by LJ Ross
Anna paused, wondering if he might not want to. She knew all about David’s past history, and about the PTSD he suffered from, so she had tried to find a job that would involve the least stress, whilst allowing him to be useful and provide a valuable service. She wished there were more opportunities available, for all the people in the kitchen, but she knew that David had been searching for a very long time.
“I—thank you. I’d love to do that job.”
He thought of quiet walks, at the end of the day—just him and his dog. He could scarcely imagine the thrill of coming home to his own bed at the end of the day, and knowing he’d been the one to earn it.
“That’s great. I’ll come and see you in a minute, and give you all the contact details.”
He nodded, still not quite sure his voice could be trusted.
“Is this your dog?” she asked.
“Yes, this is Naseem,” he said proudly.
“You’re a very handsome boy,” she said, in a voice she hardly recognised as her own. “Would he like some chicken soup?”
Unbelievably, the dog let out a polite woof, and she could have sworn that it smiled.
DCI Ryan will return in
Ryan’s Christmas: A DCI Ryan Mystery
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If you enjoy the DCI Ryan Mysteries, who not try the new series by LJ Ross—
THE ALEXANDER GREGORY THRILLERS?
Read on at the end of this e-book for an exclusive sneak peak at IMPOSTOR—book #1 in the new series—which will be released in all formats on 31st October 2019 and is available for e-book pre-order right now!
AUTHOR’S NOTE
There are lots of themes in here that are very tricky to write about in a way that does justice to the topic, whilst remaining sensitive to those who have been affected by any of the issues involved. Primarily, Borderlands is a book about the human condition; it’s about relationships between people, and how one small act of kindness can defuse a potentially volatile situation.
It’s a very restless world we live in, at the moment, but I wanted to remember all the good that people are trying to do, every day, in their own little ways.
LJ ROSS
September 2019
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’ve been so lucky during the course of my career—I have, by now, a very long list of people to whom I owe thanks. So many, it would constitute an entirely new book if I were to write them all down! However, I’ll limit myself to thanking my lovely husband, James, and my son, Ethan, for being my bedrock; thanks to my gorgeous mum, Susan, and my wonderful dad, Jim, for all their love and support; and to my sister, Rachael, for being generally fabulous! To my friends, I thank you for all your patience while I’ve been off the radar, buried deep in my writing ‘cave’, and I’m pleased to be able to tell you I’ve now crawled out of my office and am available once again for cocktails and dreams, or coffee and cake, as the case may be. Most importantly, my thanks go to you, the Reader, whose kindness means so much to authors like me. We love nothing more than writing stories for people to enjoy and, when that happens, it’s the very best of all worlds.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LJ Ross is an international bestselling author, best known for creating atmospheric mystery and thriller novels, including the DCI Ryan series of Northumbrian murder mysteries which have sold over four million copies worldwide.
Her debut, Holy Island, was released in January 2015 and reached number one in the UK and Australian charts. Since then, she has released a further fourteen novels, all of which have been top three global bestsellers and twelve of which have been UK #1 bestsellers. Louise has garnered an army of loyal readers through her storytelling and, thanks to them, several of her books reached the coveted spot whilst only available to pre-order ahead of release.
Louise was born in Northumberland, England. She studied undergraduate and postgraduate Law at King’s College, University of London and then abroad in Paris and Florence. She spent much of her working life in London, where she was a lawyer for a number of years until taking the decision to change career and pursue her dream to write. Now, she writes full time and lives with her husband and son in Northumberland. She enjoys reading all manner of books, travelling and spending time with family and friends.
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If you would like to be kept up to date with new releases from LJ Ross, please complete an e-mail contact form on her Facebook page or website, www.ljrossauthor.com
IMPOSTOR
– AN ALEXANDER GREGORY THRILLER
LJ Ross
PROLOGUE
August 1987
She was muttering again.
The boy heard it from beneath the covers of his bed; an endless, droning sound, like flies swarming a body. The whispering white noise of madness.
Poor, poor baby, she was saying. My poor, poor baby.
Over and over she repeated the words, as her feet paced the hallway outside his room. The floorboards creaked as she moved back and forth, until her footsteps came to an abrupt halt.
He hunkered further down, wrapping his arms around his legs, as if the pattern of Jedi knights on his Star Wars duvet cover could protect him.
It couldn’t.
The door swung open and his mother was silhouetted in its frame, fully dressed despite it being the middle of the night. She strode across the room and shook his coiled body with an unsteady hand.
“Wake up! We need to go to the hospital.”
The boy tried not to sigh. She didn’t like it when he sighed, when he looked at her the ‘wrong’ way, or when he argued. Even if he did, she wouldn’t listen.
She wouldn’t even hear.
“I’m awake,” he mumbled, although his body was crying out for sleep.
He was always sleepy.
