The Toy Taker Page 10

  As he lay on his back staring at the off-green ceiling his mind wandered back to his life as a young teenager living with his drunken stepfather who beat him for light entertainment and a mother who was too busy with much younger children from her new husband and too in need of the income he provided to do anything about it. And then the stepfather had started making accusations – whispering evil things in his mother’s ear about how he seemed a bit too keen to help bathe the younger children – how he’d caught him sneaking out of their bedrooms in the middle of the night. Even though they couldn’t prove anything, when he was only sixteen years old they had pushed him out of the door with a suitcase and two hundred pounds cash, given to him only once he’d promised never to come back. His pleas to his mother had fallen on deaf ears, but alone in the world he’d survived, living off a pittance of unemployment benefit in godforsaken bedsits until finally he’d been forced to take a job as an apprentice locksmith as part of his Job Seeker programme. After a few months he realized he was actually enjoying the job. Getting up every day knowing he had a purpose. Everybody in the small family business treated him with respect – treated him indeed as if he was part of their family as he watched and learned from the more experienced locksmiths. Soon he could fit almost any type of lock to almost any type of door and had even begun to learn the finer art of picking the locks open – a company speciality that had saved many a customer the expense of fitting new locks to doors that had unexpectedly swung shut on them. It started innocently enough as far as he was concerned – just a bit of harmless thrill-seeking – crouching in the dark at the doors of shops closed for the night, working his fine tools until the locks popped open, pushing the doors inwards until the burglar alarms were activated, then watching from a safe distance as the attending police berated the shopkeeper who they’d dragged out in the middle of the night to turn off the terrible noise, warning them that police would stop responding to their alarms if they couldn’t even be bothered to make sure they’d shut their doors properly. His night-time games were amusing as well as giving him the opportunity to hone his new-found skills, but soon their appeal began to wear thin. He needed more.

  The first few years of his life had been happy enough, – as far as he could remember – living with his mother and real father as an only child, but the admiring looks his mother drew from other men drove his father insane with jealousy – an insanity he tried to drown in drink, until finally his alcoholism chased him from the family home never to be seen again. He’d died a few years later and was buried in a pauper’s grave somewhere in the Midlands. After that it had been a succession of strange men he was told to call uncle until such time as they became more permanent in his mother’s life. Some had been decent enough, but most saw him at best as an inconvenience, while a few had treated him as something to be used and abused. All the while he’d had to watch the children of other families being loved and cherished by their parents – knowing that, while he was unwelcome in his own home, they would be sleeping soundly in warm, comfortable beds. If only he could share some of their life.

  Finally he could wait no longer and at last he perfected the method of becoming part of another family without anyone ever knowing. He slipped into their houses through silently opened windows and doors, his lock-picking skills improving with each adventure, standing in the kitchens and living rooms of the families as they slept upstairs, knowing that if he was caught he would be accused of terrible things. But all he wanted was to be alone with them, safe and accepted – part of a real family.

  For a long time he was too afraid to venture upstairs and stand in the same rooms as the sleeping children. Instead he’d settled for taking things to remind him of his innocent visits; not things of value, just little keepsakes no one would miss. But eventually that was no longer enough, and his fear of walking up the long, creaking staircases was overwhelmed by his need to see the sleeping children. So he took his first terrifying walk up the stairs, struggling to control his bladder and bowels as he slid past the parents’ room and entered the room of a little girl bathed in her blue night-light.

  It had been everything he’d dreamed it would be – standing, watching her little chest rise and fall under the covers, her long curly hair draped over her face like a beautiful veil. Her room was warm and pretty, with princesses and rainbows on her wallpaper, toys and dolls on every surface as she slept in her soft, comfortable bed, wrapped in a floral-patterned duvet that smelled of fresh orchids on a spring day. So this was how the other children had lived – cared for and adored, as far from his own childhood as it was possible to imagine. Tears had rolled down his face as he’d stood watching her – tears of happiness for her and sadness for his own lost childhood. After what seemed an age he left her room and slipped away as quietly as he’d arrived, taking one of her dolls from the shelf as he did so – being sure to lock the window behind him, leaving it just as he found it.

