Broken Toys

by Jackson Lear

  “Well, they didn’t know everything about what we got up to,” said Anthony.

  “And you remember how miserable everyone was at school? Curfew, parental escorts everywhere? No one could play out in the street?”

  “Yeah,” said Anthony, feeling the burn of hypocrisy rise within his chest.

  “No parent seemed to trust their kid, even at someone else’s house?”

  “So what does this have to do with your diaries?”

  “Finding the tunnel woman is going to help us find Catherine,” said Josh.

  “Us?”

  “Luxford. The police. ‘Us’ as a community.” Josh flipped through a few pages of the diary and held it open. “Look, you and I both determined that Catherine did not just walk away. We read every article there was about her. We listened to every speech her parents gave and we asked questions. We heard all the rumours about her from her friends and we wrote everything down. She didn’t run away, she didn’t have a mental illness. Someone found her and dragged her away.”

  Anthony looked over his ancient handwriting and saw a circled sentence. “Looks like I agreed it wasn’t Suspect 100.”

  “That’s Toads,” said Josh.

  “It says her abductor needed a car.”

  “Ideally, yes,” said Josh. “Dragging an unconscious girl isn’t easy. I couldn’t even make it from my bedroom to yours with you playing dead.”

  “She wouldn’t have been unconscious for long. A few seconds at most.”

  “Maybe drugs,” said Josh. “And the only way the thirteen year old Toads could have got away with this is if he ate her.”

  Anthony shook his head and felt the tiredness battle it out behind his puffy eyes. “You can’t eat a hundred pound person. I can’t even eat a two pound steak in one sitting.”

  “Okay, good, we’re thinking now, we have the ball rolling. So after all this time, do you think she’s buried in Luxford?”

  Anthony glanced up to the ceiling and wished he had the power to just fall asleep without worrying about an intruder, or his kids walking off, and he wished Josh would just leave him alone and not think about the possibility of two crazed killers walking through Luxford when one was bad enough. “I don’t think Toads could have done it. The police are going through his area right now and they’ll find everything he has. If Catherine is there they’ll find her, but the valley is miles away from the industrial area where she was taken and no thirteen year old is going to be able to drag her all the way through those trees. It’s exhausting work. They won’t find her there.”

  “Then do you think she’s hidden away as an angel in some other tunnel? One close to where she disappeared from?”

  “That’s if she actually went to the industrial area,” said Anthony. “She could have gone out for a cigarette and was kidnapped along the walk.”

  “Right, so what I’m thinking–”

  Anthony raised his hand and stopped Josh. “I appreciate your interest in this, even after all these years, but I can’t do this. Not now. I keep thinking about all the times Toads creeped me out in a nightmare. Over the last day I’ve seen all these people walking by. If they’re alone I think they’re going to break in and try to kill my kids. If they’re in pairs they’re talking about a murderer, right in front of my house, where my kids can hear them. So please, I can’t do this right. Not today.”

  Josh closed the diaries. “No problem.”

  “I’m sorry if I–”

  “No, you have kids, I completely understand.”

  “It’s just–”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Josh. “It’s just a stupid interest that never went away. But if you guys need anything today, tomorrow, whenever, just give me a shout and I’ll be around.”

  “Thanks,” said Anthony. The headache behind his eyes ached even worse now that the sun was blasting the kitchen. He hadn’t stayed awake this long in years. “How’s Hannah holding up with all of this?”

  “She’s fine,” said Josh. “Take it easy. Don’t scare Tom and Sarah. Go easy on them and on Gemma.”

  “I’m trying,” said Anthony.

  55

  Josh

  Twenty years ago, Luxford held eight thousand homes. Now there were thirteen thousand. Josh came home with several A2 maps of the area covering his entire life time. His dining table became a historical workshop as he picked over the urban sprawl that developed over the years. He photocopied the relevant notes and details from his teenage diary, then he set about plotting every possible site of where Catherine Shievers could have been buried. On a separate sheet of tracing paper he highlighted all the areas where Toads might be able to hide.

  The stack of books on the coffee table shifted from espionage fiction to real crime stories related to teenage abductions and murders. What seemed certain was that Catherine knew her attacker. If she didn’t, they wouldn’t have bothered taking the time to hide her as effectively as they had. Therefore, her murderer was a local.

  Someone would have unearthed her if she had been buried in a field that later became a housing site. That brought Josh back to the eight thousand homes to look over from his teenage years. There had certainly been empty houses in the area. Lots of unusual gardens.

  Josh scoured over the online aerial photos and crossed off all of the houses that had gone through major reconstruction to the garden or rear of the property. Either the renovators would have found Catherine or it would now be too difficult to find her if she was buried under all that concrete.

  Josh paced around his lounge. Whoever did it needed privacy. It would take some time to dig and if they took too long then someone would notice their absence on the night Catherine disappeared.

  He headed out to the industrial area on the western side of Luxford. Rows upon rows of warehouses greeted him with names so generic that they offered no insight to what went on behind those walls. Josh peered down the side of the skips to try and figure out how detailed of a search the police did back in the day.

