narrow with strain. ‘Why couldn’t he?’

‘Because Polly didn’t go missing last night — she went missing the night before.’ She continued talking, but Sean wasn’t listening any more as the significance of her words began to sink into his strained mind and settle into a composite picture he could finally understand. He’d had all the pieces of the puzzle he needed right from the first scene, but only now was he able to put them together — only now was he able to realize the significance and importance of each separate piece. ‘We looked everywhere, but we couldn’t find her, so he couldn’t have taken Polly at the same time as he took Victoria, because Polly wasn’t here.’

Sean staggered backwards a step, the weight of the unravelling truth making him dizzy as he began to speak out loud, not caring who heard or what he sounded like — he just needed to say the words that were racing through his head before they were lost: ‘He knows the houses — knows everything about them, because he’s been inside them before, during the night. And the children never cry or call out because he brings them something — something special, something more special to them than almost anything else.’

He paused for a second as the final picture took shape behind his eyes and at last solidified. ‘Jesus Christ — he was in the house the night before he took the child. He was in all the houses the night before he took the children. He let himself in, checked everything he needed to check and then he went to the children’s rooms and he saw which toys they were holding tightest. He knew they would be the ones he needed and he took them — and then he left as silently as he came, locking the door behind him so no one even knew he’d been. And when he came back the following night, he came with the toy. That’s how he kept them quiet, by giving them back the thing they wanted more than anything — the thing they loved.’

‘Oh my God,’ Mrs Varndell said through her distress, covering her mouth with one hand as if she was going to start retching. ‘Oh my God, he’s been here before — walking around inside my house. Oh my God.’

Sean ignored her because he had to. He was too close to the final answer to let anything stand in the way. ‘But that’s not enough. Not for this one. He plans — everything is planned. If he went to the bedroom and the child wasn’t holding the toy, then all the other parts of his plan would collapse, and he wouldn’t risk that, so … so he already knew which were their favourite toys — the bastard already knew. But how — how did he know that?’ He looked down at the sobbing figure of Mrs Varndell and the toy monkey in her hand, its porcelain face staring straight at him, just as the doll with the porcelain face had done when he stood in the bedroom of Bailey Fellowes − toys from a bygone era, out of place in the rooms of young children nowadays. He was seeing more and more as he dropped to his knees in front of Mrs Varndell, grabbing the hand that held the toy. ‘Listen to me,’ he pleaded. ‘It’s vitally important you listen to me.’ She blinked away her tears and tried to focus on his face. ‘I need you to tell me where you bought this toy. I need you to tell me right now.’

She shook her head, dazed and confused, her mind struggling to function properly. ‘A toyshop,’ she stuttered. ‘A toyshop somewhere.’

‘Where?’ Sean demanded.

‘I can’t remember,’ she told him. ‘I’m confused. I … I.’

‘Think,’ he pushed her.

‘In Hampstead, I think.’

Sean rocked back on his heels. Hampstead — right in the middle of the abduction sites.

‘Where in Hampstead?’

‘I don’t remember. I don’t know Hampstead very well. We just went for a wander, and we came across this toyshop, and it looked quite interesting — more interesting than usual − so we went in.’

‘In what way more interesting?’ he asked.

‘It was old fashioned, I suppose. It didn’t have many modern toys in it, mostly strange, old things, and lots of handmade clockwork toys. God knows who’d buy clockwork toys nowadays.’

‘Clockwork?’ Sean snapped his question, the picture of a man stooped over a desk piecing together a clockwork toy jumping into his mind — small, delicate tools in the man’s nimble, practised fingers, tools like the ones used to pick locks.

‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘They were everywhere. He told us he made them himself.’

‘Who did? Who told you that?’

‘The shopkeeper,’ she told him, shaking her head in surprise that the answer hadn’t been obvious to him.

‘What was it called?’ he asked, his heart thumping against his chest wall. ‘I need to know the name of the shop.’