The Seventh Girl

Book 1: Detective Kat Ballantyne

by Andy Maslen

Genres: Police Procedurals; Crime Fiction; Female Sleuths

Synopsis

She thought he was gone. She was wrong.

Fifteen years ago, a serial killer was on a rampage murdering young women in Middlehampton. Then, suddenly, the killings stopped, and the murderer was never found…

So when the body of another young woman is found bearing the twisted killer’s unique hallmark—the overpowering stench of lavender and an origami heart—DS Kat Ballantyne knows this can only mean one thing: the killer is back.

For Kat, whose best friend was the killer’s last victim all those years ago, this is deeply personal. She’ll stop at nothing to prevent more women dying and bring her friend’s murderer to justice. But the scent has gone cold once before. Kat will need all the help she can get in her investigation as she hunts down leads and encounters dead ends and horrifying twists.

With time running out, can she finally crack the case and put a stop to the killings—or will she be the next victim?

 

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Release date: January 1, 2024

Publisher: Thomas & Mercer

Print pages: 334

Reader says this book is...: action-packed (1) female sleuth (1) unputdownable (1)

Sample

Chapter One

 

Crouching beside the girl’s lavender-scented body, Detective Sergeant Kat Ballantyne fought the sudden urge to turn and run.

It wasn’t that she was squeamish. She’d seen worse. Her very first murder had involved a shotgun. Now there was a sight you didn’t want to encounter after a full English breakfast.

Nor was she easily scared. Maybe because she still felt like a woman in a man’s world, but she’d run towards danger every time, rather than waiting for backup. It had got her into trouble more than once with the brass.

Her DI in Middlehampton’s Major Crimes Unit, Stuart Carver – ‘Carve-up’, they called him behind his back – made no secret of his dislike for her. He’d once yelled at her in front of the whole team for what he’d called her ‘intensely reckless grandstanding’, which she thought was a pretty fancy turn of phrase for Carve-up, quite honestly.

No. The reason she was clenching her jaw so tightly it cracked was the cause of death. Which she knew. Right here, right now. No expert colleague needed.

She knew that the bow-tied pathologist, Dr Joshua Feldman, would have to come out from Middlehampton General Hospital – MGH, everyone called it. He’d hem and haw before intoning that he couldn’t say anything for certain without performing his post-mortem.

She knew that the CSIs, under the close eye of forensic coordinator Darcy Clements, would be here soon to squat beside the corpse and inspect and photograph and take samples. They’d need to run tests, perform analyses, consult databases. The lab director would refuse to be drawn until all the results were in, cross-checked, double-checked and tabulated.

But there was a difference between protocol and stone-cold certainty.

The girl was barely out of her teens. Her face was smooth and her jawline was softened to a gentle curve by a hint of residual puppy fat. From her nostrils and her perfect, plump pink lips there spilled a waterfall of tiny, hard ovals. The CSI tasked with collecting evidence from the body might wonder what, exactly, those little granules were. They’d tweeze a couple into a debris pot, screw the lid on tight and label it. But Kat could save them the trouble.

They were grains of wheat. Soaked in lavender oil.

Kat’s nose was stuffy from a cold she’d only just shaken off, but she could still smell that cloying herbal aroma.

Struggling to keep her fear at bay, she told herself 2.00 a.m. call-outs always made her edgy. Especially when fuelled, as she was now, by strong black coffee. Trouble was, that was a lie.

Her colleagues bitched royally whenever it was their turn as duty DS. She, on the other hand, new to the unit and only recently promoted, loved it. Normally.

Yes, there was that disorientating tug from the depths of sleep when her phone rang in the small hours. But five minutes later, caffeine shooting round her system like a liquid ‘WAKE UP!’ call, and she was ready to go. This was what motivated her. Catching killers. Delivering justice, and closure, for those left behind.

Normally.

But this wasn’t normal, was it? This was very, very far from normal.

