The Toy Taker

by Delaney, Luke

  Sean stood silent and still for what seemed an age, stuck in a trance-like state, bewildered by his own questions until his mind asked even more. ‘And … and when you did come back, how did you take George Bridgeman and Bailey Fellowes without making a sound? Samuel fought and his noise betrayed you. If the others had fought they would have betrayed you too, but they didn’t, did they? They went with you willingly, so they knew you, they must have known you or … or you had some … some special hold over them – something … magical … or you’re a family friend … or you cased the houses when they were still empty, before the families even moved in … or … or … Jesus Christ, fuck it!’ he suddenly swore, the frustration of the cascading, tumbling questions too much. He pulled a packet of ibuprofen from his coat pocket and popped a couple from the tin foil straight into his waiting mouth, swallowing them without water. He rubbed the sides of his head as he waited for the whirlwind of possibilities to subside.

  After a minute or so the confusion settled and he could think again. ‘You know all these families. We just haven’t found the link yet. Something the families haven’t told us yet. Something they’re afraid of, or have maybe just forgotten – something they can’t even conceive of as being relevant. Is that what you are – someone easily forgotten?’ He walked along the corridor until he reached the two doors opposite to each other. He pushed open the door to his right, again using the point of his knuckle, staring into the room before daring to enter, trying to see into the dimness. He could make out little other than shadows and silhouettes, prompting him to search the wall for a switch and flood the bedroom with light.

  After a few seconds of surveying the room from the doorway he stepped inside, scanning everything from the unmade bed to the toys that littered every corner and surface, seeing everything through different sets of eyes: the boy’s, the killer’s and his own, each giving him a different perspective of the crime. ‘You didn’t kill him here in this room, because the parents heard voices downstairs – so you wanted him alive. If you’d wanted to kill the boy in the house you would have done it in this room with the boy’s own pillow, and nobody would have heard a thing. No,’ he decided. ‘You wanted the children alive and somehow you took them without a sound.’ He was quiet for a while. ‘Somehow you persuaded them to leave with you – to sneak out of their own homes and away from their own families. Only Sam changed his mind. You couldn’t control him, couldn’t make him be quiet, and when you heard the voices of his parents you panicked and ran. You panicked and smothered the boy and you killed him, and then you left him in the cemetery on the grave of Robert Grant as what … some sort of apology? Damn your apology and damn you too.’

  He took a deep breath and one last look around the bedroom. It seemed as if each and every one of the large collection of soft toys were staring into Sean’s eyes, trying to tell him what they had witnessed – lifeless eyes flickering and burning as they reflected the light – a hundred mirror images of himself looking back at him – accusing him. ‘I’m sorry, Sam,’ he told the room and flicked the light off, silencing the eyes of his accusers.

  He made his way downstairs, moving quicker than he had when he’d arrived, satisfied the house held nothing more for him. It had convinced him the killer had been in the house during the night, possibly days, even weeks before taking Samuel Hargrave, but that was all he’d learned. Despite his initial feelings of excitement at this new revelation he was rapidly realizing it only posed more questions than it solved. Come into the house in the middle of the night and leave without the children – why? He shook his head at his own question, his mind turning to Mark McKenzie. Was this still all part of a game McKenzie was playing? Was he working with a paedophile ring after all? Getting their kicks out of playing with the police as well as through doing unthinkable things with the children they were taking? John Conway and his sick followers had liked to play games. Could this yet be more of the same? He doubted it, but he couldn’t be sure, not yet.

  He paused halfway down the flight of stairs leading from the second floor to the first – the place where both parents had said they’d heard voices. ‘You stopped here, didn’t you? The boy didn’t want to go with you – he began to struggle, and you were afraid, weren’t you? I can feel your fear – fear like you’ve never felt before. You had to stop him shouting so you did the first thing that came into your mind and pressed your hand over his mouth, but you covered his nose as well and he couldn’t breathe.’ He paused for a moment as he recreated the struggle in his mind – the boy fighting to escape as a panicking man overpowered him, gloved hands at first soft and warm on his skin, but then constricting and suffocating, an unbearable pressure crushing the boy’s face. ‘Did you mean to kill him? Did he make you angry – angry enough to make you want to kill him? Can you not bear the thought of facing up to what you really are – a murderer of children? He let the rest of the scene play out behind his eyes, as clear as if he was watching a recording. The heavy, dark figure picking up the boy and hurrying down the stairs, afraid to look over his shoulder as he fumbled at the locks that only minutes earlier he’d opened from the outside with such skill and ease. Sean skipped down the remaining stairs, trying to catch up with the spectre of the man fleeing below.