  Time and again he paid his visits to the sleeping, always taking something small and personal from the child’s room – just another toy lost or misplaced, soon forgotten by both parents and child alike. His collection of soft toys and dolls was squeezed into a suitcase stored under his bed for when he needed their help to relive his innocent little visits.

  But his wage as an apprentice remained small and while he was in the houses he saw many things of value: watches, jewellery, cash in purses and wallets. Small things at first, but as he became bolder the things he took grew larger: laptops, iPads, Blu-ray players. He knew just the landlord in just the pub to sell them to – no questions asked, cash over the counter. Finally his luck ran out as he let himself out of the back door of a semi-detached in Tufnell Park, straight into the arms of a waiting uniform police constable who was quietly investigating a call from a concerned neighbour who thought they’d heard something suspicious in next-door’s garden. Obviously he’d been unable to explain the laptop and iPhone they’d found in his bag and once it was established he was not the lawful occupier of the semi-detached he was arrested for residential burglary and handed over to the local CID for further investigation.

  He could still clearly 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 – the type taken by a professional photographer visiting the school. He realized it was the first time he’d stopped to look at any pictures of the missing boy properly – his beauty and innocence he’d noticed the first time he saw a photograph of the child suddenly seemed even more striking. His thoughts travelled back to the boy’s family, and once again he found himself asking whether it was their very beauty that had attracted the monster in the first place. Was McKenzie visually driven – irresistibly drawn by the physical beauty of the family? Sally’s voice brought him back to the here and now.

  ‘Ready when you are,’ she told him. Sean nodded and walked into the main office, all eyes immediately falling on him as the image of George Bridgeman continued to burn itself into his conscience.

  ‘For those of you who spent all of yesterday back at Peckham, I understand you’re probably not yet up to running speed on our new case.’

  ‘Another MISPER, isn’t it?’ DC Tony Summers asked in his husky Manchester accent.

  ‘It is,’ Sean confirmed.

  ‘Not again,’ moaned DC Tony Summers whose size and thick blond hair had earned him the nickname Thor amongst his colleagues.

  ‘The last case we had started as a MISPER,’ Sean warned them, ‘and we all know how that one ended. This time, for those of you who don’t already know, the missing person is a four-year-old boy called George Bridgeman. We have limited time to find him before everyone’s going to start assuming the worst and before the media are either informed or find out about it themselves. When that happens, we need to stay focused and separate from the inevitable circus – let Press Bureau do their job and we’ll get on with ours. Understand?’ His team nodded that they did. ‘We’ve had night-duty teams searching the streets around the family hous
e, but nothing so far. Now we’ve got daylight, further teams will continue the search and expand it on to Hampstead Heath. We’ll be using dogs and India 99 will be searching from above if the weather stays fine. OK – updates. Dave, anything from Forensics yet?’

  Donnelly remained seated, pausing to clear his throat before speaking. ‘They worked through the night at the family home of the missing boy and have lifted multiple prints, including some shoe prints, and fibres. They’ve seized a few items the suspect may have touched to get to the boy and will be submitting them to the lab this morning for a DNA sweep, but there’s been a ton of people through the house – not just the family, but their cleaner, nanny, the removal men, the estate agent and any one they showed around the house when they were trying to sell it. And no doubt there’ll still be traces of the previous family all over the place too. Basically we’re looking at dozens of sets of prints, and the same for DNA. Other than that – no traces of blood or signs of a break-in.’

  ‘So we know our suspect entered, took the boy and left without leaving any obvious trace, other than possibly prints and/or DNA.’

  Cahill winced. ‘If the media get hold of that they’re going to start making him into some sort of urban bogeyman.’

  ‘They don’t need the details of the break-in,’ Sean assured her.

  ‘What break-in?’ Donnelly reminded him.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ Sean answered. ‘Tell Forensics not to waste their time trying to compare the prints to the family, etc. Just get them all up to Fingerprints and have them run against sets already in their database. Maybe we’ll strike lucky and get a hit against someone with previous convictions.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Donnelly agreed, seeing the sense in Sean’s suggestion.

  ‘Which leads me to the suspect we already have in custody: Mark McKenzie, white, twenty-three years old, and he already has convictions for residential burglary and the sexual assault of a young child. He’s known to have used lock-picks to enter houses at night in the past and he lives only a couple of miles from where the boy was taken.’