LITMIR.BIZ

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mean, have you searched the house properly yet? I know how you police do things – slow and steady, step by step, always afraid of missing something.’

      ‘It’s being done as we speak,’ Sean told him bluntly. ‘But I’m sure the boy is missing.’

      ‘Then maybe his parents did him in and got rid of the body before they called you lot, knowing you’d come after someone like me to blame for it.’

      ‘Is that how you see yourself – as a victim?’

      McKenzie ignored him and shrugged his shoulders, the thin smile still fixed on his face. ‘Or you’re right. Someone went into the house and took him – took him away right under your nose.’

      ‘Right under my nose?’ Sean asked.

      ‘You’re a policeman, aren’t you? You’re supposed to stop things like this from happening.’

      Was that McKenzie’s motivation – some kind of twisted intellectual vanity? A misguided sense of needing revenge on the police and justice system for all that had happened to him? Take the boy to prove he could get away with murder? ‘I suppose so,’ Sean played along, ‘but whoever took the boy was obviously extremely smart. They got in and out without leaving a single piece of evidence.’ McKenzie’s smile grew a little wider as his eyes grew narrower. ‘Is that why someone took the boy – to show us how clever they are?’

      ‘Maybe.’

      ‘And is that someone you?’

      ‘Ha,’ McKenzie laughed, ‘you’ll have to do better than that.’

      ‘This is not a game, Mark. Do you know what your life will be like if anything happens to the boy? Nowhere will be safe for you ever again.’

      ‘Is that a threat?’ McKenzie pushed back, making his solicitor look up like a teacher surveying a class of trouble-makers.

      ‘No,’ Sean answered. ‘It’s a warning.’

      ‘Don’t patronize me. I know what it’s like to survive behind bars once they call you a sex offender. You bastards have put me away before, remember? But I survived all right, and I will again if I have to.’

      ‘But this time it’ll be child-abduction,’ Sean warned him. ‘You’ll be the scalp everyone’s looking to take.’

      ‘Only if you can prove it,’ McKenzie mocked, stopping Sean dead for a while.

      ‘OK,’ Sean continued after a few seconds, ‘let’s move on to something I can prove, and maybe we’ll come back to the missing boy. Earlier today when you were arrested in your flat there was something on your laptop – care to tell me what it was?’

      ‘You know what it was. But I told you – I just bought it second-hand. The stuff you saw was already on it.’

      ‘Come on, Mark,’ Sean gently encouraged, ‘we’ve already had a look at it and it’s clear the obscene images – the obscene images of children, Mark − were only downloaded seconds before we entered your flat. And seeing as how you were the only person there, it kind of means you had to be the one who downloaded them – doesn’t it?’

      ‘Must have been a glitch, or maybe someone downloaded it remotely from somewhere else.’

      ‘On to your laptop?’

      ‘It’s possible.’

      ‘Not with your previous it’s not,’ Sean told him. ‘Are you aware of Bad Character Evidence? Have you discussed it with your solicitor?’ McKenzie shrugged while Jackson briefly looked up to shake her head. ‘It means if you rely on a story like that then we can tell the jury all about your previous convictions for downloading other, similar pornography, not to mention your convictions for sexually assaulting children. I really don’t think that’s going to help your cause.’

      ‘You can’t prove anything.’

      ‘By the time the specialists at our computer laboratory have examined that laptop, I’ll be able to prove plenty.’

      ‘If you say so.’

      ‘You’re going back inside, Mark.’

      ‘I don’t think so.’

      McKenzie’s misplaced confidence was beginning to irritate him. ‘Well at least we’ve established one thing – that you’re a liar. A liar who, even when faced with the truth, still can’t be honest.’ McKenzie squirmed a little in his chair. ‘Everybody in this room knows you downloaded the child pornography yourself and everybody here knows you took the boy.’ Sally and Jackson now also shuffled uncomfortably in their chairs.

      ‘Like I said,’ McKenzie goaded him, ‘you can’t prove anything and you can’t save the boy. You’re too late.’

      ‘What do you mean?’ Sean asked, as calmly as he could. ‘What do you mean, I’m too late?’

      ‘That’s for me to know and you to find out.’

      ‘If you know something, you need to tell me.’

      McKenzie’s foot tapped fast and repeatedly as his excitement grew. ‘I don’t have to tell you anything.’

      Sean’s heart burnt with anger at McKenzie and fear for the missing boy, but he wouldn’t play McKenzie’s game any more – it was too easy for him to come up with sound-bite answers that might mean something or nothing. ‘Did it feel good?’ he began, ‘being alone in the street in the middle of the night? Quiet and cold, nothing but the sound of the leaves in the wind.’ McKenzie stopped tapping his foot and looked Sean in the eyes for almost the first time. ‘You’re good with locks, but it still must have taken a while to get the door open – were you scared someone would hear or see you, kneeling outside by the front door? It must have been difficult, working with gloves on, using those fine, small tools, but you had to wear them, because it was cold that night and you needed to stop your fingers from going numb, didn’t you?’ McKenzie squinted and frowned, his thin smile all but gone. ‘And when you finally stepped inside the house, the warmth hitting you in the face, the smell of the family must have been almost more than you could bear – did it make you feel dizzy, like you were having a dream?’

      ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ McKenzie interrupted.

      ‘What did it feel like, Mark, climbing those stairs towards the boy’s room – walking past his mother’s bedroom while she slept – knowing you were going to take her baby?’ Jackson glanced at him, her face betraying that she had children herself, no matter how grown-up they may be now – her mother’s instinct stopping her from intervening even when she should. ‘Did it make you feel special, Mark? Special like you never feel in everyday life? Did it make you feel powerful?’

      ‘Guessing, guessing, guessing,’ McKenzie hissed. ‘All you’re doing is guessing.’

      ‘But why didn’t you touch the mother? Is it because you’re a coward? Because you were afraid of her – afraid to rape a grown woman in case she fought back?’

      ‘This is going too far, Inspector,’ Jackson finally interjected.

      ‘Which is why it has to be children for you, doesn’t it?’ Sean ignored her, his voice louder than before. ‘But why not the little girl? Is it only little boys that do it for you, Mark?’

      ‘I think that’s enough, Inspector,’ Jackson insisted, her voice matching his until McKenzie spoke over the top of both of them.

      ‘You think you’re so clever – the police,’ he spat at them. ‘Fuck the police. I have the power here – no one else. I say what happens. We play by my rules – no one else’s.’

      ‘You have the power, Mark? Your rules? You seem to be forgetting something.’

      ‘Yeah? And what would that be?

      ‘That we’ve

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