The Present: The must-read Christmas Crime of the year!

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Copyright © D S Devlin 2017

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Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

D S Devlin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780008272760

Ebook Edition © December 2017 ISBN: 9780008272746

Version: 2017-12-04

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

About the Author

Keep Reading …

About the Publisher

Prologue

The van arrived in the dark and silent hours before the dawn. It came slowly, crawling at a snail’s pace, its headlights off, its engine making barely a whisper. As it passed from one street to the next, its blacked-out windows stared like the unblinking eyes of a doll at the suburban houses on either side, at the neat driveways and trimmed hedges with their sprinkling of early December frost, at the fairy lights and decorated trees and plastic snowmen adorning the well-kept gardens.

Without indicating, the van turned slowly into Beechcroft Avenue, then into Hazelwood Road, then into Sycamore Drive, until finally it came inching along Elm Crescent. Here, at last, it stopped, pulling up against the kerb outside number 19.

19 Elm Crescent.

An unremarkable address in an unremarkable street in an unremarkable London suburb. But within the next twenty-four hours, that address would be known all over the country, as would the names of the young couple who lived there.

Ben and Sharon Steiner.

The black van sat outside number 19, its engine idling.

Then, with a sigh, the engine died.

Silence.

Stillness.

A minute passed.

Without a sound, a black figure slipped from the van and passed like a shadow along the drive of number 19. Effortlessly, expertly, carrying out a plan that had been well prepared in advance, the figure ducked around the side of the house. There was a momentary glint of light as a sharp-edged cutting tool was carefully scored across a window pane. Then a circle of glass was prised away, a black-gloved hand reached inside to unlatch the lock, and two heartbeats later the black figure was inside the house.

The intruder inched through the darkness of the living room, past the decorated tree, past the array of early Christmas cards on the mantelpiece, past the framed photograph of Ben and Sharon on their wedding day, smiling blissfully, revelling in their big day, and revelling too in the start of what was sure to be a long and joyful life together. Whatever the future had in store for them, it would be wonderful. Wonderful.

Reaching the hallway, the black figure stopped at the foot of the staircase and glared silently up towards the first-floor landing and the closed bedroom door just visible there.

The intruder paused.

A gloved hand clutched the wooden handle of a hatchet.

From behind the blank face of a balaclava came slow, regular breathing.

The breathing got faster. Faster, and more guttural, more animal-like.

A thick gobbet of saliva fell against the ragged mouth hole of the balaclava and soaked into the black material.

And then, suddenly, as if reacting to a starting pistol no one else could hear, the intruder charged forward, pounding up the stairs at full speed, taking them two at a time, careless of the racket made by heavy boots on the wooden treads.

It was that thundering of boots on the stairs that awoke Ben Steiner, bringing him suddenly bolt upright in bed.

And it was the crash of the bedroom door flying open that awoke Sharon Steiner, bringing her as suddenly bolt upright, as wide-eyed and terrified as her husband.

The black figure was on them before they had a chance, pounding across the bedroom in three huge strides, looming over them, raising the hatchet and bringing it down with sickening force. The axe blade embedded itself into Ben Steiner’s rib cage and jammed there so firmly that when Ben jerked and convulsed from the bed, he took the hatchet with him. It remained jutting from his chest even as he sprawled onto the floor, drumming and thrashing amid a dark torrent of blood.

Sharon Steiner opened her mouth to scream, but the black-gloved hand struck her like a hammer – once, twice, three times, then again – silencing her.

The intruder did not want her to scream.

Not tonight. Not here.

The screaming was all to come later, in the place that had been prepared for her.

And she would not be screaming alone.

Chapter 1

‘I want to find her, Guv,’ Anna Vaughan said firmly. ‘I want to find her while she’s still alive – and I want to find the bastard who took her.’

Anna was in her editor’s office – if this cramped and chaotic room strewn with papers and files, unwashed coffee cups and overflowing rubbish bins, battered laptops and tangled computer wires could be called anything as grand as an ‘office’. But it served its purpose. It was from here – five floors up in a ramshackle building tucked away in London’s Soho district – that the investigative digital newspaper After-Dark was run. The editor – known to everyone as The Guv - was incapable of cleaning her desk or sorting out clutter, but she damn well knew how to get stories online – good stories, exclusive stories. In the three years Anna had worked here as a journalist, After-Dark had exposed corporate corruption in the Square Mile solved cold murder cases, brought down two serving members of Parliament by exposing their sordid pasts, uncovered terrorist cells and paedophile rings and people traffickers, and more besides. The Guv, and most of the journalists who worked for her, had been threatened, intimidated, even attacked. But they had never been silenced. After-Dark continued to speak up, speak out, speak the truth about the darkest and vilest corners of society.