  Catherine’s father would have been over this place every day for years, retracing her steps, and she wasn’t found.

  As simple as that, Josh gave up the industrial area as a lost cause. Better people than he had searched the area and they had all come up empty. He reached the edge of town and turned to face the miles of fields, motorways, train tracks, and urban development. He locked in on the fields in particular.

  If she is buried down there, her killer had to get her there and none of that is easy to walk or drive to. So, the harder it is to get to the less likely he would have gone there.

  And it wasn’t like he could start digging in someone’s field in the hope of finding a dead fifteen year old from twenty years ago.

  He needed someone to help narrow down all of the possibilities.

  “Toads didn’t do it,” puffed Josh, as he jogged along Blyth Street.

  Amanda was beside him, breathing easily. “Why not?”

  “He was twelve or thirteen at the time. Catherine was fifteen. And she was not a waif.”

  “She was hardly fat,” said Amanda.

  “No, but she did play netball. Tall, working towards an athletic body. And hockey, I think. Had no problem knocking people down, on or off the pitch.”

  “Field,” corrected Amanda.

  “Toads, though, was a waif.”

  “It doesn’t rule him out.”

  “Best case scenario for the pre-teen Toads; Catherine was on her own drinking beer. She was waiting for one of her friends to show up only he slept through. Maybe she’s had a joint or two herself. She’s easy going, feeling friendly, and sees this little kid walk by. She calls out, ‘Hey, you’re the one that scared the shit out of Nicky Kalistar, aren’t you?’ The kid stops, they start talking, she asks, ‘Have you ever had a beer, kid?’ She hands hers over, he takes a sip, spikes it with a drug, hands it back, and she guzzles the rest. That’s the only way I can see her going peacefully. The drugs kick in and now she’s all loopy. Toads starts up on so
me sob story. He doesn’t know where he is. He’s lost. He’s scared. He asks if she can walk him home. So, hand in hand, they walk off, and he pushes her down the side of a cliff where she breaks her neck.”

  Amanda glanced over to Josh with a weirded-out stare. “The twig of a kid pushes a towering netballer off a cliff? In Luxford?”

  “What about off a bridge?”

  “More believable.”

  “Of course, it utterly depends on Toads having drugs on him, spiking Catherine’s drink, and then getting the best of her.”

  Amanda and Josh jogged on in silence for a few seconds, until they reached the stone bridge. They both cracked into a laugh as soon as they saw it.

  “Speak of the devil,” said Amanda.

  “Admittedly, we did know there was a bridge along here,” said Josh.

  “But we’re miles away from where she was last seen,” said Amanda.

  “There are a couple of more bridges in town.”

  “It’s a stretch if Toads has drugs on him and happens to find a girl who will take them.”

  “Could happen,” said Josh.

  “Yeah, but I’d put that one at the bottom of the list. What else have you got?”

  Josh felt his lungs start to get the better of him. He was fine with jogging at a leisurely pace, but jogging while holding a conversation wasn’t as easy as he thought it would be. “Maybe she went to see what had happened to her boyfriend. Find out why he didn’t show up.”

  “Better. And the kid just happened to be on the same road, came along and pushed her before she realised.”

  “Or he was the bait,” said Josh. Almost as soon as he said it his attention was lifted away and he slowed from the run.

  Amanda eased back as well. “You tiring out?”

  “A little.” Josh slowed to a walk and held a finger up to his lips as though it would help him concentrate. “Maybe he was bait. Even if it was unintentional.”

  Amanda turned and paced back and forth to keep some kind of momentum going. “How so?”

  Josh’s eyes narrowed towards an exam-like concentration as the road map to Catherine’s potential demise seemed to reveal itself all at once. “We have no idea who Toad’s parents are. And we didn’t see him again for something like twenty years. Say Catherine is walking across this bridge. She sees Toads crying by the side. She asks if he’s lost, Toads’ dad is hiding nearby. He leaps up and hits her across the head with a spade. Or she sees Toads’ dad beating the shit out of his kid. Toads manages to run but Catherine happened to get caught. She saw who his dad was and, like father like son, he’s barely got his shit together upstairs. She tries to run, Toads’ dad runs after her, grabs her, hits her, drags her away. We didn’t see Toads again for decades. Why? Because his dad came to his senses, realised he had just killed a girl, and legged it. With his son, of course. He either buried Catherine or dumped her in the back of a car, grabbed his kid, and moved to a different town. As soon as Toads was old enough he found his way back to Luxford for nostalgia reasons. Hopefully not because of Catherine’s death making him all giddy, but because here was where he was the happiest as a kid.”

  Amanda kept on pacing. “So Toads’ dad killed Catherine?”

  “That’s the only way that Toads could realistically have been involved.”

  “No one has ever seen his dad.”

  “Of course they would have. How often do you blank over homeless people?”

  Amanda pushed her eyebrows together. “I’m from New York.”

  “You’re from Luxford,” said Josh.

  “I see homeless people all the time.”