  Sean pulled the door open and walked quickly outside without closing it behind him, looking up and down the road just as Sam’s father had, in some forlorn, desperate hope that even now, hours later, he might somehow see the man and boy under the yellow street lights. He found himself frozen to the spot, unable to decide which way to walk, waiting for some unseen power to direct him, turning one way then the other, squinting to try and tell which way to head, but nothing revealed itself. In the end he decided to walk in the direction where the road was longest, past the rows of parked SUVs and top-end estate cars, looking for a place where the man he hunted could have parked without disturbing the solitude of the street in the middle of the night. ‘You didn’t park here – didn’t park close to the house, because if you had the father would have heard the slam of the car door, the engine starting – he would have seen you speeding away. So you were parked somewhere else – in the next street – at the end of the road and around the corner? But you couldn’t have made it all the way to the end before he saw you – not while you were carrying the deadweight of the boy. The father said he couldn’t see anyone – couldn’t hear anything.’ Sean stopped and looked around. ‘So you hid – you hid with the boy, listening to his father running in the street, his footsteps little more than dull thuds as he searched for you in his bare feet. But the sound of those footsteps must have been terrifying while you cowered like a hunted animal, and you had to stop the boy calling out or making a sound – you had no choice – so you kept your hand pressed across his face, didn’t you? You kept your hand pressed across his face until the footsteps disappeared, and then you ran – you took the boy to wherever your car was. But where did you hide?’

  Again he searched the street. Between the parked cars? No. Where then? He walked to the closest house and peered over the iron railings into the basement, before moving to the next house and doing the same and then the next and the next. They were all the same – a mixture of chained-up bikes and wheelie bins, most in complete darkness, but not all. ‘You hid down here, didn’t you – like the coward you are. But which one, you bastard son-of-a-bitch?’

  He kept moving along the street, looking into the basements, desperately searching for something that would tell him it was the one where the taker of children had hidden, but he could find nothing – feel nothing. ‘Fuck,’ he told the emptiness. Now he’d have to get Forensics to search every basement in the street. If he wasn’t already Mr Unpopular, he soon would be. ‘Damn you and damn me too,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t know you yet, but I will find you. I just need more. I need something else. I need the post-mortem.’

  Douglas Allen sat in his study that resembled a small workshop on the first floor of his house, surrounded by his collection of clocks and
mechanical toys. He wore a magnifying eye-scope over his right eye with his mini-potholing lamp strapped around his forehead, which was switched on despite the bright circle of light provided by the large flexible desk lamp he’d pulled close to where he worked. The rest of the room was in semi-darkness. He hummed along to the choral music that was quietly playing in the background as he selected a lock from his large collection and began to insert his delicate tools into the keyhole, reminding himself of where each pin and hole inside could be found – of every tiny sound they made as he gently manoeuvred them into exactly the right position to spring the device open. Within a few minutes he heard and felt the pins drop into their housings and the deadbolt suddenly retracted into the body of the lock. He put it to one side and reached for the next, only to be instantly frozen by a sound, real or imagined, coming from somewhere in the house. He cocked his head and listened intently, filtering out any sounds from beyond the house as he tried to allay or confirm his fears. Had one of the children wandered from their bedroom against his express wishes? He’d fed them, bathed them and put them to bed over two hours ago and checked on them since, finding them soundly asleep in their pristine pyjamas and bed linen. Maybe one of them had had a bad dream? After a few minutes he was satisfied the sound had been nothing and returned to his work, pulling the next lock into the circle of light before abandoning it just as quickly and reaching for a small, framed photograph of his wife, lifting it from the desktop and holding it close to his face, unclipping the eye-scope from his spectacles. The sadness of the previous night still hung over him like oppressive black clouds, haunting his every waking moment.

  ‘What should I do, Iris?’ he whispered, his voice trembling. ‘I don’t know what to do. If … if you were only here with me … I … I … I’d know what to do.’ You do know what to do. ‘Iris?’ You must carry on God’s work. ‘I don’t know, Iris – after what happened with … the last time.’ The Lord is thy shepherd. ‘Is this truly what God wants?’ He lets me rest in the meadow grass and leads me beside the quiet streams. He gives me new strength. He helps me do what honours him the most. ‘And do I honour him? Does doing what I do truly honour him?’ But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven. ‘Is Samuel with the Lord now?’ He lives with him for ever in his home now. Allen choked back his joy and relief, but the tears still streamed down his face until he could taste the salt on his lips. You must save as many as you can before it’s too late. Time is always against us.

  He felt her fade away as suddenly as she’d arrived and the emptiness returned, tearing at his chest and pounding in his head, the pain making him dizzy and nauseous.

  ‘God give me strength to carry on,’ he called out, his eyes tightly closed, hands clamped to the side of his head, trying to squeeze the demons from inside his mind. ‘God give me strength.’ But the pain was unrelenting and merciless. With his eyes still firmly closed he clumsily felt around in the dark, fumbling at the small drawers of the desk until he believed he’d found the one he needed. He pulled it open and groped inside until his fingers coiled around the first small bottle as his other hand pulled at the lid, ripping it off and sending lilac pills cascading across the desk and on to the floor. ‘God give me strength,’ he begged again. ‘God give me strength to bear my burden.’ But the pain in his head had begun to exhaust his strength. Just take the medication, his doctors had told him, just take the medication and you’ll be fine – painless. But the drugs took the voices away too – the voice of his wife, the voice of his Lord.