‘You think Sharon Steiner is still alive?’ the Guv asked, glaring fiercely from behind the heaps of chaos on her desk.

‘Yes, I think she’s alive. I think Santa took her, and he never kills his female victims until Christmas Day. Look.’ And Anna held out a sheaf of papers, her research into the serial killer the police had nicknamed Santa. ‘Twelve years ago, first week of December, Kelly Nicholson and her husband Ross are attacked in their bed while sleeping. Ross is killed, Kelly is abducted, the police make no progress, and Kelly turns up dead just before New Year. Two years later, exactly the same pattern with Patricia and Michael Reading. Then again two years after that with Laura and Daniel Sayles. Then again, and again, and always the same pattern – a young couple attacked in their bed in early December, the husband killed, the wife abducted, the police floundering, and the wife’s body left out to be discovered by the New Year. And every time the pathologist’s report conclusively states that the female victim was killed no sooner than Christmas Day. The Christmas Day killer. That’s why they called him Santa.’

‘You’ve certainly been doing your homework.’

‘If it’s Santa who’s taken Sharon Steiner, then he’ll keep her alive until the twenty-fifth. And that means there’s a chance I can find her and save her.’

‘Fifteen days,’ the Guv said. ‘You think you can manage it in fifteen days?’

‘I don’t have any choice. It’s Santa sets the time limit, not me. Somebody has to find Steiner, Guv. CID are getting nowhere. No clues, no leads, no suspects. They’re incompetent. I’ve got sources inside the police tipping me off about how hopeless CID is. They’re the Keystone Kops. Now, the DI in charge of the Steiner case is holding a press conference this afternoon. It’s the perfect opportunity for me to confront him face to face with what this whistleblower inside the police has been telling me. It’ll really put a rocket up him, maybe even shake him and his department up enough to start doing their jobs properly. Then, when I’ve woken CID up, I’ll set out to pick up Sharon Steiner’s trail for myself, track her down, and find her.’

‘Whatever’s left of her.’

‘Her and the psycho who took her. If CID can’t manage it, I will.’

The Guv shrugged and nodded: ‘Well, I can’t deny you earned your stripes with this sort of thing. You did an amazing job last summer covering the Underwood story.’

The Underwood story. A missing boy, a stalled police investigation going nowhere, and Anna Vaughan right there in the middle of it, finding little Josh Underwood alive, revealing his father as the abductor, and deeply embarrassing CID by obliging an investigative journalist to do their job for them. It had all made great copy for After-Dark and boosted Anna’s reputation as a reporter who really got things done – but it had also soured relations between her and the police. Those relations were not destined to become any more cordial, not after she publicly confronted them with the insider information she had received from her anonymous whistleblower inside the police.

‘You know I’m the right person for this story, Guv,’ Anna insisted.

‘This Steiner business is a far cry from the Underwood case,’ the Guv warned her. ‘It’s far more violent, far more dangerous.’

‘All the more reason to find that missing girl as soon as possible. I know I can do it, Guv. I know I can get a result.’

The Guv eyed her keenly for a moment, then said: ‘You’re a first-rate hack, no doubt about it. And you pulled a blinder with the Underwood story. But nobody gets it right all the time. There are no guarantees, God knows not in this business, Anna.’

‘I know that, Guv.’

‘And you’ve rattled CID’s cage once already this year. You won’t find a warm welcome there if you go waltzing in shouting the odds about them yet again.’

‘I’m not looking for a warm welcome, I’m looking for Sharon Steiner and the man who took her. That’s all that matters.’

‘Possibly,’ the Guv said, almost to herself. Then she lit up a cigarette – no law could be passed that was ever going to stop her from bloody smoking in her own bloody office – she drew deeply on it, exhaled thoughtfully, and said: ‘Well – you’d better jump to it, then.’

But just as Anna was striding out the door, the Guv called to her: ‘But don’t get cocky, Anna. Remember Miles. Remember what happened to him.’

Anna paused, thought for a moment, then replied: ‘I remember Miles, Guv. And I take your point. I’ll be careful.’

And with that, she strode away, heading down the interminable staircase that always reeked of cabbage, making for the filthy streets of Soho far below.

