The Toy Taker (44 page)

Sean immediately recognized the unfamiliar look of confusion and disturbance on Canning’s face. ‘You find something?’ he asked, stepping forward.

‘What does this mean?’ Canning replied, letting Sean discover the toy for himself. ‘Is it some sort of ritual gesture?’

Sean’s eyes fell on the toy, the sight of it and the questions it brought making him feel a little lightheaded as he tried to comprehend what it could mean: the small, blue dinosaur tucked neatly, precisely under the boy’s arms as they lay folded across his chest. ‘What are you all about, my friend?’ Sean asked out loud, unconsciously lifting the camera and taking pictures. ‘Why did you do this? Where did the toy come from? Did you give it to the boy after you’d killed him – after you’d suffocated him with your own hands? Were you trying to say sorry to him, like you’re now trying to say sorry to the world?’

‘Maybe he has children of his own?’ Canning offered. ‘After he killed the boy, he felt so guilty he wrapped the body with one of his own children’s toys? As you said, as a gesture of his sorrow – his guilt?’

‘No,’ Sean answered. ‘He doesn’t have any children of his own.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because—’ he began, breaking off as he realized that he didn’t know, at least not in a way he could explain to Canning or anyone else. ‘Wait,’ he suddenly changed tack. ‘There’s something in his hand – his right hand.’ He bent as close as he dared, squinting to better see the edge of something shiny and metallic protruding from the boy’s clenched fist. Sean’s hand began to stretch out towards the shining object, but Canning caught it around the wrist, making Sean’s head snap towards him, a momentary glare of anger in his eyes.

‘Gloves,’ Canning told him. ‘You’re not wearing gloves.’ Sean looked at his unprotected hands and withdrew. ‘I’ll do it,’ Canning continued, taking hold of the boy’s fingers and trying to prise them open as the lifeless muscles and tendons resisted. Canning audibly strained until at last he bent the fingers back far enough to extricate the object from the boy’s palm. ‘Fascinating,’ was all he said as he lifted the tiny metal crucifix towards the bright mortuary lights.

The visit he’d paid to the church that morning flashed in Sean’s mind, and he remembered the words of the young priest:
we’re looking so hard, but we can’t see
. ‘That’s all I need,’ he grumbled.

‘Excuse me?’ Canning queried.

‘That’s all I need,’ Sean repeated. ‘A religious nut running around London abducting kids. The press will bloody love this angle. Keep this on a need-to-know basis,’ he told the pathologist. ‘As in, only you and me.’

‘I understand,’ Canning reassured him. ‘But this sort of behaviour, leaving religious artifacts, personal items with the body … Inspector, I’ve been doing this job long enough to know these are the hallmarks of a serial killer. Yet if I understand you correctly, you believe the perpetrator killed the boy accidentally. It appears your man is becoming something of a contradiction.’

‘Maybe I’m wrong.’ Sean put down the camera, tried to gather his thoughts. ‘Or he’s becoming what you say, but doesn’t know it.’

‘In which case you need to find him and find him quickly. He still has two other children, does he not?’

‘He does,’ Sean confirmed with a sigh and a frown. ‘And there’ll be more – soon.’

‘I can see there’s something else bothering you, Inspector,’ Canning added. ‘Would you like to tell me?’

Sean sighed again, but knew he could speak to Canning more freely than most. ‘The toy,’ he confessed. ‘The crucifix I understand – he placed it in the boy’s hand after he realized he was dead, as an offering, a religious token, something to try and make himself feel better, to dull his own grief and guilt. But the toy, I …’ He stalled, the thought that had seemed so clear only moments ago suddenly drifting away from him. All he could do was wait – if he tried to grab at the thought it could slip between the fingers of his consciousness and be lost for ever. Slowly it drifted back to him. ‘He goes into their houses and he takes the children. They make no sound. They go with him silently – willingly. What’s one way of pacifying a child – what would win a child’s trust in the middle of the night?’

He looked at Canning as if the pathologist might mouth the answer for him, but he just shook his head slowly and with no small degree of concern, so Sean supplied the answer: ‘You take them a gift – a present. Bastard takes them a toy – he took them all a toy. They wake up sleepily, not sure whether they’re dreaming, and the first thing they see isn’t a stranger in their bedroom but a beautiful new toy only inches away from their face. They reach out for it and he lets them take it, lets them begin to trust him before he even has to speak – that’s how he does it. That’s how he can take them so quietly. I should have thought of this earlier.’