Apart from the crudely cropped dark brown hair and the grains spilling from her mouth and nose, the girl might have been sleeping. No blood. No visible wounds. None of the signs of that vicious kind of male anger directed at women that she and her colleagues saw almost every day of their working lives. Because this was a man. She knew it. And she knew who he was.

There was one more piece of evidence she needed.

After pulling on a pair of purple nitrile gloves, Kat gently lifted the dead girl’s scoop-necked top and peered at her chest. An expertly inked orange and pink butterfly fluttered in the hollow of her right collarbone.

The cold clench of fear squeezed harder. It was there, below the tattoo. Where she’d known it would be. Tucked into the left bra cup like a love note.

A pink origami heart.

Kat shuddered as she pulled the folded paper free and slipped it into an evidence bag. The same MO. The same victim type. The same signature.

He was back. Not a copycat. Not a disciple. Him. She could feel it.

Killing girls again, after a fifteen-year absence.

His last victim had been Kat’s best friend, murdered a couple of weeks after her eighteenth birthday.

And it had all been Kat’s fault.

 

Chapter Two

 

Back in ’08, Kat had believed she had no right to be alive.

She’d blown Liv off for their drink in a wine bar because she’d just been dumped. Left her best mate alone, drunk, probably staggering home with just a bag of chips for company. And he’d emerged from the dark and snatched her out of the world.

A week had gone by, then two; one month, three. The killings stopped. The case got shunted off the front pages and the news reports. Downgraded by the police. One year. Five. Ten. The case was colder than ice. Colder than the South Pole. Colder than outer space.

People forgot. People wanted to forget. Everybody except Kat. How could she, when Liv’s death haunted her? It was why she’d dropped out of university to travel instead. On the way, meeting a nice guy from Glasgow called Ivan Ballantyne, and marrying him a couple of years later when she fell pregnant.

The nightmares had eventually stopped. For the most part.

But there were still times when Ivan had to rock her in his arms at 3.00 a.m. while she whimpered. Still struggling to escape the images sticking to the backs of her eyeballs like chewing gum on a well-trodden pavement.

Someone tapped Kat on the shoulder. Sniffing back a tear, she turned to see PC Abby Greene. A friend.

‘CSIs are here, Kat, and the pathologist’s on his way.’ Abby hesitated. ‘You all right?’

‘Yeah, I’m fine, just chasing the last of my cold away.’ She stood, clearing her throat. ‘Where are the witnesses?’

Abby turned and pointed to a Mini with white stripes on the bonnet and a Union Jack on the roof, the colours transmuted to shades of grey by the flashing blue lights that strobed across the scene. Kat could make out two figures lit a sickly yellow by the interior light.

‘That’s them. I think they came up here for a shag.’

‘In that?’

Abby grinned. ‘Where there’s a will. Mind you, they’re a bit old for that sort of thing. Unless they’re dedicated doggers.’

‘Abby!’

Shaking her head, both at her mate’s bawdy sense of humour and to disperse the ghosts of the past, Kat made her way out from under the flapping crime scene tape. She nodded to the white-suited figures trudging out of the gloom towards her.

She tapped on the driver’s-side window then knelt beside the car so she’d be eye to eye with the occupants.

The glass hummed down to reveal a woman in late middle age, brassy blonde hair all over the place, though she’d clearly made an effort to rearrange it. Her low-cut leopard-skin top revealed an impressive, if crêpey, cleavage. Beside her, an older man – balding, thick red-plastic glasses perched on a nose too small for his face. He wore a tweed jacket and looked like a cross between Kat’s old maths teacher and a retired kids’ TV presenter.

‘I’m Detective Sergeant Ballantyne,’ Kat said, showing them her warrant card. ‘I understand you found the body.’

The woman opened her mouth but the man leaned around her, cutting her off.

‘That’s right. My name is Brian Clamper, I’m sixty-seven, my address—’

Kat smiled. ‘That’s OK, sir. I’m sure my colleagues have already taken a note of your details.’