“Come on, get dressed,” she continued, and he tried not to look directly at her as she scurried about the room, pulling out clothes at random for him to wear. He didn’t want to see her eyes, or what was hidden behind them. They’d be dark again, like they were before, and they’d look straight through him.
There came a soft moan from the bedroom next door, and his mother hurried out, leaving him to pull on jeans and a faded Power Rangers t-shirt. The clock on the bedside table told him it was three-seventeen a.m., in cheerful neon-green light. If he had the energy to spare, he might have wondered whether the children he’d seen playing in the garden next door ever got sick, like he did, or whether they got to go to school.
He remembered going to school, once.
He remembered liking it.
But his mother said he was too ill to go to school now, and he’d learn so much more at home, where she could take care of him and Christopher.
It wasn’t her fault that, despite all her care, neither boy seemed to get any better.
Once, when she thought he was asleep, she’d come in to sit on the edge of his bed. She’d stroked a hand over his hair and told him that she loved him. For a moment, he thought Mummy had come back; but then, she’d moved her mouth close to his ear and told him it was all because Daddy had left them to be with something called a Filthy Whore, and everything would have been alright if he’d never gone away. He hadn’t known what she meant. At first, he’d wondered if some kind of galactic monster had lured his father away. Maybe, at this very moment, he was trapped in a cast of bronze, just like Han Solo.
She called his name, and the boy dragged his skinny body off the bed. There was no time to make up fairy tales about his father, or to wonder how other children lived.
Or how they died.
* * *
There was more muttering at the hospital.
He could hear it, beyond the turquoise curtain surrounding his hospital bed. Whenever somebody passed by, the material rippled on the wind and he caught sight of the serious-looking doctors and nurses gathered a short dista
nce away.
“I can’t see any medical reason—” he heard one of them say, before the curtain flapped shut again. “This needs to be reported.”
“There have been cases,” another argued.
“One dead already, the youngest in critical condition—”
The boy tensed as he recognised the quick slap-slap-slap of his mother’s tread against the linoleum floor.
“Where’s my son? Where’ve you taken him?” she demanded, in a shrill voice. “Is he in there?”
He saw her fingers grasp the edge of the curtain, and unconsciously shrank back against the pillows, but she did not pull it back.
There ensued a short argument, conducted in professional undertones.
“If you really think—alright. Yes, yes, he can stay overnight, so long as I stay with him at all times. But what about Christopher?”
The voices receded back down the corridor as they moved towards the High Dependency Unit, where his younger brother lay against scratchy hospital bedsheets, fighting for his life.
* * *
When the boy awoke the next morning, he was not alone.
Three people surrounded his bed. One, he recognised as the doctor who’d snuck him a lollipop the previous night, and she gave him a small smile. Another was a stern-faced man wearing a dark suit that reminded him of his father, and the other was a young woman in a rumpled police uniform with sad brown eyes.
“Hi, there,” the doctor said. “How’re you doing, champ?”
There was a false note of cheer to her voice that made him nervous.
“W-where’s my mum?”
The three adults exchanged an uncomfortable glance.
“You’ll see your mother soon,” the man told him. “I’m afraid she’s had some bad news. You both have.”
In careful, neutral tones, they spoke of how his younger brother had died during the night and, with every passing word, the boy’s pale, ghostly-white face became more shuttered.
It had happened before, you see.
Last year, his baby sister had died too, before she’d reached her first birthday.
He remembered all the cards and flowers arriving at the house they used to live in; the endless stream of neighbours pouring into his mother’s living room to condole and glean a little gossip about their misfortune. He remembered his mother’s arm wrapped around his shoulder, cloying and immoveable, like a band of steel.
“These two are all I have left, now,” she’d said, tearfully, drawing Christopher tightly against her other side. “I can only pray that God doesn’t take them, too.”
And, while the mourners tutted and wept and put ‘a little something’ in envelopes to help out, he’d watched his mother’s eyes and wondered why she was so happy.
CHAPTER 1
Ballyfinny
County Mayo, Ireland
Thirty years later
“Daddy, what’s an ‘eejit’?”
Liam Kelly exited the roundabout—where he’d recently been cut-up by the aforementioned eejit driving a white Range Rover—and rolled his eyes. His three-year-old daughter was growing bigger every day, and apparently her ears were, too.
“That’s just a word to describe somebody who…ah, does silly things.”
She thought about it.
“Are you an eejit, Daddy?”
Liam roared with laughter and smiled in the rear-view mirror.
“It’s been said,” he admitted, with a wink. “Nearly home now, sugarplum. Shall we tell Mammy all about how well you did in your swimming class, today?”
His daughter grinned and nodded.
“I swam like a fish, didn’t I?”
“Aye, you did. Here we are.”
It took a minute for him to unbuckle her child seat and to collect their bags, but then Liam and his daughter were skipping hand in hand up the short driveway leading to the front door of their bungalow on the outskirts of the town. It was perched on higher ground overlooking the lough and, though it had been a stretch to buy the place, he was reminded of why they had each time he looked out across the sparkling water.
