The Toy Taker (45 page)

‘How did the post-mortem go?’

‘I didn’t stay for the whole thing,’ Sean admitted. ‘Just long enough to all but confirm what happened.’

‘Which is?’

‘He was suffocated, not strangled. No other injuries to the body and no outward signs of sexual assault.’

‘So all the usual things are missing,’ Donnelly stated flatly. Receiving no answer, he continued: ‘In which case, the question remains: why is he taking them?’

‘I don’t know,’ Sean confessed. ‘But whatever his motivation is, it isn’t sexual.’

‘And you’re absolutely sure of that?’ Donnelly checked, unhappy about letting something as straightforward as a sexual predator fall away as a possibility.

‘I’m sure.’

‘Where does that leave us then?’ Donnelly asked as he and Sean both slumped into their chairs. ‘We have no viable suspects; his motivation is a mystery; we’ve nothing from Forensics that could help identify him, and the media appeal’s drawn a complete blank, except for the odd crank and lunatic. Where do we go from here? We still have two missing kids out there, boss.’

‘We keep looking for a link – we go over everything again until we find something, only …’

‘Only what?’

‘Only, we may have to consider the possibility there is no link between the victims and their families.’

‘What do you mean? We’ve put in a lot of hours looking for this link and now you’re saying there might not be one?’ Donnelly looked at him in disbelief. ‘There must be a link, because whoever’s taking these kids knew everything he needed to know, including the layout and security systems of the houses. He could only do that if he’d been allowed into the houses and had a good look around.’

‘New information’s come to light,’ Sean told him.

‘What information?’ Donnelly asked, his arms spread wide.

‘He was in the houses at night.’

‘We know that. How’s that supp—’

‘He went in beforehand, at night.’

‘How?’

‘It’s simple, if you think about it. The same way he went in when he took them: he picked the locks.’

‘Hold on,’ Donnelly said, his arms folded, his tone challenging, ‘let me get this straight. You’re saying sometime before he abducts the child, he goes to the house, lets himself in by picking the locks, has a good look around and then just leaves?’

‘That’s about it, yes.’

‘But why wouldn’t he take the child? Why risk a second visit? It doesn’t make sense.’

‘Not to you or me or any sane person, but he’s not like any sane person. I don’t know why he does it, I wish I did. My best guess would be it helps elongate his fantasy. He sees the child sleeping; sees the parents sleeping; sees the brothers and sisters sleeping, and leaves, locking up behind him so no one ever realizes he was there. And then he goes away – he goes away and he thinks about nothing else for days, until he feels the time is right to return and claim his prize.’

‘This is a fucking nightmare,’ Donnelly decreed.

‘It’s our job to deal with nightmares,’ Sean reminded him. ‘But this could also help us, give us some new angles to look at.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as, if this is how he finds out whether their alarms are working or even whether they set them at night, then he may have tried to enter other houses as well as the ones we know about. Get the door-to-door teams to revisit the areas near the scenes – ask the occupants if anyone has had an unexplained alarm activation in the middle of the night. Maybe they even found their front door ajar because he had to leave in a hurry. If we’re lucky, someone might have looked out of a window and seen a man run off or a car pulling away. Who knows – maybe they can give us a description or, even better, a number plate.’

‘You mean if we’re very lucky?’ Donnelly pointed out.

‘Most cases like this are solved by a lucky break. We’ve just got to keep looking.’

‘Fair enough,’ Donnelly agreed half-heartedly, lifting his heavy frame from the chair with the ease of a much lighter, younger man. ‘I’ll get straight on it.’

‘Good,’ Sean thanked him. ‘Oh, and one more thing: the boy – Samuel Hargrave – when we unwrapped the blanket we found he was holding a soft toy in his arms and a crucifix in his right hand.’

‘Interesting combination.’

‘The crucifix is probably old and no doubt all but untraceable, but the toy – we might be able to find out where it came from. Maybe a shopkeeper will remember selling it to someone who left an impression on them?’

‘You mean a weirdo?’

‘If you like.’

‘And you think he gave the toy to the boy?’

‘Makes sense: he takes toys with him when he goes to abduct the children.’

‘To pacify them. To show them he’s a friend.’

‘Exactly.’

‘But the toy could be the boy’s? He could have just grabbed it when he was leaving?’

