On Your Doorstep: Perfect for those who loved Close to Home
Previously published as Stolen ChildIt's every mother's worst nightmare . . .Carla Kelly wakes to find her two-day-old baby’s cot cold and empty.Her daughter has been taken.Desperate and at breaking point, Carla launches a fierce national campaign to find her baby – but the trail runs cold.Then she receives an intriguing letter, offering support from a surprising quarter. But it leads Carla into a chain of events that exposes shocking secrets from her past. Someone is out to seek their cold-blooded revenge.And it will bring Carla unknowingly closer to the stolen daughter she has sworn she will do anything to get back …
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On Your Doorstep
Laura Elliot
Published by AVON
A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published as ‘Stolen Child’ in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2010
This ebook edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers in 2018
Copyright © June Considine 2010
Cover design © Alison Groom 2018
Cover photograph © Louise MacGregor 2018
June Considine 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 ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, 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.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9781847561466
Ebook Edition © July 2010 ISBN: 9780007367986
Version: 2018-11-05
With love to my husband, Sean Considine.
Thank you for your invaluable support throughout the writing of On Your Doorstep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
From ‘The Stolen Child’ by William Butler Yeats.
I buried my baby on the shortest night of the year. We were shielded by old walls as I laid her to rest in a shadowy wilderness of lilac and elderberry. She was my almost-child, my shattered dream. Sixteen weeks in my womb before she came away. Born on the longest day of the year, webbed fingers and toes, her veins delicate as skeins of silk. Sweet little monkey face.
The pain took me by surprise. When it came, I was standing by the gate leading into Dowling’s Meadow, feeding sugar lumps to Augustus. I heard gunshots in the distance. Mitch Moran, clay pigeon shooting again, and, beyond the lane, the pulse of traffic as cars, driven too fast along the narrow road, signalled an end to another working day. Such a twilight, clouds streaking like lava across the sky, the rooks looping and clamouring above the trees. Then I felt it, the familiar cramping in my stomach, the low drag on my spine.
Sugar crunched like icicles under my feet when I stepped back from the gate. The pain was slight at first and eased quickly, as if teasing me into the belief that I was imagining it. I walked carefully back towards my house, hoping there was still time to save her. But the evening was on fire, a conflagration setting the countryside alight, and the scattering rooks fell through the air like charred scraps of paper. Even the flowers in the hedgerows hurt my eyes, the scarlet pimpernel, the blood-red poppies swaying as I bent over them, cradling my stomach until the pain eased and I could walk again.