The front door was open, and they entered the hallway with a clatter of footsteps.
“We’re back!” he called out.
But there was not a whisper of sound on the air, and he wondered if his wife was taking a nap. The first trimester was always tiring.
“Maybe Mammy’s having a lie-down,” he said, and tapped a finger to his lips. “Let’s be quiet like mice, alright?”
“Okay,” she replied, in a stage whisper.
“You go along and play in your bedroom and I’ll bring you a glass of milk in a minute,” he said, and smiled as she tiptoed down the corridor with exaggerated care.
When the little girl pushed open the door to her peaches-and-cream bedroom, she didn’t notice her mother at first, since she was lying so serenely amongst the stuffed toys on the bed. When she did, she giggled, thinking of the story of Goldilocks.
“You’re in my bed!” she whispered.
She crept towards her mother, expecting her eyes to open at any moment.
But they didn’t.
The little girl began to feel drowsy after her exertions at the swimming pool, and decided to curl up beside her. She clambered onto the bed and, when her hands brushed her mother’s cold skin, she tugged her rainbow blanket over them both.
“That’s better,” she mumbled, as her eyelids drooped.
When Liam found them lying there a short while later, the glass fell from his nerveless hand and shattered to the floor at his feet. There was a ringing in his ears, the pounding of blood as his body fought to stay upright. He wanted to scream, to shout—to reject the truth of what lay clearly before him.
But there was his daughter to think of.
“C-come here, baby,” he managed, even as tears began to fall. “Let’s—let’s leave Mammy to sleep.”
CHAPTER 2
South London
One month later
Doctor Alexander Gregory seated himself in one of the easy chairs arranged around a low coffee table in his office, then nodded towards the security liaison nurse who hovered in the doorway.
“I’ll take it from here, Pete.”
The man glanced briefly at the other occupant in the room, then stepped outside to station himself within range, should his help be required.
After the door clicked shut, Gregory turned his attention to the woman seated opposite. Cathy Jones was in her early sixties but looked much younger; as though life’s cares had taken very little toll. Her hair was dyed and cut into a snazzy style by a mobile hairdresser who visited the hospital every few weeks. She wore jeans and a cream wool jumper, but no jewellery—as per the rules. Her fingernails were painted a daring shade of purple and she had taken time with her make-up, which was flawless. For all the world, she could have been one of the smart, middle-aged women he saw sipping rosé at a wine bar in the city, dipping focaccia bread into small bowls of olive oil and balsamic while they chatted with their friends about the latest episode of Strictly Come Dancing.
That is, if she hadn’t spent much of the past thirty years detained under the Mental Health Act.
“It’s nice to see you again, Cathy. How was your week?”
They went through a similar dance every Thursday afternoon, where he asked a series of gentle, social questions to put her at ease, before attempting to delve into the deeper ones in accordance with her care plan. Though he was generally optimistic by nature, Gregory did not hold out any great hope that, after so long in the system, the most recent strategy of individual and group sessions, art and music therapy, would bring this woman any closer to re-entering normal society—but he had to try.
Cathy leaned forward suddenly, her eyes imploring him to listen.
“I wanted to speak to you, Doctor,” she said, urgently. “It’s about the next review meeting.”
“Your care plan was reviewed recently,” he said, in an even tone. “Don’t you remember?”
/>
There was a flicker of frustration, quickly masked.
“The clinical team made a mistake,” she said.
“Oh? What might that be?”
Gregory crossed one leg lightly over the other and reached for his notepad, ready to jot down the latest theory she had cobbled together to explain the reason for her being there in the first place. In thirty years as a patient in four different secure hospitals, under the care of numerous healthcare professionals, Cathy had never accepted the diagnosis of her condition.
Consequently, she hadn’t shown a scrap of remorse for her crimes, either.
“Well, I was reading only the other day about that poor, poor mother whose baby died. You know the one?”
Gregory did. The tragic case of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome had been widely reported in the press, but he had no intention of sating this woman’s lust for tales of sensational child-deaths.
“Anyway, all those years ago, when they put me in here, the doctors didn’t know so much about cot death. Not as much as they do now. If they had, things might have been different—”
Gregory looked up from his notepad, unwilling to entertain the fantasies that fed her illness.
“Do you remember the reason the pathologist gave for the deaths of your daughter, Emily, and your son, Christopher? Neither of them died following Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, as I think you’re well aware.”
The room fell silent, and she stared at him with mounting hatred, which he studiously ignored. Somewhere behind the reinforced glass window, they heard the distant buzz of a security gate opening.
“It was a cover up,” she said, eventually. “You doctors are all the same. You always cover for each other. My children were ill, and not one of those quacks knew what to do about it—”
Gregory weighed up the usefulness of fishing out the pathology reports completed in 1987 following the murders of a two-year-old boy and a girl of nine months.
