The Last Girl to Die Read online

  THE LAST GIRL TO DIE

  Helen Fields

  Copyright

  Published by AVON

  A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2022

  Copyright © Helen Fields 2022

  Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2022

  Cover photographs © Magdalena Russocka/Trevillion Images (reflection) and Shutterstock.com (all other images)

  Helen Fields 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.

  Source ISBN: 9780008379360

  Ebook Edition © September 2022 ISBN: 9780008379377

  Version: 2022-07-01

  PRAISE FOR THE LAST GIRL TO DIE

  ‘A stunner! The Last Girl to Die truly sets the standard for the psychological thriller! I guarantee you’ll put everything on hold until you arrive at the shocking final scenes … Without a doubt, one of the best crime novels of the year!’

  Jeffery Deaver

  ‘Oh my goodness, I absolutely and totally loved this book. Outstanding and compelling, it gave me whiplash from all the twists and turns.’

  Angela Marsons

  ‘Fantastic and utterly absorbing! A beautifully crafted, rollercoaster of a thriller with compelling characters and a dark, ominous setting. I couldn’t put it down.’

  Simon McCleave

  ‘The Last Girl to Die had me instantly gripped. Hell fire – I lost sleep and bit my nails down as the tension ramped up. If you love murder mysteries and thrillers, you have to read this book. Fabulous!’

  Carla Kovach

  ‘An isolated thriller that is tightly wound and balanced on a hair-trigger. It sweeps you up like a brutal North Sea riptide, drowning you in tension and twists. Take a deep breath because there won’t be time to come up for air. Helen Fields is a leading light in the Scottish-crime scene.’

  Morgan Greene

  READERS LOVE THE LAST GIRL TO DIE

  ‘Helen Fields is the queen of suspense.’

  NetGalley Review, 5 stars

  ‘Totally absorbing from the start, the setting is beautiful, and the characters are very well written, a real joy to read.’

  NetGalley Review, 5 stars

  ‘Breath-taking. Twists and turns galore. I couldn’t put it down, I loved it.’

  NetGalley Review, 5 stars

  ‘A tense, twisty, phenomenal read!’

  NetGalley Review, 5 stars

  ‘Fantastic. Excellent. Incredible. I could not put this one down for the life of me. Love, love, love this book.’

  NetGalley Review, 5 stars

  ‘What rollercoaster ride this was. I love it when a book shocks me the way this did.’

  NetGalley Review, 5 stars

  ‘A haunting, complex psychological mystery. Breath-taking shocks, horror, unforeseen twists, and an emotionally shattering conclusion.’

  NetGalley Review, 5 stars

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to those amazing people who have bought and read this book. It’s you I think of as I write. It’s you whose faces I imagine as I kill a character, or make them fall in love, or have them betray one another. I see your faces and try to capture the emotions I want you to feel then cram them into these words. Thank you for continuing to read in a world of binge watching and social media. Thank you for loving the experience of falling into a book as much as I still do. Without you, I would just be screaming my stories alone in the darkness of my imagination.

  And thank you to the booksellers who put this book into your hands. From the big chains to the independent bookshops, the supermarkets to the second-hand stores. Passionate people all, those who sell books. Likewise the librarians and the educators. The bloggers and reviewers. The bookclubs and websites.

  Books bind us together. They join our hands and minds around the world. They inspire and excite us, and they are not so easily forgotten as those hours staring at a screen. Because when you read a book, you make your own images in your mind. You become the actor, the set designer, the costume, hair and make-up department. The director. A reader has a vast and varied skillset, and it is awesome. Remember this with the next book you read. The work your brain does as you soak in the text from the page is utterly magical.

  I had a lot of help casting my small part of the magic spell contained herein. HarperCollins and Avon books are full of dangerously, fabulously creative and technical geniuses. I have a chance here to name a few, but know that there were more people involved than I can possibly thank.

  Phoebe Morgan began the edits on this book, Helen Huthwaite finished them and Thorne Ryan ran the last leg of the relay. Brilliant editors all. My gratitude to Oliver Malcolm, Becci Mansell, Lucy Frederick, Ellie Pilcher, Elisha Lundin and Eleanor Slater. Many of you, I know, love audiobooks with a passion and I owe a huge thank you to Charlotte Brown for making audio gold from these books and to the outstanding talent that is Robin Laing – the voice of all the characters in these books and who has brought Luc Callanach to life for so many people – I am constantly astounded by how beloved the audio versions are.

