The Toy Taker. Luke Delaney
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remember the abject terror he’d felt when the detectives had handcuffed him and said they were going to take him back to his bedsit to search it for further stolen goods – his mind suddenly unable to think of anything other than the suitcase under the bed and the damning evidence it contained. Trying not to sound too desperate, he told the police he’d happily admit to the burglary and that therefore there was really no need to search his home. But his pleas had been ignored.
Thirty minutes later he could only stand and watch in horror as the younger of the two detectives pulled the suitcase from under the bed and flicked open the latches, throwing open the lid to reveal the toys inside. ‘From my childhood,’ he’d lied before the detective could speak. ‘My parents were going to throw them away so I brought them here. I was going to try and sell them – some of them might be worth something.’ Before the detective could question him his colleague distracted both of them as he began to pull watches, credit cards, mobile phones and jewellery from a drawer in a chest.
‘Hello there,’ he mocked as he let the items he’d found fall through his fingers like pirates’ gold. ‘Looks like you’ve been a very busy boy, Mark.’ McKenzie’s eyes had never left the suitcase until to his astonishment and relief the younger detective closed it and slid it back under the bed before moving quickly to his colleague’s side to examine the items that seemed far more interesting than a suitcase of old toys, and certainly easier to trace and prove as stolen. ‘You’re fucked,’ the detective added for good measure, ‘properly fucked.’
It was all he could do to suppress the smile he felt warming his insides as he continued to thank God that the burglary he’d been arrested for had been one of the rare occasions when he hadn’t taken a toy from the child’s room as a trophy. If he had, the suitcase under the bed would have meant so much more to the young detective, but now it had simply been forgotten. He admitted to eight different residential burglaries, listening carefully as the police listed the property taken from the homes, always fearful the toys he’d taken would be on the list, but they never were. Perhaps the parents of the children had never noticed them missing in the first place. Or maybe they had, but not until days after the burglaries, by which time their minds, their imaginations had failed to make the connection.
Four months later, as a first-time offender, he was sentenced to nine months imprisonment and was out in five, jobless and homeless until the Probation Service found him another shithole of a bedsit. With so much time on his hands and bitterness in his heart old, dark, disturbing longings soon began to stir in the pit of his soul and he knew that merely standing by the sides of their beds wouldn’t be enough any more. Besides, if the police were looking at him, they’d be looking at him during the night, as they would any night-time offender.
And so it was that he found himself stalking playgrounds during the day, always waiting for his opportunity, waiting for the watching mothers to look away at the wrong moment, for the young child to wander too close to where he hid. Which was exactly what the little boy had done that fateful Wednesday afternoon. He led him away through the woods, touching him and making him do things as he listened to the cries and screams coming from the playground, as the mother and the other hens frantically searched for the little boy. He’d finally panicked and run deeper into the woods leaving the boy alone, sobbing. But he soon became lost and disorientated, voices seemingly closing in on him from all sides, so he decided to hide in the hollow of an old tree, covering himself with dead leaves as the sound of a barking dog joined the chorus of shouts and screams. Eventually the hound came so close that he could hear its sniffling and scratching and he made a last desperate run for it, only for the huge, terrifying beast to bring him down hard within a few paces. A uniformed dog handler arrived, but was clearly in no hurry to call the beast to bay, and in that moment he knew he’d been labelled forever – labelled as a child-molester, hated by all but his own kind. As a residential burglar he’d already been treated by the police as something ugly and suspicious, but that was nothing compared to the treatment he’d received after his arrest for the sexual assault of the child. It seemed everywhere he turned someone would be singing in a whisper: Sex case. Sex case. Hang him, hang him, hang him.
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