‘Yes, of course, but they were just uniforms. You’re a detective, aren’t you? You’ll want to start at the beginning, build up your own picture of events, won’t you?’

‘Well, they aren’t “just” anything, sir. They’re police constables, the same as me. But anyway, can you tell me what happened?’

The woman elbowed her consort, none too kindly, in the chest. ‘Get off me, Brian, for goodness’ sake! I could hardly breathe in this bloody Wonderbra in the first place without you squashing me.’

The gesture and the fact she’d used the guy’s first name went a long way to allaying Kat’s suspicions about the nature of their relationship. The woman smiled.

‘I’m Jenny, love. Jenny Stagg. We were having a little bit of a kiss and cuddle and I was just, you know, adjusting my position. I have a bad back and it’s easier if I’m on top.’

‘Jenny, for God’s sake!’ Brian interjected. ‘I’m sure DS Ballantyne doesn’t need every sordid little detail.’

‘Don’t worry, sir,’ Kat said, giving Jenny a knowing look, ‘this is all confidential, and believe me, I’ve heard it all before.’ I’ve seen it, too.

‘Anyway,’ Jenny continued, ‘that’s when I saw her.’

‘The dead girl?’

‘Yes. Poor love. She can’t be much older than twenty.’

‘Did you see anyone else while you were cuddling? Before you noticed the body, I mean?’

‘To be honest, I was concentrating on what was going on in here, if you get my drift?’

‘I didn’t see anyone either,’ the man said. ‘But if it helps, I did catch a faint whiff of lavender when I had a look at her.’

Alarm bells sounded for Kat. The last thing she needed was witnesses contaminating the scene, let alone the body; a crime scene in its own right.

‘Sorry, Brian, when you said you “had a look at her”, can you be more specific for me?’

‘Death holds no terrors for me, DS Ballantyne,’ he said in a tone he presumably thought sounded worldly wise. What was he? Ex-forces. A fireman? An undertaker? ‘I was a hospital porter for years. You see everything at MGH. I went over to check she was dead. Girls these days, they drink too much or take pills, whatever – and they lose control, don’t they? I thought she might be sleeping.’

Kat hated the assumptions he was making about ‘girls’, but the trouble was, he had a point. And no, that didn’t excuse any man who took advantage, whether it was unwanted advances or cold-blooded murder.

‘Did you touch her, Brian?’

He bridled. ‘Of course I didn’t! I watch all the shows on TV; I know the drill. I could see she was dead, so I came back to Jenny and told her and then I dialled 999,’ he gabbled. ‘Well, not dialled. I mean, who does that these days? But I tapped it. Gave the details, the location and so on. Clear and concise, that’s what they need, isn’t it?’

He was sweating, and the muscle below his right eye had starting twitching. Shock. He was wound so tight he was only managing to control it by the constant talking. Kat tried to calm him down.

‘You did the right thing. We’re lucky you were here. We’ll need to take a DNA sample from you, just for elimination purposes,’ she said. ‘I’ll have one of my colleagues come over if you’re happy to do it now?’

‘Oh, yes. Anything to help the boys – er, and girls, I mean women – in blue.’

‘Thanks. We’ll get that sorted and then you’re free to go. Just one thing, please. A request to both of you.’

‘Yes, love? What is it?’ Jenny said.

‘Please don’t mention the smell to anyone. Not the press, not on social media, not even close friends or family.’

Brian tapped the side of his nose. ‘Keeping back a key detail. Smart girl! – I mean, woman.’

‘Of course,’ Jenny said. ‘Mum’s the word, eh?’

Kat nodded. She was already mapping out the case. The lines of enquiry she’d need to establish, the interviews, the wrangling over budget, the media and community relations. But part of her was looking back. Afraid yet unable to resist peering into the darkness that lay in her past. Where a killer lurked.

The police had failed to catch him last time.

This time, she vowed, would be different.

***