  But there is so much more that goes into the process. The sales and marketing teams work phenomenally hard. I appreciate each and every one of you. Likewise the cover designers and typesetters, the external editors and proof readers. The printers and distributors. Thank you one and all.

  To my lovely agent, Caroline Hardman and her colleagues at Hardman & Swainson who knock it out of the park every day – Joanna Swainson, Thérèse Coen and Nicole Etherington – you have the patience of angels and the kindness of saints.

  So to all the readers, for the love of books, I salute you. May we all read just one more chapter before we turn out the lights …

  Helen Fields

  November 2021

  Dedication

  To Helen Huthwaite

  For always bringing the sunshine

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Praise for The Last Girl to Die

  Readers Love The Last Girl to Die

  Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One
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  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Read on for …

  Keep Reading …

  Author Note

  About the Author

  By the same author

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  Finding Adriana Clark’s body was a shock, but not a surprise. I had, after all, been searching for it. The girl had been lost to her family for eleven devastating days and nights. I mention the nights because, in my experience, they outweigh the daytime in awfulness so greatly that the daylight hours become irrelevant. Families waiting for a missing loved one to return can fill their days. They can make telephone calls, put up posters, give pleading interviews to the press, bake bread or go to church. Everyone, everywhere has some sort of altar – domestic, professional or religious – at which to bend the knee in times of crisis during the day. But when I first met Adriana’s family, I saw the horror of the endless nights they’d endured waiting for the phone to ring and the seconds to pass. Nighttime is not merely a lack of light; it is the darkness within each of us when we lose hope.

  The facts of the initial case were not uncommon. A teenager had disappeared. Seventeen years old from a family living on the Isle of Mull, west of the Scottish mainland. An American family, which was one of only two aspects of the case that struck me as unusual. Had they been visiting Mull as tourists then that would have been one thing, but it seemed a bizarre place for a family from Southern California to have chosen to live. For one thing, save for a brief, blissful summer, there were many fewer hours of sunshine per annum, not to mention the lack of malls, coffee franchises and delivery options. Still, I thought, good for them. Personally, I was much happier in smaller communities rooted in nature and self-sufficiency than in oxygen-deprived cities, but then I’m a Canadian who hails from Banff. Much like Mull, Banff half tolerates, half welcomes the annual influx of tourists. I always managed to escape into the mountains in winter or to sit by a lake in summer when I needed peace. A call to investigate a case in Vancouver or Toronto was how I usually defined a long-distance trek. Scotland was a commute further than I’d anticipated.

  So, to Adriana. One late September Saturday morning her parents awoke, assumed their daughter was sleeping in and became concerned only at lunchtime by her failure to appear. Her father put his head round her door and discovered an empty bed. No sign of her anywhere in the house. Her bike still in the garage. Wallet gone, but Adriana’s passport remained in her mother’s bedside table. No sign of her cell phone.

  Five days later I landed at Glasgow airport and made my way overland to the ferry.

  You’re wondering if I’m a police officer. I’m not. Nor am I a pathologist or any sort of forensic expert. What I am is a private investigator – a title I’m not keen on – but it comes with a licence, and sometimes a piece of paper is useful when you’re asking people to share information. I specialise in missing teenagers. Not the subset of work I’d had in mind when I started out, but I’m female and short – thus apparently unthreatening – and I have what’s been referred to more than once as a ‘cheerful, positive manner’. Also, dimples. Sadly, none of those things were ever going to bring Adriana back, or render her parents’ grief less dreadful.

  They let me into their home and told me everything they believed to be relevant about their daughter. Adriana was enrolled in an online educational course to complete her American high school diploma. She’d had a summer job at the local pub in Tobermory where they were renting whilst renovating a permanent home. Good student, no drug problem, no boyfriend, very social. Missing her friends in America to an appropriate extent. No red flags. She had a twin brother, Brandon, with furious eyes. That was okay. I couldn’t imagine how it would feel to have a missing twin. He was suffering. Last was a little sister, Luna, four years old and the product of a union between older parents who believed that nature was taking care of contraception, only to be caught out. Cute, bouncy, with curly black hair, she was a miniature of her Latina mother, Isabella. Their father, Rob, was the American classic – tanned skin, baseball loving, avid barbecuer. They’d looked at me as if I were both the poison and the antidote: a greeting I was used to. No one wants to be in a situation where they need my help.

  I’d been working as an investigator since graduating from my Criminal Justice course eight years earlier, and Adriana’s corpse was the most upsetting thing I’d seen in all that time. Given that I’d found the remains from a mountain lion mauling and witnessed a bear attack in progress, that’s a high bar.

