The Toy Taker (28 page)

‘Can I ask what it’s about?’ the box replied.

‘It’s personal,’ he answered, regretting it immediately, wishing instead he’d told the inquisitive voice it was confidential. He winced at his mistake and waited for a response.

‘I see,’ the voice eventually replied. ‘I’ll just see if she’s available. Wait there a minute please.’ He was about to argue, but the connection went dead.

‘Shit,’ he cursed, hopping from one foot to the other, trying to defend himself against the cold and his growing feeling of awkwardness, sure that he was as conspicuous as he felt standing in the doorway of the art deco monolith. Finally the intercom crackled back into life.

‘Dr Ravenni-Ceron will see you now. We’re on the third floor, room 323. You can take the lift or you can use the stairs.’ The door clicked open and the line went dead. He paused for a second before opening the door and entering, sure his feet would take over and lead him away, but instead they took him inside and up the stairs to the third floor, doubts and anxiety giving way to excitement and anticipation.

When he reached room 323 he was relieved to discover there was no intercom to negotiate, just an unlocked door and a secretary in her early thirties sitting behind a desk in the small, simple reception. She stood as he entered, speaking in a voice he recognized from the intercom, although it was warm and friendly now instead of cold and metallic.

‘Detective Inspector Corrigan, I presume?’ she asked with a smile.

‘Yeah,’ he answered, so eager to be alone with Anna that he almost overtook the secretary as she escorted him the few short steps to the office door.

‘Dr Ravenni-Ceron’s office,’ she announced, stepping aside for him to enter.

‘Thanks,’ Sean managed to say before filling his lungs with air and stepping through the door, which closed softly behind him.

At first he almost didn’t see Anna sitting behind her antique leather-topped desk. The design and style of the office was so close to how he’d imagined it that he felt as if he’d been here many times before, although this was his first visit. The multiple layers of shelves stacked with leather-bound books that he assumed were about psychology and other matters of the mind, art deco lamps and shades to match the building, and even a comfortable leather reclining chair. A deep-red Persian rug covered the oak floor. A voice he hadn’t heard in many months broke his mental meandering.

‘Hello, Sean,’ Anna said, her voice relatively neutral, but with a hint of nervous excitement. ‘Long time no see.’

‘Too long,’ he answered. ‘My fault entirely.’

‘Can I ask what brings you here?’

Sean cleared his throat before speaking again. ‘A new case.’

‘A new case?’

‘Yes.’

‘The one that’s been on the TV and all over the papers – the child abducted from his own home? Sounds like the sort of thing they’d like to have you investigating.’

‘But that happened in Hampstead,’ he challenged her. ‘I cover south-east London, not north-west.’

‘Not any more, I hear,’ she told him. ‘Special Investigations Unit, isn’t it? London-wide?’

He assumed Sally had been speaking out of school during her sessions, but his assumption was wrong.

‘You hear right,’ he admitted, ‘and yes, I’ve got the investigation into the missing boy. Only now there’s a missing girl as well.’

‘Oh,’ Anna replied, surprised and disturbed to hear of a second child being stolen from their family. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘So am I,’ Sean told her sharply, a moment of silence falling between them.

‘Please, take a seat.’ Anna waved him to an armchair facing the desk. ‘So how can I help?’

‘I could do with a second opinion,’ Sean confessed. ‘I can’t work out what’s going on in the mind of whoever’s taking them. Why they’re doing it.’

‘Go on,’ Anna encouraged.

‘We don’t have a body yet, despite the fact he’s now taken another child.’

‘And what does that tell you?’ she asked.

‘It tells me that he hasn’t killed –
yet
.’

‘The news reports said he took the boy from his own home, but there was no mention of how he got in,’ she prompted, even though she already knew the answer. She couldn’t afford to let Sean know that she was already aware of details that hadn’t been released to the public.

‘He used expert lock-picking skills to enter. Then he took the children from their beds in the middle of the night without making a sound or leaving a trace – no evidence of a struggle or drugs being used to subdue the victims. After he left, he locked things up behind him, as if—’

‘As if he didn’t want to leave the remainder of the family vulnerable,’ she finished for him.

‘It’s a possibility,’ Sean admitted, without telling her he’d already considered it and hadn’t yet ruled it out.