‘It could be, but I doubt it. He wouldn’t want the child to think he was trying to steal their favourite toy. Safer to take a new one. But check it out anyway.’

‘I’ll get Paulo to look into it,’ Donnelly assured him.

‘Good. Dr Canning has the details and photographs.

‘I’ll let Paulo know. And by the way, you look like shit.’

‘Thanks,’ Sean winced.

He watched the grinning Donnelly head into the main office in search of DC Zukov, then removed a small mirror from one of his desk drawers. Donnelly was right: he did look like shit – exhausted hollow eyes and unhealthy pale skin. He tossed the mirror back into the drawer and slammed it shut, looking across his desk at the piles of memos and reports that were rapidly accumulating. Could the one tiny piece of information that would turn the entire case be hiding in that mountain of paper, or in amongst the seemingly endless sea of information now stored on the inquiry’s computer databases? He knew it was entirely possible, even probable, but he couldn’t stomach the thought of sifting through any of it right now – the image of Samuel’s tiny body embracing the little plush dinosaur haunted his consciousness and stopped him thinking straight or concentrating. He needed to get out – get out and do something, anything that could give him the insight he needed to find the man he hunted and find him quickly. Find him before he took another child, or took another life. He jumped to his feet, stuffed his coat pocket full of the things he needed and headed for the exit.

Less than an hour later Sean pulled up outside number 7 Courthope Road – the scene of the first abduction. He checked the area for any sign of the media and was relieved to see so far they were sticking to their promise to leave the victims’ families alone, so long as the police gave them regular updates. But he was still pretty sure that as soon as he stepped from the car he’d fall into the frame of a long lens hiding behind a window or on a rooftop not too far away.

He dragged himself from the car and to the front door, remembering the first time he’d been here – the poisonous atmosphere of desperation and mistrust. After ringing the doorbell he stepped back, listening to the sounds coming from inside the house – normal sounds that masked the truth of what had happened here. A minute or so later he was relieved to see the door opened by one of his own – DC Maggie O’Neil, who was still acting as the Family Liaison Officer for the Bridgemans.

‘Sir,’ she said with surprise. ‘I wasn’t expecting a visit.’

‘I wasn’t expecting to make one,’ he answered, stepping inside without waiting to be invited. ‘How’ve they been doing?’ he whispered.

‘OK,’ Maggie told him. ‘Closer, since the DNA results showed the dad was also the biological father.’

‘Wonderful,’ Sean said sarcastically. ‘He finally has proof the boy is his, only now he’s gone. Where are they?’

‘Kitchen – having dinner, or at least trying to.’

Sean waited for Maggie to lead the way, gritting his teeth at the thought of having to speak to the family again.

As they entered, Maggie told the Bridgemans, ‘Sorry to disturb your dinner, but DI Corrigan’s here to see you.’

The parents looked up at him with abject fear in their eyes while their daughter merely glanced at him and kept eating.

Celia Bridgeman began to rise from her chair, swallowing hard before speaking, convinced they would be her last words before finding out her son was dead – before her world stopped for ever. ‘Has something happened? Have you found George?’

‘No,’ Sean answered quickly, understanding the terror his mere presence had caused. ‘Nothing like that. We’re still looking, and we’ll keep looking till we do find him, I promise you.’

‘Then why are you here?’ Stuart Bridgeman asked, his eyes still distrustful of Sean, suspicious of his intentions despite the fact that his gut instinct told him Sean was their only real chance of seeing George alive again.

‘Standard procedure,’ Sean half lied. ‘We find it’s often useful to go over things again a few days after the initial incident. Sometimes the subconscious recalls things that seemed irrelevant at the time.’

‘Anything,’ Celia jumped in before her husband could speak. ‘We’re happy to assist with anything if it’ll help get George back.’

Sean sat on the opposite side of the kitchen table and looked at the faces of the three family members before beginning the process of trying to unlock some buried nugget of information they probably wouldn’t even know was there – praying for a shard of light to illuminate the way forward. ‘I have to consider that George was initially targeted far more randomly than we first thought. It may have been something as simple as a brief encounter in the street, outside his school or in the park. You may have been followed home without knowing it – that’s how they knew where he lived – nothing more complicated than that.’

‘You mean a stranger?’ Celia asked.

‘Probably,’ Sean answered.

