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The Present: The must-read Christmas Crime of the year!. D Devlin S
Читать онлайн.Название The Present: The must-read Christmas Crime of the year!
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780008272746
Автор произведения D Devlin S
Издательство HarperCollins
The Present
D S DEVLIN
A division of HarperCollinsPublishers
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
Copyright © D S Devlin 2017
Cover images © Shutterstock.com
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.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008272760
Ebook Edition © December 2017 ISBN: 9780008272746
Version: 2017-12-04
Table of Contents
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