‘Uhhm,’ Anna sighed. ‘So when he’s carrying out the abductions he’s highly organized.’

‘I believe so,’ Sean agreed.

‘And most highly organized killers are perversely disorganized when it comes to getting rid of the body.’

‘That’s normal,’ he agreed again.

‘So if the children had indeed been taken by a killer you would be right to expect to have found a body by now …’ Anna continued to think out loud. ‘But if he’s taking them with the intention of abusing them, then perhaps he hasn’t killed them yet.’

‘He would have, by now.’

‘Why?’

‘To get rid of any witnesses,’ Sean answered coldly.

‘Possibly,’ she considered.

‘Definitely,’ he insisted, McKenzie’s face and words imprinted in his mind.

‘Then there’s a simple conclusion,’ Anna told him. ‘They were neither taken by a killer nor by an abuser. They were taken by a possessor.’

‘A
possessor
?’ Sean questioned. ‘I don’t understand,’ he half-lied.

‘Someone who means them no harm, but who wants to possess them, keep them as their own, perhaps?’

‘Like who?’

‘Like … like a woman.’

‘A
woman
?’

‘Yes, one who perhaps sees these children as needing her. She may see herself as their rescuer, not their abuser. Tell me, do the families have other children?’

‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘Why?’

‘Interesting. It could be a sign of her subconscious guilt – she takes a child, but leaves the family with other children, which also explains why she secures the houses when leaving and perhaps how she can get the children from the house without them being scared enough to raise the alarm. Children are inherently less afraid of women than they are men.’

‘No,’ Sean shook his head. ‘A lot of what you’re saying makes sense, but I can’t see a woman picking the locks and entering those houses – I just can’t.’

‘We’re capable of more than you think, Sean,’ Anna told him. ‘But I take your point: house-breaking would be a highly unusual crime for a woman.’ They sat in silence for a while. ‘So perhaps there are two people working together – a man and a woman. She selects the children, possibly at random, but more likely because she knows them somehow, and he takes them for her. A childless couple who have no hope of having their own, perhaps?’

‘That’s interesting,’ Sean told her, but his unexcited eyes told her she wasn’t offering him anything new.

‘No, it’s not,’ she replied. ‘You’d already considered it.’

‘Maybe,’ he admitted with a shrug.

‘Then why don’t you tell me why you’re really here?’

Her question was met only with the piercing blue of his eyes.

‘Can I get you a drink? Tea or coffee, perhaps?’ she asked, needing some respite from Sean’s intensity.

‘No thanks,’ he answered, watching her stand and straighten her charcoal grey pencil skirt, her small, heavy breasts moving slightly under her white blouse.

‘I need a drink of water,’ she told him, walking to the small water-cooler in the corner of her office, standing with her back to him as she took her time filling the plastic cup. She heard the creaking of his chair as he rose, felt the distance between them close as he came to her, standing too close behind her, making her tremble. She pushed herself back into him when she felt his arm curl around her waist, unable to control urges she’d long been pretending to herself she didn’t have.

‘Made you feel alive, didn’t it?’ he whispered into her ear. ‘Being around me and the others – a real-life murder investigation – hardly ever sleeping or eating, your only thought to catch the bastard that took those women. Killed those women. Everything else in your life suddenly seemed trivial and futile.’

‘Maybe,’ she whispered back. ‘It was … it was …’

‘Thrilling,’ he answered for her. ‘It thrilled you. But now everything’s back to normal, just like it used to be. Only it never can be, not for you. You need more now. You always will.’

‘You’re right,’ she admitted. ‘You’re right. I need more.’

He pulled her closer so he could feel her chest rising and falling, the curves of her back pressing against his body as her buttocks fitted into his groin making his testicles curl and tense as his penis began to flush with blood – his arm tightening around her waist as the other slipped around her chest and cupped one breast releasing her sweet warm breath as she sighed and turned to face him. She gripped his face in her hands, pulling his mouth on to hers, biting softly on his lower lip while her right leg rose and curled around his thighs, locking them tighter together. His tongue entered her mouth and she imagined it exploring the place between her legs, imagined him inside her as they moved as one on the floor of her office or across her desk. But without warning her conscience betrayed her and defeated her desire. She untwined her leg and pushed against his chest with both hands, pulling her lips, swollen with passion, away from his searching mouth. ‘No,’ she told him. ‘This is wrong. We can’t do this.’

