Impostor

by L. J. Ross

  IMPOSTOR

  – AN ALEXANDER GREGORY THRILLER

  LJ Ross

  Copyright © LJ Ross 2019

  The right of LJ Ross to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or transmitted into any retrieval system, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by Stuart Bache

  Cover design copyright © LJ Ross

  OTHER BOOKS BY LJ ROSS

  The DCI Ryan Mysteries in order:

  1. Holy Island

  2. Sycamore Gap

  3. Heavenfield

  4. Angel

  5. High Force

  6. Cragside

  7. Dark Skies

  8. Seven Bridges

  9. The Hermitage

  10. Longstone

  11. The Infirmary (prequel)

  12. The Moor

  13. Penshaw

  14. Borderlands

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”

  —Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Boscombe Valley Mystery

  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 distance 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 mad
e 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 dist
ant 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.

  Not today.

  “I’m going to appeal the court ruling,” she declared, though every one of her previous attempts had failed. “You know what your problem is, Doctor? You’ve spent so long working with crackpots, you can’t tell when a sane person comes along.”

  She’d tried this before, too. It was a favourite pastime of hers, to try to beat the doctor at his own game. It was a classic symptom of Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy that the sufferer developed an obsessive interest in the medical world, and its terminology. Usually, in order to find the best way to disguise the fact they were slowly, but surely, killing their own children.

  “How did it make you feel, when your husband left you, Cathy?”

  Gregory nipped any forthcoming tirade neatly in the bud, and she was momentarily disarmed. Then, she gave an ugly laugh.

  “Back to that old chestnut again, are we?”

  When he made no reply, she ran an agitated hand through her hair.

  “How would any woman feel?” she burst out. “He left me with three children, for some tart with cotton wool for brains. I was well rid of him.”

  But her index finger began to tap against the side of the chair.

  Tap, tap, tap.

  Tap, tap, tap.

  “When was the divorce finalised, Cathy?”

  “It’s all there in your bloody file, isn’t it?” she spat. “Why bother to ask?”

  “I’m interested to know if you remember.”

  “Sometime in 1985,” she muttered. “January, February…Emily was only a couple of months old. The bastard was at it the whole time I was pregnant.”

  “That must have been very hard. Why don’t you tell me about it?”

  Her eyes skittered about the room, all of her previous composure having evaporated.