D Devlin - The Present - The must-read Christmas Crime of the year!

‘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.