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

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СКАЧАТЬ and write an article … about you, and how you’ve behaved here tonight. Who knows, it might just finish your career. It certainly won’t do your promotion prospects any favours.’

      ‘In!’

      ‘I’ll make my own way home,’ Anna said, and with that she turned on her heel to walk away.

      ‘Ms Vaughan,’ Townsend called after her. ‘One last thing before you go.’

      Anna stopped, sighed heavily, and waited.

      ‘Well?’

      ‘I just wanted to say … well done.’

      Nonplussed, Anna turned round and looked back along the corridor at Detective Inspector Townsend. But now she saw that Townsend’s whole demeanour had changed. He was smiling. His eyes were smiling, all the iciness and aggression melted away from them.

      ‘I mean it, Ms Vaughan,’ he said, and there was warmth in his voice, there was humanity. ‘It’s one thing to stand up to the police at a press conference surrounded by fellow reporters – but it takes real guts to do it alone, without backup, in the depths of a police station at two in the morning. So – well done. And please accept my apologies. I would rather not have had to put you through such rough treatment just now. Rest assured that I would never have subjected you to any of it without good reason. A damn good reason.’

      ‘Good reason? I … I don’t understand what you’re talking about.’

      ‘The Steiner case. You have no idea what’s really happening with it, Ms Vaughan. No idea at all. And given what’s happened to you tonight, with that so-called present turning up on your doorstep, it looks like you’re far, far more involved with that case than you can imagine.’

      ‘I … I …’

      Townsend held out his hand to her, a genuine gesture.

      ‘Please, come through to my office and I’ll explain everything,’ he said. ‘It’s important, Ms Vaughan – not just to the Steiner case, but to you, personally. I need to speak to you. Your life might very well depend on it.’

      Anna stepped warily into Townsend’s office. She still didn’t trust him. Even less did she understand what the hell was going on with him.

      ‘Please, take a seat,’ he said.

      Gingerly, she sat down. Townsend settled himself behind his desk across from her. It was the same arrangement as in the interview room just moments before, but the atmosphere was now completely different. The sense of hostility was gone. Townsend gently offered Anna another coffee, apologised again for his earlier treatment of her, and then dug out a file from his desk drawer.

      ‘Look familiar?’ he asked, sliding the file across to her.

      Anna opened it and leafed through the pages inside. They were transcripts of emails – the emails sent to her by the ‘whistleblower’ inside CID – and the emails Anna had sent back in return.

      ‘You’ve been monitoring me all along, I take it,’ Anna said.

      ‘In a manner of speaking. This whistleblower you’ve been communicating with – it’s me, Ms Vaughan. All that so-called insider information you’ve been receiving came from the laptop sitting here on this very desk between us.’

      ‘But … But I …’

      ‘Had a single word of it been true, Ms Vaughan, you would of course have been totally justified to make it public in your newspaper articles. As it happens, it wasn’t true at all. It was lies, Ms Vaughan. I fabricated everything – the cock-up with forensics, the missing CCTV footage, the procedural irregularities.’

      ‘You duped me.’

      ‘Yes,’ said Townsend, without a hint of gloating. He was, if anything, apologetic. ‘Yes, Ms Vaughan, I duped you. And you will, of course, be keen to know why. Well, now the deception has been revealed, the time has come to explain what’s really going on with the Steiner investigation.’

      He opened up his laptop. An audio-visual screen behind his desk lit up, displaying a police forensics photograph.

      ‘This is the Steiners’ bedroom as we found it after the abduction,’ Townsend explained. ‘As you can see, the bed sheets are all disturbed, a chair is tipped over, there are signs of a struggle all around the room … and, of course, there’s the blood.’

      A second photograph showed a huge black mass of blood on the floor beside the bed and thick, red streaks leading away from it towards the door.

      ‘It’s Ben Steiner’s blood,’ Townsend went on. ‘Forensics got an ID on it almost straight away – despite what we led you to believe, Ms Vaughan. We’re pretty sure he was attacked in the bed with an axe of some sort, that his body fell here, next to the bed, and that he was then dragged – either dead or unconscious – across the floor.’

      A third photo showed the blood streaks leading across the Steiners’ first-floor landing and disappearing into the bathroom.

      ‘The body, what’s left of it, was found in the bath tub. Do you have a strong stomach, Ms Vaughan?’

      ‘I … um … well …’

      ‘I can jump ahead. You don’t need to see it.’

      ‘No. No, I can take it. Show me.’

      She regretted it almost at once. But although she winced, she forced herself not to look away.

      ‘We think the axe that was used on Ben Steiner in the bedroom is the same on that was used to dismember him in the bath tub,’ Townsend said, staring at the horrific photograph on the screen with cool professional detachment. ‘As you can see, Mr Steiner’s body was completely hacked to pieces. The head is missing, as are several internal organs – the heart, the spleen, the liver. Everything was left piled up here, as you can see. Are you all right, Ms Vaughan?’

      Anna was no longer looking at the photograph. She had her hand over her mouth and was breathing slowly and deeply.

      A few seconds later she had composed herself. When she looked back, the screen was blank again.

      ‘Okay?’ Townsend asked, genuinely concerned.

      Anna nodded, swallowed, then said: ‘And what about Sharon Steiner? Any idea what happened to her?’

      ‘No, apart from the fact that she’s missing. There was a small quantity of her blood on one of the pillows, suggesting she was struck or attacked in some way while she was still in the bed. It probably wasn’t a fatal attack, just enough to subdue her. Our assumption at present is that the intruder killed Ben Steiner in the bed, most likely with an axe. Very quickly afterwards he rendered Sharon Steiner unconscious, and this gave him time to drag Ben’s body to the bathroom and dismember it. After that, it seems that he carried Sharon away with him and completely disappeared. The only thing we’ve got to go on are a few grainy images caught on the CCTV camera of a petrol station quarter of a mile away. I’ll show you.’

      He tapped a few buttons on the laptop, and on the screen behind the desk some murky, colourless petrol pumps and a stretch of road СКАЧАТЬ