  “Always with a sign saying, ‘Unemployed. Please help,’ right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But if they’re just walking around like everyone else, in regular clothing, would you pay attention to them? Probably not. Just think how many cars past us this morning. Think of them driving along. How many joggers did they see today, or yesterday, or last week? It all just filters out. We probably saw Toads’ dad a hundred times, we just never made the connection. Anyway, if Toads is involved it’s because he saw what happened to Catherine, not because he did it.”

  Amanda finally stopped pacing, took a couple of deep breaths, and pointed back along the way they had come. “Ready?”

  “Yeah.”

  Amanda glanced over. “So, million dollar question; do you actually think Toads was involved?”

  Josh drew in a long and deep breath. “I hadn’t given it serious thought until I considered his dad being the killer. Otherwise I would have said no. Too young. But Toads disappeared for a long time. Makes sense if his dad packed up and left all of a sudden.”

  “Well, you didn’t see him again because you stopped playing in the streets and parks.

  Josh shook his head with confusion. “Hey?”

  “Up until thirteen or fourteen you’d be exploring, climbing along walls, covering as much territory as possible. As soon as fifteen hits you stop exploring and start hanging out. You pick one spot and that’s where you’ll be until something forces you to find a new spot. Then you went off to university for years, came back, and fell into a routine of going from home to work to the shops and to the same couple of take-away places. And you’re indoors all the time. The only chance you’ll have of seeing a thirty year old Toads is as you’re driving to get chicken and chips. As a kid you’d be going to all the same places that Toads would explore as well. You were bound to bump into him then and bound not to as you got older.”

  “So, do you think Toads left Luxford?” asked Josh.

  “No, but it was a nice theory. Dad coming along, getting his son in on the trade of killing teenage girls. Thanks for that imagery, by the way.”

  “I have my moments. What about Catherine being buried here or abducted and brought somewhere else?”

  “Did you ever see Silence of the Lambs?”

  Both the book and film were on Josh’s coffee table. “She’s trapped down a well in some guy’s basement?”

  “No. Jodie Foster finds a body in the back of a car that’s been in storage for years. That’s the easiest answer. It’s late at night, it starts raining, some asshole is racing down the industrial area as fast as his car can go because all the roads there are straight and deserted. He loses control or Catherine happens to cross the road at the wrong time. Either way, he hits her. He stops, finds a dying girl on the road, and he starts shitting himself. He puts her in the back, hopefully to bring her to the hospital. But he’s lost and not thinking straight. He drives as carefully as he can, watching her in the rear view mirror as she starts to lose consciousness. By now he’s lost beyond all reason and in a full blown panic. Catherine is dead in the back. He can’t risk being seen with her. The one thing he does have working in his favour is a London lock up garage in a dishevelled part of town. So he takes her there, puts her in the trunk, and tries to think of somewhere he can dump her body. Only, the next day he realises that it’s too risky to dump her. Much safer to keep her where she is. One day slips into another, months go by, then years, and in that time he’s left the garage completely alone, terrified of the day when some corporate entity forcibly buys it out from under him in the hope of converting the area into a block of apartments. But it hasn’t happened yet. She’s still there, in the back of the car that killed her, in some lock up garage away from Luxford. Easy. Straight forward. No spiking of Catherine’s drink is necessary.”

  Josh grumbled at the simplicity of the theory. “So it was an accident that got out of hand?”

  “It happens more than you think,” said Amanda. She glanced over her shoulder. She never saw anyone following them, but they were certainly noticed.

  56

  Daniel

  “Turn it off,” their mum said.

  Emily turned and glared. “Muuum.”

  “I said ‘off.’”

  Emily grumbled, shot a quick death-stare at her brother, and turned off the TV.

  “I said there was to be
none of that,” said Diane.

  “It was only a TV program,” said Emily.

  “And it strikes too close to home. It’s enough for one day anyway. Why don’t you go and read a book?”

  Daniel edged upstairs before Emily could exact another round of revenge at him for the lack of TV. He went into incognito mode on his computer and searched to find the truth about what the pair of detectives had talked about while in the morgue. It all focussed on a prostitute who had been found strung up to a tree, covered in animal blood.

  She’d had intercourse just prior to her death, the coroner said. Daniel ran a search to see if that was possible to find out, or if it was only possible in the world of television.

  He didn’t wear a condom, the coroner said. Daniel searched to see if that was true as well.

  If he came in her we’ll be able to find out who he was, the detective said.

  Daniel’s hands trembled over his keyboard, while in the room next door his sister started downloading the episode she was banned from watching.

  57

  Claire

  It was with supreme care that not a single strand of hair was out of place. She went with a simple foundation, the slightest of colour to her lips, and a hint of mascara. There was absolutely no way that anyone was going to know that she was at her lowest.

  For the last few weeks every pair of eyes fell upon her. At first they simply registered that she as another face in the crowd, then came that gentle head tilt to the side as they mentally clicked; You’re Ian Baxter’s mother, aren’t you?

  Everything now had to be done with the lowest risk of being noticed. She had to settle for heading out to the supermarket just before they closed so as to run into as few people as possible. But there was still always someone there, glancing at her, observing her from a distance.