Free The Child Taker & Slow Burn by Conrad Jones Page A

his own sexual desires but the twins were too valuable to spoil. It was difficult but he resisted the temptation. He didn’t class himself as a real paedophile because it wasn’t only prepubescent children that he liked to abuse. He wasn’t fussy who he abused: men, women or children were all the same to him. As long as they were thoroughly unhappy about what he was doing to them then he was sexually satisfied. It was ironic that he frowned upon real paedophiles as he saw them as being somehow more perverted than he was. At the end of the day, what they did with the children once he was paid was their own business. The pictures would fuel their interest further and he scanned them from the camera into his laptop, and then saved them onto a memory stick. He needed to go to a site with public internet connection facilities to send them, that way no one could trace where the upload had come from if the police discovered them online. It was forty-eight hours since the twins went missing and the newspapers and television were full of little else. Police investigations into any associated activity online would be intense and he would have to be careful.
    The child taker slipped the memory stick into his pocket and slipped the laptop under his arm. He turned off the portable television. A small lamp radiated the only light in the caravan and created long shadows in the confined space. He walked from the U-shaped seating area into a small kitchenette. The curtains were closely drawn, which gave the caravan a claustrophobic feel. There was a permanent smell of must and damp which permeated the mobile dwelling. No matter how many windows he opened it always seemed to be there, lingering. He flicked off the lamp and walked towards the bedroom. The caravan vibrated in time with his footsteps. He opened the bedroom door an inch and peeped inside. The twins were sleeping like spoons in their sleeping bag. Zak had his arm across his sister, protecting her while she slept. A pink mobile gyrated above them, playing a lullaby that he didn’t recognise as it turned. The mobile had a subtle nightlight beneath it, which cast the room a pink colour. Under different circumstances it was a peaceful scene, but the twins were blissfully unaware of the terrible evil that hung over them.
    The warm glow of the nightlight and the dulcet tones of the lullaby made him envious. He tried to replicate his ideal boudoir for the children he kept; somewhere that he would have liked to sleep, peaceful and safe. His own memories of childhood were nowhere near as comfortable as the scene he was looking at now. The dormitory that he shared with nineteen other boys was cold and dark and there were no lullabies playing. The only sound he remembered at night was the sobbing of his companions and the desperate cries of whichever poor boy Father Paul chose to discipline. He remembered the sound of those tormented boys vividly. It was their cries which twisted his mind irreparably. Hearing someone else suffering meant that he was safe. Father Paul would not hurt him while he was hurting another. Somewhere along the line while growing up the lessons of his abusive childhood mutated and made him the man he was today.  He watched the children sleeping and a tear ran down his face. His tears were not for them. He didn’t care about them. He cried for himself. Jack closed the door gently and locked it with a key. He opened the caravan door and stepped outside into the night. The sky was visible in places, stars twinkling briefly before puffy black clouds concealed them again.
    There was a fast food restaurant on the outskirts of Warrington, the nearest town, which provided free Wi-Fi for its customers. It would be the ideal place to upload the pictures for his potential customers to view. His buyer had offered twenty- five thousand Euros for each twin and a ten thousand euro bonus if they were mixed sex. With the children in his possession and the pictures online he could