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

‘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 just across from them appeared. One, two, three jerky frames played in sequence, over and over on a loop, showing the barely discernible shape of a van passing by along that stretch of road.

‘The quality’s too bad for us to get a number plate or any distinguishing ID on that van,’ Townsend said as the loop of three images repeated itself again and again. ‘But the time these pictures were taken and the direction the van’s going in would tally perfectly with an intruder making their getaway from 19 Elm Crescent.’

‘But … I don’t understand, Detective Inspector. Why lead me to believe that your whole investigation is a shambles? Why make me think that? And for God’s sake, why let me print it?’

Townsend poured himself a fresh coffee, settled himself into his chair, took a moment to collect his thoughts, then spoke.

‘We don’t know the identity of the man who killed Ben Steiner and abducted Sharon Steiner – but whoever he is, he’s not entirely unknown to us.’

‘It’s the so-called “Santa” killer, isn’t it,’ Anna put in. ‘The killer who always strikes in December, breaks into a home, kills the man, abducts the woman, holds her hostage until Christmas Day when at last he kills her.’

Townsend nodded: ‘All that stuff’s in the public domain, Ms Vaughan. But what you won’t know about are the Twelve Days of Christmas.’

‘What do you mean, the Twelve Days of Christmas?’

‘We’ve kept this information strictly out of the media. Nobody knows about it except those of us in CID dealing directly with the Santa investigation. You see, Ms Vaughan, every time Santa strikes, every time he abducts a woman and holds her hostage, he contacts us. He makes it very clear – crystal clear – that all communication between him and us is strictly private. If we speak to the press about it, the hostage dies immediately. If we keep it private, there’s a slim chance we might just find her alive. So, we keep quiet – and that’s when Santa starts taunting us with clues as to where to find the missing girl. These clues – or taunts, or whatever the hell they are – come in one at a time, sometimes two or three in rapid succession in a single twenty-four hour period. And each one is based on “The Twelve Days of Christmas”.’

‘Like the note attached to that awful present left outside my door!’ Anna exclaimed. ‘On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me … ’

‘Yes,’ nodded Townsend. ‘That’s Santa. Perhaps there’s a cryptic meaning in the contents of that present, a clue as to how to find Sharon Steiner before the time runs out. Or perhaps he’s just playing mind games with us. Or perhaps he’s just amusing himself. God alone knows. What I know, however, is that for the last twelve years he’s been doing the same thing, and every time CID fails to make sense of the clues until it’s too late. All we ever find is the body of the victim, and not so much as a trace of that bastard Santa … until he surfaces again with a fresh victim and starts the whole process rolling again.’

‘Why does he do it?’ Anna asked. ‘Have you attempted to psychologically profile him?’

‘There’s a file on his possible psychological motivations that’s two inches thick, Ms Vaughan, but it’s no damned used to me. I’m not a psychologist, I’m just a copper. My job’s to find him, not analyse him.’

‘But you haven’t found him.’

‘We will,’ Townsend said firmly. ‘My team will. I will. This year. This year it’s going to be different. This year, I’m on the case. This year me and my people will get the girl back alive. This year we’ll collar that bastard Santa and we’ll bang him up for the rest of his life. This year.’

He got to his feet and paced about for a few moments, tense and agitated.

‘He likes playing games with the police,’ he said at last. ‘Right from the start it’s how he’s always operated. He snatches his victim then taunts the police with clues as to how to catch him. Every time it’s the same. And every time he outwits us. We’re always too slow. We never work out the clues until it’s just that bit too late. But this time around, Ms Vaughan, I’ve decided that I will change the rules.’

‘I think I see your tactics,’ Anna put in. ‘You’ve deliberately made yourself and your investigative team look incompetent. That’s why you posed as a whistleblower and got in touch with me. You made sure I put all this stuff in the paper, and now Santa thinks he’s dealing with a bunch of fools.’

‘Precisely. Painful as it is to paint myself as a cretin in public, it’s a price I’m willing to pay to get Santa to drop his guard. I want him to get overconfident. I want him think he’s already beaten us. I want him to start making mistakes … and I’m hoping that’s exactly what’s happened already.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘That “present” that turned up on your doorstep a few hours ago. It’s the first time he’s ever sent anything like that to an outsider, to somebody other than the CID investigators coming after him. For the first time ever, he’s changed his procedure. And that, surely, must mean something.’

‘But why the hell would Santa start sending things to me?’

‘I can’t answer that, Ms Vaughan, but this is the first time he’s ever sent a clue to anyone other than the police. It’s not like him.’

‘Maybe he saw me speaking up at the press conference.’