  Blindly he gathered up a handful of the pills from the desktop, not looking to see how many he was about to swallow, weeping with pain and shame – shame that he was about to betray his own wife, the only person who’d ever really loved him. ‘Please, God … please God, give me strength,’ he begged one last time, his hand moving closer and closer to his mouth, as if it was controlled by the Devil himself, pushing the poison relentlessly nearer. But as his lips reluctantly began to part, the white pain suddenly broke like giant wave over the shore, its energy spent and fading. His breathing began to return to normal, his eyes flickering open, still dazzled by the lamplight, but increasingly able to tolerate it. He rocked back on his knees and opened his clenched fist, allowing the lilac pills to trickle from his grip and fall to the floor. ‘The Lord is my saviour – the Lord is my shepherd. The Lord is my saviour – the Lord is my shepherd.’ He swayed back and forth as he chanted his allegiance. ‘Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil – Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.’ Over and over he repeated the words of the Lord’s Prayer, frantically at first, then more calmly, until he could feel a only trace of the pain that had threatened to defeat him.

  Finally he was able to stand, pulling himself up and hauling himself into the chair, wiping the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his shirt, his hands still trembling as he tugged open another drawer and took out an innocuous-looking blue notebook. He flicked through the pages until he found what he was looking for. A name – Victoria Varndell, age about five years old. Address: 2 Bayham Place, Mornington Crescent. ‘Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ It was his duty to save the child, but not tonight – he couldn’t save her tonight, not until he’d learned all he needed to know. But tomorrow he could save her. Tomorrow he would be able to save five-year-old Victoria Varndell.

  Sean hadn’t been able to bear the thought of returning to the Yard after visiting the house in Primrose Hill – returning to the piles of reports and emails that undoubtedly waited for him. The increasing list of missed calls on his mobile was evidence enough that he was much in demand, but he had nothing to say to anybody, nothing he wanted to share – not yet. Instead he’d driven to the other two scenes, parking as close as he could to the houses the children were taken from without being noticed, just sitting in the dark, his window down as he listened to and smelled the streets. It was the first time he had travelled from scene to scene and he was struck by their proximity to each other. But the area between them still meant there were hundreds, maybe even thousands, of streets to cover. No matter how many dozens of extra cops they put on the streets, it would still be an incredible stroke of luck if they were to stop the right man and bring to a halt what the media were increasingly referring to as his reign of terror. He tried to remember anyone getting that lucky before, but couldn’t.

  Eventually he had to face the fact that the scenes wouldn’t speak to him and he headed home to East Dulwich. He needed at least a few hours’ sleep, a shower and change of clothes – maybe even some food that wasn’t processed or out of a vending machine. By the time he arrived it was late enough that most of the other occupants of the street were either already tucked up in bed or heading that way.

  He enjoyed the short walk in the solitude of the empty road, his footsteps loud enough to create a slight echo, his warm breath forming great plumes of steam that died as quickly as they were born. During his time as a uniform constable he, like most cops, had learned to make the night his – its sounds and sights, smells and tones. He was familiar with and comfortable in night in a way most people would never understand. If he hadn’t been so tired he would have walked further, and there was still a chance Kate would be awake. Usually, when he arrived home late, he preferred to be alone, his mind too crowded for small talk or even talk of his family, but tonight was different – he needed to see Kate, needed to speak to her. Anna was right – Kate and his family were his anchor. Without them he could easily begin to lose himself. Anna was a temptation, one he still hadn’t dealt with, one that still inhabited his consciousness − but he had no doubt who he loved, who he couldn’t live without, and he needed to see her tonight.

  As he slid the key into the only lock securing the front door he couldn’t help but wonder how long it would take the man he hunted to open and enter his own house, gliding up the stairs to where his daught
ers slept, his wife not hearing a thing as he slipped into their bedroom and chose one to take – but which one would he choose? Sean found himself asking, before shaking the ugly thought away and letting himself in, closing and locking the door behind him, kicking off his shoes and walking to the rear of the house where Kate and the kitchen waited. She looked up from her laptop and greeted him as if he was a normal man, returning from a normal job at a normal hour.

  ‘Wasn’t expecting to see you for a while.’

  ‘Thought I’d grab a few hours at home while I can – not that the world and his wife aren’t looking for me.’

  ‘Trouble?’

  ‘When is it ever anything else?’

  ‘That’s not what I meant. I mean are you in trouble – you specifically?’

  ‘Not especially,’ he half-lied. ‘Powers that be want this one sorted as soon as possible. They’re putting the pressure on a bit, like they do. You would think I didn’t want to find whoever’s taking these children. Fools.’

  ‘Do you still think they’re alive?’

  ‘Not all of them,’ he told her.

  ‘You find something then?’

  ‘Yeah. A body,’ he answered coldly.