The Toy Taker. Luke Delaney

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      Sean staggered along the seventh-floor corridor carrying a brown cardboard box that was heavy enough to make him sweat. The heating at the Yard was turned up high to please the ageing computers housed within. He checked the doors as he passed them – store rooms, empty rooms; occasionally a room with no sign, just a number and a few wary-looking people inside, silently raising their heads from their desks as he passed, disturbing their expectations of another day without change. He didn’t bother to introduce himself but just kept walking down the unpleasantly narrow corridor that was no different to all the other corridors at New Scotland Yard, with the same polystyrene ceiling tiles and walls no thicker than plasterboard, all painted a shade of light brown that blended into the worn, slightly darker brown carpet. ‘At least the floors don’t squeak,’ he whispered to himself, remembering the awful rubber floors back at Peckham as he arrived at Room 714 and its closed door.

      He half-expected the door to be locked in a final gesture of defiance from the now disbanded Arts and Antiques Squad – a show of two fingers to Assistant Commissioner Addis, who Sean ironically always pictured living in a house surrounded by arts and antiques. Maybe one day Addis would get burgled and have to hastily re-form the squad in an effort to recover his own stolen treasures.

      Sean balanced the heavy box on his raised thigh and tried the door handle, which to his surprise turned and opened, the door itself swinging aside in response to a good kick, allowing him to enter his new home from home.

      Sean peered inside as best he could before stepping over the threshold. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he exclaimed as he walked deeper into the office, which was about half the size of the one they’d just left and looked like a hand-grenade had gone off in it. Clearly the Arts and Antiques boys and girls had been moved out in a hurry, leaving very little but rubbish and broken computers behind. He congratulated himself on the decision to tell his own team to ransack the Peckham office as part of the move. He dumped the box on an abandoned desk and crossed the office to the still-closed blinds – cheap, grey plastic venetians. He tugged the string, expecting the blind to neatly, if noisily, roll up to the ceiling, but the entire thing came crashing to the floor, the reverberating sound appearing to go on for ever as it bounced back and forth off the empty walls. Sean stood frozen, his face a grimace, long after the sound had faded. He turned back towards the door, anticipating a flurry of concerned people coming to investigate, but no one came, although he thought he heard laughter from further down the hallway. He moved along the line of blinds and gingerly pulled the strings until all were open and he was able to look down on the streets of St James’s Park below, the traffic little more than a distant murmur.

      Turning his back on the windows, he surveyed the office in the daylight and didn’t like what he saw any better than before. It was going to be a real squeeze and arguments would abound as to who was entitled to a desk of their own, but at least there were two offices at one end of the main room, partitioned off with the usual polystyrene boards and sheets of Perspex, all held together by strips of aluminium. He made his way to the larger office and stepped inside, deciding it was about as big as his last one. He decided he’d give it to Sally and Donnelly to share while he took the smaller one. At the very least it might placate the unhappy Donnelly.

      Leaving the office, he retrieved the heavy cardboard box that contained his most precious policing tools and entered the smaller office, dumping the box on the standard-sized desk that would soon be covered in keyboards, computer screens, phones and files. Under the desk he found the usual cheap three-drawer cabinet and miraculously the previous owner had left the keys in the top lock. Only someone leaving the force for good would abandon such a prized possession. Sean felt a twang of jealousy as he imagined the previous owner skipping out of the office after their last day at work, knowing they would never be returning. He shook the thought away and looked around for a chair, finding a swivel one pushed into the corner of the room, foam peeking from the rip in the seat cover. Never mind – it would have to do.

      Before sitting he began to unpack the contents of the box – the few personal things first, placed on top of everything else where they were least likely to be damaged: a photograph of his wife, Kate, and of his smiling daughters, Mandy and Louise, and finally a small silver cross on a thin silver chain, given to him by his mother when he was just a boy. She’d told him it would protect him. It hadn’t, but still he’d kept it without knowing why. He hung it over the corner of the frame that held Kate’s picture and remembered being dragged to church as a child, never to return as an adult, despite his mother’s frequent encouragement.

      He continued to unpack his things: his Detective’s Training Course Manual – otherwise known as The Bible, a copy of Butterworths Criminal Law and the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, old files kept for reference, СКАЧАТЬ