‘What if the toy’s not something he brought with him?’ Canning argued. ‘What if he simply took the toy from the child’s bed before waking them.’

Sean considered it, chewing his bottom lip. As plausible as Canning’s suggestion was, his instinct wouldn’t let him accept it. ‘No,’ he eventually said. ‘No, because it could too easily backfire on him. If the child woke and saw a stranger holding his favourite soft toy he might think he was taking it. Instead of building trust it could destroy it. Our man’s a thinker and planner. He wouldn’t risk it. He couldn’t take that chance. He has to have brought the toy with him. But we’ll check back with the parents anyway.’

‘I see,’ Canning murmured. ‘Shall we continue?’

Sean nodded and the pathologist continued to unwrap the blanket as carefully as he could, inch by inch, until it lay hanging underneath the boy like the dead petals from the head of a flower. Canning moved on to the blue dinosaur-print pyjamas and began to unbutton them. He moved the cloth aside as carefully as if the boy was a living, breathing patient, and revealed his tiny, slim chest and abdomen – the skin as pale and soft as milk.

‘No obvious sign of injuries,’ Canning announced, before rolling the body to one side to examine his back, then repeating the process on the other side. ‘No apparent injuries or wounds to the back either.’

Sean watched, knowing they would find nothing, but also knowing they had to look anyway, the sombre, darkening mood of both men tangible.

Next Canning began to remove the boy’s pyjama bottoms, folding each section meticulously to catch any tiny pieces of evidence as they came free from the body. He placed them in a medium-sized brown paper evidence bag that had a transparent cellophane window running down the full length of one side. All clothes were bagged this way: if they were placed in plastic evidence bags any organic evidence on the clothing could turn to mould by the time the item reached the lab. Paper allowed the evidence to breathe – keeping it alive as long as it took to betray its owner.

Canning turned to the victim’s immature genitals and anus. Sean didn’t expect him to find anything, but still he prayed he wouldn’t, looking down at his feet while the pathologist completed his initial examination of the boy’s most intimate places.

‘No obvious signs of sexual assault either,’ Canning announced, immediately qualifying his statement: ‘Although I can’t say with absolute certainty until I examine him more thoroughly.’

‘But it doesn’t look like he was … like he was
touched
in any way?’ Sean asked.

‘No,’ Canning agreed. ‘It doesn’t appear so.’

‘Thank God,’ Sean murmured, then gave a start as his mobile rang. It took him a moment to disentangle it from his inside coat pocket and answer.

‘Guv’nor, it’s DS Noble. It’s my forensic team that’s been examining the scene at 10 Hawtrey Road.’ The voice went quiet while he waited for some recognition. Eventually Sean realized he was talking about the home of the dead boy lying only inches away.

‘Of course,’ he managed to say as if he’d never been in doubt. ‘What d’you have for me?’

‘Not much, but enough. A couple of fibres and a couple of hairs from the boy’s bedroom that are probably the suspect’s. No fingerprints, so I’m thinking he wore gloves. The lab can work the hairs up for DNA. They’ll convict him once we have him, but if he doesn’t have previous convictions then they’re not going to help us find him.’

‘Make sure the lab compare your samples to any from the other two scenes. At least they might be able to confirm we’re only looking for one man.’

‘I’ll make sure it’s done,’ Noble assured him.

‘Let me know if you find anything else,’ Sean told him, ‘anything at all.’ He hung up before Noble could answer.

‘Everything all right?’ Canning asked.

‘No,’ Sean answered, once more looking down on the broken little body. ‘This man’s crossed the line now – broken his last taboo. Next time it’ll be easier for him to kill, and it’ll take less to provoke him. It’s always goes the same way.’

‘I thought you said this was in all likelihood an accident,’ Canning queried.