As she drove through the congested London traffic making her way to the police press conference, the Guv’s words kept playing through her mind:

‘Remember Miles. Remember what happened to him.’

Miles Carter.

She could picture him very clearly, the way he had been five years ago when she’d first started at After-Dark. With his rumpled jacket and chaotic mop of dark hair and his big, wide, beaming face that kept creasing up into an irrepressible grin, she had instantly warmed to the older and more experienced journalist. And he had warmed to her, too, taking her under his wing. Through a combination of encouragement, criticism, teasing and lavish praise, Miles had given her as comprehensive a crash course into journalism as she could have hoped for. Anna had even started to suspect that their working relationship might blossom into something more personal. There had certainly been a hint of chemistry between them.

And then it all changed. Suddenly. Abruptly. Horribly.

About six months after Anna had started working at After-Dark, Miles had embarked upon an extensive investigation into cold cases stashed away in the CID murder files. He said very little to Anna about the details of his research, but from time to time he confided in her about the grimness of his work, the sadness that weighed down on him when he contemplated just how many innocent lives had been snuffed out over the years and without the killers responsible being brought to justice.

‘I’ve started to feel I owe these victims something,’ he said once to Anna. ‘It doesn’t feel like investigative journalism any more, it feels more like a moral obligation. Where CID have thrown in the towel, I feel it’s my job to pick it up again, to reopen the cases, to see that these victims receive at least some sort of justice.’

He began making contact with dark and shadowy people deep in the underworld, people who could furnish him with clues and leads with which to track down old killers.

And then – something happened. Something between Miles and a man he had gone to meet. Miles disappeared. It was as if he had vanished from the face of the earth. No trace of him. No word from him.

And then, two weeks later, the police had come to the After-Dark offices to say that they’d found him. Miles had been discovered roaming the streets of the suburbs, half-starved, dishevelled, mistreated, and barely coherent. During the slow period of his convalescence, he would tell nobody where he had been or what had happened to him. He declined to give a statement to the police. He refused to reveal anything to the Guv. He would not even divulge anything to Anna, though she would spend hours at his bedside in the hospital and then later visit him at the rambling Hampstead townhouse he had inherited from his mother and where he lived alone.

Physically, Miles recovered. But, psychologically, he remained fragile, too much so to return to work at After-Dark. Anna would visit him and was always shocked at how vulnerable he continued to appear, how anxious he was at the most innocuous sounds in the street outside, how reluctant he was for her to leave him alone again when it was time for her to go.

From time to time she would ask him gently, ‘Miles – what happened to you?’

Only once did he ever break his silence about the matter. Looking at her intensely, forcing a sad smile, he had said, ‘I got too close.’

‘Too close to what, Miles?’

‘I got too close,’ he had repeated softly. ‘And I learnt my lesson.’

And that was all he ever said about his nightmare.

It had been a salutary lesson to all the team working at After-Dark. They all of them diced with danger in the course of their investigations. Any one of them could end up like poor Miles Carter – broken, traumatised, or worse. If Anna got too close to the Santa killer, and if she was careless, and if she took one wrong step and put herself in excessive danger, then …

Pushing her fears out of her mind as best she could, she pulled into the car park of the police station where CID was holding its press conference. Parking up, she took a moment to check her reflection in the rear-view mirror, examining her oval face, her keen eyes, her strong nose with its slight Roman arch, the generous mouth, the blonde hair scraped back and held in a messy bundle behind her head.

‘You won’t end up like Miles,’ she told her reflection. She spoke firmly, with conviction. But all the same, there was still a hint of fear in those reflected eyes looking back at her.

Anna headed into the police station and was directed to a cramped, drab room which was to house the press conference. There were no seats provided, so she jostled her way through the press scrum, getting as near to the podium as she could manage, fighting to keep her ground until the conference began.

Waiting for things to start, she examined the police handout she had been given, but there was nothing on it that she wasn’t already familiar with. Dominating the handout was the photo of Ben and Sharon Steiner on their wedding day, beaming into the camera without a care in the world. The whole country knew that photo by now; it had appeared in every newspaper and flashed up time and again on the news.

But despite the familiarity, the picture still chilled Anna’s blood. The innocence in the faces of that couple was painful to behold. In that joyful moment when they’d posed together in the sunshine, they’d had no idea – not even an inkling – of the agony and horror that would suddenly descend upon their lives without warning, of the fact that one would disappear overnight and the other would be left dead in a pool of blood.

