The Toy Taker

by Delaney, Luke

  George Bridgeman sat on the floor of the room that had seemed strange and unfamiliar not so very long ago, but was now already beginning to feel like his home from home. He played with the toys that had been left in the room, presumably for him; strange toys that he wasn’t used to – not like the toys he had at home. At first, in his confusion he had pushed them to one side, but gradually they had begun to intrigue him, and unlike most of the toys he had at home he didn’t grow tired of them within a few minutes. As he played, his thoughts drifted from his home and family – at least for a time, but soon the rumbling of his empty stomach reminded him he hadn’t been fed yet today. All he’d had was a beaker of water from the night before to relieve his dry mouth and quell the emptiness in his belly for a little while. It was the first time in his young life that he’d ever felt real hunger or thirst.

  As his blood sugar dropped to an uncomfortable level his concentration waned and he pushed the wooden puzzle he’d been working on to one side and thought about his family, how much he missed his mother, her soft, comforting words and the embrace that instantly made any situation better – any pain only fleeting. He thought of his sister, who teased him nearly all the time, but who could also be so kind and caring towards him, particularly when their parents weren’t watching – sharing her sweets with him and letting him join in her games. Anyone who was mean to him while she was about had better watch out.

  And then there was his father, who none of them seemed to see much of, but especially him. He often tried to think of what he might have done that made Daddy so cross with him, but he just couldn’t think of anything – at least nothing he thought was terribly naughty. Every time Daddy shouted at him, his mummy would always tell him not to worry and say he’d done nothing wrong, although she’d always wait until Daddy had gone first. Sometimes he was so scared of making Daddy angry that he hardly dared move for fear of spilling a drink or dropping something on the floor. Yet when his sister did the same, Daddy said nothing. He always tried to be a good boy.

  Sudden noises from the other side of the door pulled him away from his thoughts – more voices like the ones he’d heard before, of men and women talking. And children’s voices too, both excited and upset. But they only ever lasted a few minutes at most before they fell away, the sound of a door closing punctuating the silence that followed, until the next time the voices came. While most of the voices constantly seemed to change, as muffled as they were, there was always one voice that remained – monotone and constant – a man’s voice that he was sure he recognized.

  Sean and Sally walked along the ground-floor corridor at Scotland Yard passing rank-less people in suits and the occasional uniformed senior officer with shoulders covered in what all other cops referred to as scrambled egg. Sean couldn’t help but wonder where they were heading and what they did, but was wholly unable to think of anything that they could be doing that could possibly be of use to him, with the exception of fronting the occasional press conference or giving the necessary level of authority to covert operations. Other than that he did his job in spite of them, not because of them. He answered his ringing, vibrating phone without breaking stride.

  ‘DI Corrigan.’

  ‘Guv’nor, it’s DS Handy here.’

  ‘Colin,’ Sean knew the DS, who ran one of the Central Surveillance Teams. ‘By virtue of the fact we’re speaking to each other, I’m assuming you got the McKenzie follow?’

  ‘We did indeed. I heard you were involved and thought it’d make a change from following suspected terrorists around Ealing all week.’

  ‘I can imagine. Where are you now?’

  ‘All plotted up outside Kentish Town nick, waiting for your man to show.’

  ‘I’ll let the custody sergeant there know to bail him. He should be out a few minutes after that. Did Featherstone get you a picture of my man?’

  ‘I’m looking at it as we speak.’

  ‘Good. Let me know if anything happens. Happy hunting.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Handy answered and hung up just as the lift arrived to carry Sean and Sally to the seventh floor.

  ‘Everything all right?’ Sally asked as the doors slid shut on them.

  ‘Yeah, fine. Surveillance is up and running.’

  ‘That’s something, I suppose.’

  Her response drew a displeased look from Sean, who was about to challenge her when the lift jerked to a stop and the doors hissed open, allowing two mid-ranked uniforms to step inside. By the time they reached the seventh floor and stepped from the lift he’d forgotten what she’d said and was back on his mobile.

  ‘Custody Suite, Kentish Town,’ announced the curt voice on the other end.

  ‘DI Corrigan speaking, Special Investigations Unit. You have someone in custody for me I need bailing – a Mark McKenzie.’

  ‘Yeah, I know the one,’ the voice answered. ‘What’s the reason for bailing him, and when and where d’you want him bailed to?’

  ‘For further inquiries,’ Sean told the voice. ‘You can bail him back to Kentish Town a month from today. Anything else?’

  ‘No,’ the voice assured him. ‘That’ll be done, no problem. Have a nice day.’

  The line went dead just as he and Sally entered their new main office. They walked straight through the mayhem and into the side office Sally shared with Donnelly, who was at his desk talking to Zukov. Sally’s narrow-eyed stare lifted Zukov to his feet behind her desk. Donnelly nodded towards the open door and Zukov took the hint.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it then,’ he told them as he squeezed past Sally in the doorway and melted into the main office beyond the Perspex.