‘It was,’ Sean explained, ‘but next time won’t be. He takes children from their own homes in the middle of the night. Does that strike you as normal or rational behaviour? No matter how many promises he’s made to himself that he won’t hurt another child, he will – if they try and escape, or they talk back too much, or they don’t meet whatever twisted standards he thinks they should, or when he gets bored of them. He’ll kill again, he won’t be able to stop himself, no matter what he may think.’ The thought of standing in the mortuary a second longer suddenly made Sean feel sick. ‘I need to be somewhere else,’ he told Canning. ‘Call me if anything changes. In fact, call me even if it doesn’t.’ He quickly turned and headed for the exit – Canning’s eyes silently following him all the way until he could see him no more.

Assistant Commissioner Addis sat in the back of an unmarked jet-black police Range Rover furiously tapping away on his private high-spec laptop. He’d soon tired of the cheap rubbish the police had provided him with and had decided the personal expense for something decent was worth it to give him the edge on his competitors. His out-and-about bodyguard sat in the front with his regular driver, neither of whom could stand Addis, but both of whom liked the relatively cushy number that looking after him provided. Most senior officers of his rank would be permanently shadowed by an inspector or chief inspector who would be referred to as his bag-carrier, but Addis worked alone, too organized and efficient to admit he could possibly need a personal aide. He barely needed a secretary, and besides, as far as he was concerned the less people who knew his business the better. The mobile phone that lay on the table next to the laptop began to ring and he answered it without looking, his right hand still frantically typing some new guidelines he’d be expecting the Anti-Terrorist Team to follow without divergence.

‘Robert,’ a familiar and intimidating voice replied. ‘It’s been a while. Just thought I’d give you a ring and see how everything is going.’

‘Everything?’ Addis choked a little. ‘If this is about the conduct of some of our Anti-Terrorist officers overseas, then I can assure you that the situation will be addressed in the very near future.’

‘Who cares if the Anti-Terrorist boys have been getting a little too pally with the Pakistani Intelligence Service? You know as well as I do that torture gets results, and what the public don’t know won’t hurt them. No, my more pressing concern is this Special Investigations Unit of yours.’

‘In particular?’

‘In particular, DI Corrigan. You told me this unit could be relied upon for the occasional bit of good news – good news that would reflect well on the government. But that doesn’t seem to be happening, and now we’ve got the TV and papers all over it in their usual fucking way. Word has it it’s only a matter of time before they start asking the Home Secretary what she thinks about it – maybe even the PM himself, for Christ’s sake. These missing kids aren’t being snatched from teenage single mothers living on some shithole estate in Birmingham, Robert. These families have influence, and the people they work for have even more influence. Their gripes go up the food chain and eventually they reach me, and it’s my job to deal with them. We understand each other, don’t we, Robert?’

Addis cleared his throat before answering. ‘We do.’

‘Excellent,’ the voice told him, then softened into a conciliatory tone: ‘Look, Robert – we in the government all agree that what London needs is a mayor who’s strong on law and order. Free bikes and a decent firework show at New Year’s are all well and good, but they’re hardly vote winners. People want to feel safe in their houses, and they don’t want to be tripping over beggars and vagrants every time they go to a West End theatre. London needs a Giuliani. Your public profile has been much enhanced over the last year or two, Robert, but if this investigation drags on much longer it could be irreparably damaged, along with it any political ambitions you may harbour. I just thought you should know.’

Realizing that the caller had hung up, Addis tossed the phone on to the seat next to him, rubbing his chin pensively.

He’d be damned if Corrigan was going to drag him down with him. It had been a mistake to trust a career detective – he should have given the job to a Bramshill flyer, someone he could control. Who cared if they’d never actually investigated anything more serious than shoplifting, at least he wouldn’t have to worry about having the wool pulled over his eyes at every turn. But he quickly reminded himself why he’d chosen to use Corrigan instead of a flyer – because Corrigan wouldn’t be looking to make a name for himself. He’d get the job done and move on to the next one. A flyer would be looking to take all the credit and steal all the headlines, and he couldn’t have that. All the same, he couldn’t afford to give Corrigan more than another forty-eight hours, if that. If the right man wasn’t in custody by then, he’d have to go.

Sean strode into the main office at the Yard still feeling displaced and nauseous after witnessing the preliminary stages of Samuel Hargrave’s post-mortem. He needed to launch himself back into the investigation to chase the images and memories away.

Having seen him arrive, Donnelly tailed him to his office, waiting until they were inside before speaking.