‘Which would make it even more difficult for you to find him, wouldn’t it?’ Her voice grew more alarmed as the realization sunk in. ‘I mean, if it was someone connected to both families then it would only be a matter of time before you worked it out. But if it’s a stranger, if George has been taken by a stranger, then you’ve got nothing, have you? Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.’

‘There are always plenty of lines of inquiry in an investigation like this,’ Sean lied. ‘This is just one more, so I need you to think – can you remember anyone, anyone at all, who may have approached you, no matter how inconsequential it felt at the time? Someone who just seemed a little bit off to you – who paid a bit more attention to George than the norm – no matter how friendly they appeared?’

Celia pinched her forehead between her index finger and thumb, shaking her head in concentration, before slumping in her chair. ‘I’ve been trying to think of someone like this for days – ever since George was taken, but there isn’t anyone. Nothing like that happened.’

‘Try,’ Sean urged her, attempting not to let his own frustration show. ‘A bus or taxi driver – a waiter or barman?’

‘No,’ Celia insisted. ‘Nothing.’

‘Had you been anywhere with George, in the days before he went missing – the cinema, a play-barn, a library?’

‘I don’t know … an indoor play centre maybe.’

‘Where?’

‘The one over in Collingwood, a horrible place.’

‘When?’

‘I can’t remember – maybe two, three days before he was taken.’

‘Did anything happen – anything out of the ordinary?’

‘No. I met some girlfriends from my old antenatal group. We had coffee, the kids played together and I went home.’

‘Where else did you go?’ Sean kept it up, praying he could break her down and shake loose anything that could be locked in her memory.

‘I don’t know – this café, that café, this shop, that shop. What does it matter – you’ll never find him like this.’

‘It could matter,’ Sean insisted before she silenced the room and froze everyone inside it like statues.

‘Is he going to kill him?’ she asked coldly. ‘Is that why you’re really here – because you think he’s going to kill George?’

‘No,’ Sean forced himself to say. ‘No, I don’t know that.’

‘But you believe it, don’t you? You believe it because he already has, hasn’t he? He’s already killed a child?’ Sean felt his brain grind to a halt as her words cut deeply into him, paralysing any thought he had of talking his way around her questions and accusations. ‘But not George,’ she continued. ‘If it had been George you would have had to tell us. Then it must be the little girl – Bailey.’

‘No,’ Sean admitted with a long sigh. ‘Not Bailey.’

‘Then who?’

‘He took another child,’ Sean explained, never breaking eye contact with Celia. ‘Something appears to have gone wrong during the abduction and a boy was killed.’

‘How?’ Celia demanded.

‘I can’t tell you that.’

‘How?’ she repeated, her voice louder.

Sean sighed again. ‘He was suffocated – we believe.’ Celia sat motionless, her eyes unblinking.

‘You said something went wrong,’ Stuart Bridgeman reminded them. ‘So it could have been an accident. It doesn’t mean the same is going to happen to George.’ He constantly looked back and forth between his wife and Sean, whose eyes had remained locked on each other. ‘It was an accident, for God’s sake.’

‘Don’t you understand?’ Celia asked. ‘He’s killed now. He’s killed a child, whether by accident or not. He tried to abduct another child and ended up killing them. He’s even more desperate now and capable of anything – isn’t that right, Inspector? And he still has George.’

‘Well, if you think of anything,’ Sean changed the subject, ‘just let DC O’Neil know and she’ll pass it on to me. I have to get back to the office and check a few things out. But listen,’ he told them, ‘we’re doing everything we possibly can to find George and we won’t stop until we do – I can promise you that much.’

‘Find my boy,’ Celia told him as the tears began to escape her eyes, her fists clenching until the knuckles turned white. ‘I’m begging you, find my boy alive. Bring him home to me. You’re our only hope.’

‘I’ll find him,’ he tried to assure them while feeling like a liar. ‘There’s still time, I know there is.’ He stood to let them know he was leaving. ‘Mrs Bridgeman. Mr Bridgeman.’ Finally he broke eye contact with Celia and made his way slowly from the kitchen, heading for the front door with Maggie close behind him. He waited until he was out the front door and standing on the steps before speaking. ‘Keep an eye on them,’ he told her. ‘What they’re going through must be hell. Mrs Bridgeman isn’t the weeping, wailing type, but that doesn’t mean she’s not on the edge.’