  It was little more than a hunch that had taken me to Mackinnon’s Cave. To be fair, a guidebook and a decent understanding of teenagers had ignited my gut instinct. Not that it was inevitable that Adriana was there; it could have been any of the caves on the island. A twenty-two mile trek from Tobermory, the distance was probably the reason Mackinnon’s Cave hadn’t been explored by police earlier; but Adriana’s peers were old enough to be driving, and at that age, the further you partied from home, the less likely you were to be discovered.

  Mackinnon’s Cave is a billion-year-old crack in the western edge of the island that invades the land mass by some 500 feet. By early October, September’s previously calm seas were washing up moodier and less predictable. There’d been a storm that morning with a high tide. Mackinnon’s Cave was only accessible safely when the tide was out, otherwise the pathway required a swimming costume. I’m an outdoor sports enthusiast – skier, snowboarder, hiker, mountain climber. I’ve camped out in arctic conditions and endured snowstorms with nothing but a tent membrane between me and the elements. But a sea swimmer … at night? Not so much.

  The cave was impressive. As I entered, the rock wall on the right leaned in, imposing. The entrance was a tall, thin break in the rock face that made my pulse dance in my wrist. The late sunlight was no match for the darkness inside, but I’d come prepared with a climbing helmet featuring multiple lamps. Stepping in, I knew my instinct had been right. The discarded cider can I trod on produced the distinctive metal crumpling sound that says ‘teenagers’ the world over.

  The remains of a fire were just a few metres beyond – close enough to the fresh air that the smoke would be drawn out of the cave. More than one ring of surrounding stones, more than one type of wood burned – the makeshift fireplace had been used, relaid and reused perhaps over years.

  Teenagers have places.

  I’d already searched many of those places on the island. Favourite beaches, deserted farmers’ huts, shells of castles, car parks with sunset views and privacy. But Adriana was waiting for me at Mackinnon’s Cave.

  My footsteps echoed through the mouth of the cavern, the sound sharpening as I entered the throat. Then into a substantial room, with natural shelves high on the rocky walls and ditches cracked into the ground at each edge. High-ceilinged, grand, imposing. I’d have missed Adriana if not for a break in the blanket of rocks that revealed the metallic glimmer of the teal toenail varnish her mother had said she’d been wearing. As I’d walked, the light from my helmet had lit the nail lacquer, producing the wild flash of a swamp animal’s eyes at night. My feet, slower than my brain, had walked another few feet, and when I turned back the teal shimmer was nowhere to be seen. r />
  On my hands and knees, I’d cleared the rocks away, wary of rockfalls, anxious not to seal my own premature coffin. Her body had been pushed down into one of the cracks, covered by a few large boulders, then shale, pebbles, dirt.

  I touched Adriana’s hand first. It was icy, the skin silken but firm, digits swollen. Closing my eyes a moment, the intimacy caught me off-guard. You always hope you’re wrong, but I’d sensed her family’s hopelessness. There’d been an undercurrent in their side-looks and the words they weren’t saying. They’d been asking me to find a corpse, not locate a runaway. I’d felt it almost immediately.

  I should have walked out of the cave there and then, let go of her hand and preserved the scene. Procedure, procedure, procedure. The problem with that is that private investigators have no rights. You don’t get to consult with the forensics squad or the pathologist, you never see the police file (unless you’re sleeping with a detective, and I’d sworn off them years earlier) and those first impressions are everything. It’s almost all the useful knowledge.

  Hands gloved, keeping everything in one place so as not to lose any trace fibres from the scene, keeping my knees in a single spot on the floor, I moved rock after rock until Adriana was laid out naked before me.

  I’m glad the dead cannot see themselves. There’s nothing peaceful about it. Being a corpse is an endlessly intrusive process.

  Adriana had no obvious injuries to gasp or gape at. Forget bullet wounds, claw lacerations or the raging burn of rope around neck. Her skin, though mottled purple in patches, had a base tone of grey-white-green. There’s no name for that colour but in my head, I’ve labelled it mortuary green. It’s really the only place you ever see it.

  Her eyes were open, whites running red, the former sparkling brown of her pupils covered by an opaque shield. Adriana’s mouth was open, too. Spilling from it, like the cave’s own vomit, was sand. Not the loose sand you kick up walking along a beach on a sunny afternoon, but the packed-down sand of a child about to turn over a full bucket to make a castle. Her lips stretched wide in a perpetual scream that mine threatened to copy.