A door opened suddenly and a man in a dark suit strode up onto the podium. He was tall, well built, with dark hair and angular, very serious features. His keen, rather piercing eyes surveyed the room as if trying to pick out an individual face from the crowd. When that intense stare fell upon Anna he seemed to pause and scrutinise her with particular interest, or maybe even hostility. Did he recognise her as the hack who had humiliated CID the previous summer on account of the Underwood case?

Anna refused to be intimidated. She held his stare, unblinking, for what felt like minutes but could only have been a heartbeat or two – and then the man turned his attention elsewhere, checked his notes, tapped the microphone, and addressed the room:

‘Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for attending this press conference. My name is DI Jim Townsend of Middlesex CID, B Division, and, as I’m sure you are aware, I am the officer charged with heading the investigation into the recent disappearance of Ben and Sharon Steiner. Now, before I update you as regards the current state of the investigation, I feel it necessary to address certain criticisms and accusations which some amongst you have made against CID in recent months in relation to the abduction of Josh Underwood.’

And now he surely shot a cold glance at Anna.

‘Our professionalism and integrity was called into question on account of that case,’ DI Townsend went on. ‘I have no intention of rebutting those accusations point by point so I will restrict myself to saying simply this: CID is, and always will be, dedicated to each and every task assigned to it. In the current case, myself and my investigative team are totally committed to discovering the whereabouts of Sharon Steiner, and, as far as is humanly possible, returning her safely to her family and loved ones. We are no less committed to apprehending whoever was responsible for the brutal murder of Sharon’s husband Ben. Our investigation is being carried out with rigour, dedication, and with the utmost professionalism. Any and all accusations to the contrary are unfounded and unjustified.’

‘DI Townsend, why have the forensics samples taken at the crime scene not been properly analysed yet?’ Anna called out.

The other journalists packing the room poised themselves expectantly for an answer.

Townsend turned his cold stare back towards Anna and said: ‘I am not at liberty to discuss forensics reports publicly at the current time.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because such information may prejudice the ongoing investigation.’

‘Assuming you had such information,’ Anna said boldly. ‘Detective Inspector Townsend, I have a source inside Middlesex CID who has informed me that the forensics samples taken from the crime scene were contaminated due to mishandling by an inexperienced forensics team.’

‘Untrue,’ Townsend said bluntly.

‘And I have also been informed that CCTV footage from security cameras in the vicinity of 19 Elm Crescent – footage which almost certainly would have contained images of whoever attacked and abducted the Steiners – was not seized as evidence and has since been erased.’

‘Untrue,’ Townsend repeated, an edge of anger creeping into his voice.

‘And what’s more, Detective Inspector, that same source revealed to me that basic investigational procedures were not followed by you and your officers when you first arrived at the crime scene …’

‘Untrue.’

‘… resulting in evidence gained at that time being declared inadmissible in any subsequent trial.’

‘All untrue.’

‘And that, on account of budgetary restrictions, lack of manpower, and even shortage of available computers in CID, the investigation has in reality been postponed, or at the very least seriously curtailed pending financial review.’

‘Excuse me, are you who I think you are?’ Townsend spoke in a low, hard voice, glaring at her.

‘Anna Vaughan, After-Dark.’

Townsend nodded to himself, narrowed his eyes, and said: ‘I might advise you, Ms Vaughan, that your talents and capabilities could for once be put to better use than vilifying me and my department.’

‘And I might advise you, Detective Inspector Townsend, that I am merely making public the information that has been passed to me by a whistleblower inside your own department.’

‘Not so, Ms Vaughan.’

‘You’re accusing me of lying?’

‘I am accusing you of not adequately checking your sources. There is no such “whistleblower” in my department. It’s impossible. You are, I can assure you, the victim of a hoax.’

Various shouts and cried came from the press, but Anna strained her voice to be heard over the top of them: ‘Then where are the forensics reports? Where is the CCTV footage? Why has the investigation been scaled back so quickly? Why are there no leads? Why are there no suspects?’

But now Anna’s voice was drowned out completely by the bellowing coming from the other journalists. Townsend stood there at his podium, ignoring all the shouting and hollering, his eyes fixed icily on Anna, his mouth set firmly, his jaw muscles visibly flexing. It was an expression which said, without any shadow of a doubt: You have made an enemy here today, Ms Vaughan … believe me, you have made an enemy.