‘Yes we can,’ he argued, still searching for her warm breath.

‘We’re both married, Sean,’ she reminded him. ‘We can’t do this. It’s wrong.’

He detected the change in her voice – in her breathing − and knew the passion had passed. ‘Christ,’ he told her. ‘Can’t we just do something we want, instead of what people expect of us for once? Nobody needs to know.’

‘We’ll know,’ she told him. ‘We’ll know, Sean.’ She pushed him harder, increasing the distance between them until it was obvious their brief affair was already over, although their hands still rested gently on each other. ‘I want to, but I won’t,’ she continued. ‘We could do this and I’d be fine. I could go home tonight and I’d be fine. I’d wake up in the morning and I’d be fine. But you wouldn’t be, Sean – you wouldn’t be fine.’

‘You don’t know me as well as you think you do,’ he argued.

‘I know you well enough.’

‘Is that your professional opinion or your personal one?’

‘Both,’ she told him, any trace of passion gone from her voice. ‘If we were to do this it would destroy you, Sean, and everything you are.’ He looked at her blankly. ‘Don’t you understand? It’s your wife and family that anchor you. Without them you’d be lost, drifting without a purpose or belief. You betray them, you betray yourself and you’d never recover. Don’t cross a line that you can never come back from.’

Finally he untangled himself and stepped away, her words mingling with something he remembered McKenzie saying:
Once you’ve crossed that line, there’s no turning back – not for anybody. Don’t cross a line that you can never come back from
. Thoughts of Kate and his daughters rushed into his aching mind – the family that was growing up without him, becoming little more than strangers to him. He felt a dizzy and searched for a chair to sit in.

‘Sean?’ Anna asked. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes,’ he managed to lie. ‘I’ll be fine.’

Anna studied him for a moment in silence before speaking. ‘I don’t think you really wanted this to happen, no matter how much I did.’

‘Then you’d be wrong.’

‘Would I? This isn’t about me, Sean. We both know it. It’s as if you’re trying to be something you’re not. Why?’ He said nothing. ‘Is it something to do with the new case? Trying to get the scent back by putting yourself on the edge, by risking everything that’s important to you?’ Still he didn’t answer. ‘It is, isn’t it? That’s why you’re here.’

‘I’m getting nowhere with this investigation,’ he finally admitted. ‘I can’t work out his motivation. Can’t get inside his head.’

‘Sounds as if you already have,’ she contradicted him. ‘You could very well be right: maybe this one isn’t doing it to torture and kill. Something else, perhaps?’

‘Yeah, but what?’

‘As we were discussing before …’ They exchanged an awkward glance. ‘The abductor could be working with someone – a male and female working together to take the children – to take them and keep them as their own. To love them.’

‘I’d considered it,’ Sean told her.

‘But?’

‘But how could they ever hope to get away with it – raising abducted children as their own?’

‘You’re assuming they’re rational.’

‘One delusional person acting alone I can consider, but two fantasists sharing the same obsession – an obsession as unusual as this? I don’t think so.’

Anna considered him for a minute, surprised at how dulled his instincts appeared to be. ‘I agree,’ she told him, making him look her in the eye. ‘But in a case like this I would expect to find one delusional and one rational person. The rational person no doubt knows exactly what they’re doing and that ultimately it’s doomed to failure, but they do it anyway out of a need to please or even appease the delusional one. A husband trying to satisfy a wife; a lover trying to please a more dominant partner … It could even be a dynamic between siblings or some other type of family relationship – a mother and son?’

‘Maybe,’ Sean half agreed, stretching and rubbing the back of his neck. ‘But one thing I’m sure of is that our suspect knew both families. We’ll keep cross-referencing names until we get a hit, and when we do I’ll have my prime suspect. Then they can tell us
why
themselves.’

‘Good luck,’ Anna told him as he stood to leave.

‘Thanks,’ he answered. ‘I’ve got a feeling I’m going to need it. And I’m sorry if I … if I did anything to make you feel … uncomfortable. I wouldn’t want you to ever feel that way around me.’