  ‘Just back from Kentish Town?’ Donnelly asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ Sean answered.

  ‘Just back from Hampstead myself. Been having an interesting little chat with Caroline, the nanny, not to mention Mrs Bridgeman.’

  ‘Really?’ Sean asked, his tone making him sound less interested than he was. ‘And what did they have to say for themselves?’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Why don’t we start with the nanny?’

  ‘Aye, Caroline Reiss. She was most helpful. Let me into a little family secret.’

  ‘Which is …?’ Sean asked impatiently.

  ‘Which is that rumour has it in the dim and distant past Mrs Bridgeman had an affair. The previous nanny who worked for them at the time happens to be pals with Caroline, which is how she found out.’

  ‘How is any of this relevant to George being taken?’ Sally asked. ‘Mrs Bridgeman had an affair – big deal – they seem to have survived it.’

  ‘Ah, but you haven’t heard the best bit yet,’ Donnelly teased them.

  ‘Which is?’ Sean asked again.

  ‘The affair apparently occurred about nine months before wee George was born,’ Donnelly told them casually.

  ‘Ooops,’ Sally finally said to break the silence. ‘That changes things.’

  ‘Who did she have the affair with?’ Sean asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Donnelly replied.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Because I didn’t ask.’

  ‘Why the hell not?’

  ‘Because she’d had enough.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake, Dave,’ Sean continued, ‘when did you get all sentimental? Her kid’s missing and if there’s an estranged father in the picture we need to know who the fuck he is.’

  ‘Slow down, guv’nor. She hasn’t actually admitted to having an affair yet, and she’s adamant wee George is her husband’s child.’

  ‘Which means nothing,’ Sean reminded him.

  ‘I know,’ Donnelly agreed, ‘but let’s give her a day or so to think about what all this could mean, then I’ll take another crack at her.’

  ‘We don’t have that sort of time,’ Sean insisted.

  ‘This could also mean Mr Bridgeman might be involved in George’s disappearance,’ Sally interrupted. ‘From what we’ve heard so far, he’s pretty cold towards the boy.’

  ‘A
ye,’ Donnelly agreed, ‘and the nanny told me pretty much the same as she told Maggie: he’s always been almost resentful of the boy. Maybe now we know why.’

  ‘So what are we saying?’ Sean asked. ‘That we may have a long-lost lover who could have taken the boy, or an embittered husband who may have killed the boy and got rid of the body?’

  Sally shrugged her shoulders, leaving Donnelly to answer.

  ‘That’s about the size of it.’

  ‘OK, fine.’ Sean accepted the possibilities. ‘Keep digging and see what you can find. If Mr Bridgeman took the body away to get rid of it then he probably used his own car, or his wife’s. Have the cars seized and hand them over to Forensics. Make up some bullshit to get them to volunteer handing them over, but if they give you any shit, arrest Mr Bridgeman and seize them anyway. I’d rather you didn’t nick him, but if you have to … I’ll get Featherstone to expand the search teams out to a three-mile radius from the home. I don’t want a single abandoned building left unsearched. I don’t care if it’s a warehouse or a shed. I’ll get Addis to authorize roadblocks and we need to spread the door-to-door further afield. The media appeal Addis is doing later today should make people aware of what we’re up to, so people might start talking to us.’

  ‘Does this mean we’re concentrating everything on this being somehow linked to Mr Bridgeman or a blast from the past coming back to haunt Mrs Bridgeman?’ Donnelly asked.

  ‘No,’ Sean answered. ‘We still have McKenzie.’

  ‘Who we’ve got nothing on,’ Donnelly argued.

  ‘Not entirely true,’ Sean told him. ‘His modus operandi for previous offences is so close to this one that we could almost charge him on method alone. If I just had a bit more—’

  ‘But we don’t,’ Donnelly stopped him. ‘We don’t have enough to charge him on method alone, so what do we have?’

  ‘He just feels right,’ Sean tried to explain.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning he reminds me of someone from the past who also liked to play dangerous games.’ John Conway’s face drifted through his mind like a ghost.

  ‘Oh aye, and who would that be?’ Donnelly asked.

  ‘No one you know. He was the leader of a paedophile ring I investigated once.’

  ‘And McKenzie reminds you of this guy?’ Donnelly continued.

  ‘Kind of.’

  ‘Can you be a bit more specific?’ Donnelly pushed.

  ‘No,’ Sean admitted. ‘I wish I could, but for some reason the penny’s not dropping. Mckenzie’s motivation – I don’t know – I can feel it, but I just can’t tie it down.’

  ‘There’s no need to complicate this with paedophile witch-hunts,’ Donnelly insisted. ‘The chances that the boy was snatched in the night by some bogeyman paedophile are a million to one – a million to one,’ he repeated for emphasis. ‘As we all sadly know, the vast majority of child murders are committed by a member of the child’s family. Paedophiles who murder are a very rare breed – you know that. Let’s get on with what’s more likely and concentrate on the family.’

  ‘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 loc
ation 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.