The Infirmary: A DCI Ryan Mystery (The DCI Ryan Mysteries Book 11)

by LJ Ross

  “If you want me to beg, that’s what I’ll do. I’m begging you now. Please don’t kill her. Don’t kill my sister.”

  Edwards smiled.

  “You don’t understand, do you? Didn’t you ever think that I might be following your movements, just as closely as you were following mine? Having her here in your home, you placed her in front of me like an offering. A challenge to the brave. You must have known I wouldn’t be able to resist her.”

  He trailed another finger across Natalie’s bare thigh, dressed in the short pyjamas she’d worn for bed.

  “She’s a real beauty, this one.”

  Ryan felt bile rise in his throat.

  “Take me, instead.”

  “Oh, I will.”

  Edwards gave Natalie a couple of sharp slaps. Her head rolled back as she struggled to the surface, and he drew out a long, surgical knife.

  “No!”

  Ryan clawed his way across the carpet, willing his body to move. Edwards watched him as if he were a strange oddity.

  “Save your energy,” he said. “You may need it.”

  “My team are on their way!” Ryan shouted, wondering where the hell they could be. It had been a long time since he’d called through to the Control Room.

  Edwards smiled again.

  “I took the liberty of calling again to explain there’d been a false alarm. We sound very alike, you and I, and you’d given your passcode in such a helpful way, earlier.”

  Ryan felt the last of his hopes dwindle to nothing.

  Natalie’s eyelids swept upwards. Confusion and terror played across her face and she looked away, meeting Ryan’s desperate eyes across the room.

  He read the acceptance, the dreadful knowledge of what was to come.

  “No!” He dragged himself forward again, like a dead weight.

  “Say ‘goodbye’,” Edwards said.

  A scream broke free as Ryan watched him take a handful of Natalie’s hair and tug it back, exposing the slim column of her throat. Adrenaline surged through his body, finally propelling him upwards. He stumbled across the floor, arms outstretched to prevent the fall of Edwards’ knife.

  But he was too late.

  The blade swept a long graceful line across her neck and a river of blood gushed forth, fanning a warm arc over Ryan’s upturned face.

  He watched her body fall to the ground, as if in slow motion. He felt her fingertips brush his own and he tried to grasp them, to hold her close. But in his heart, he knew he was too late. Wild anger surged through his veins and he rounded on her killer, acting on instinct alone. He caught the look of surprise on Edwards’ face before his hands clamped around the man’s throat. He never knew where he found the strength, but he saw Edwards’ eyes bulging in his head, felt the rush of his blood straining through his arteries as he gasped for air. Ryan realised he was crying, tears coursing down his face as he did what he had sworn never to do.

  To take another life.

  His arms were shaking by now, but he felt nothing; only a hollow emptiness where his heart had once been. He felt Edwards’ hands scratching his face, trying to claw his way free, and he knew that the end was close.

  Dimly, he heard somebody burst through the door behind him. He thought he heard Philips shout to him.

  “No! No, lad!”

  The mist faded and his hands loosened on the man’s throat. He fell back, shivering and sobbing while the police rushed forward to where Edwards lay in the foetal position, dragging air into his burning lungs. Ryan was shaking so hard, his teeth chattered. His body was reacting badly to the cocktail of drugs and adrenaline, but he forced himself to crawl across to where his sister lay in a heap on the floor.

  “Natalie,” he whispered, brokenly.

  He kneeled beside her, cradling her head gently in his lap, smoothing back the hair from her forehead. He began to rock back and forth.

  Philips watched him with a heavy heart, and shooed away the medics who would have interrupted Ryan’s final moments with his sister.

  “Give him a minute,” he murmured.

  Eventually, he laid a gentle hand on Ryan’s shoulder.

  “It’s time to go,” he said gently.

  “I’m not leaving her,” Ryan said, and continued to rock.

  “You can go with her. We’ll make sure she’s well looked after.”

  “It’s my fault, Frank. She was here because of me and she died because of me.”

  “No—” Phillips began, but Ryan wasn’t listening.

  He watched them drag Edwards to his feet, restraining his hands as he continued to fight. For a moment, their eyes locked and a single message of mutual hatred was exchanged before he was led away.

  EPILOGUE

  There were candid photos of Ryan that morning as they’d transported him by stretcher to the hospital, but even the worst rags refused to buy them. Instead, they printed Edwards’ face next to those of his five known victims and paired it with the headline:

  HACKER TAKES FINAL VICTIM

  Phillips had ordered a complete media ban in the hospital room where Ryan lay, having been transported from the emergency ward onto the psychiatric ward for observation. He had not uttered more than a handful of words since he’d arrived, not since his parents had visited him and been turned away.

  “Your mum and dad are here again,” Phillips told him, from the single armchair in Ryan’s private room. “They want to see you.”

  Ryan shook his head.

  “Your mum—she’s in a bad way, lad. She needs to see you.”

  Ryan turned on him with such a look of despair, it brought a lump to Phillips’ throat.

  “I can’t stand to see her, to see the look in her eyes. It was my fault,” Ryan said again. “She’ll never be able to think of me in the same way again.”

  “You’re wrong,” his mother said, from the doorway. “You’re very wrong.”

  Eve Finlay-Ryan stepped inside the room, her cheeks hollowed and her eyes shadowed by grief. Ryan’s father was beside her, an older version of himself with a shock of white-grey hair and eyes that were pools of incredible sadness.

  Phillips stood and moved aside, to give them the privacy they needed.

  Eve sank onto the chair beside her son, her strong, handsome son who carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. It was too much for anybody to bear.

  She took his hand and held onto it when he would have pulled away.

  “I want to tell you two things,” she said, and her voice shook with emotion. “The first is that we love you, so very much.”

  A tear tracked down his face, but he would not meet her eyes. Eve moved to perch on the bed beside him, so she could reach up and smooth the dark hair away from his face.

  “The other thing you need to know is that it wasn’t your fault.” Her daughter was lost to her and there was a hole in her heart, one that would never heal. But her boy was not to blame for that.

  Ryan’s face crumpled and she rubbed her palm against his cheek, as she used to do when he was a child.

  “My boy,” she murmured, though he was a grown man.

  “I almost killed him,” Ryan whispered. “With these hands, I almost killed a man.”

  Eve’s lip trembled, then she took both his hands in her own, warming them.

  “You witnessed something nobody should ever have to see. But you’re better than that—that monster, Ryan. You stopped yourself, before it was too late. You have nothing to reproach yourself for.”

  Ryan heard the words, but could not bring himself to believe them.

  “Please, son. Come back with us,” his father said. “Let us look after you.”

  Ryan turned away, and his eye caught on a decorative coaster sitting on the bedside table. It was an image of the castle on Lindisfarne, a tiny island separated from the mainland twice a day, sixty miles north along the Northumbrian coastline. They said it was a place of sanctuary where it was possible to think, to reflect. Perhaps it would be a good idea to turn his back on
the world, at least for a few weeks.

  “I need to get away for a while,” he said, in an odd, emotionless voice. “I’ll keep in touch, I promise. I just—I can’t be around people, for a while.”

  His mother looked down at their hands but nodded, trying to understand.

  “Where do you plan to go?”

  “Holy Island.”

  * * *

  The sixty-mile drive from Newcastle city centre to the remote island of Lindisfarne was faster than Phillips would have liked. There hadn’t been nearly enough time to try to talk him out of it, nor to remind his friend of all the people who cared about his wellbeing and would rather have kept him close. He stole a glance at Ryan’s profile in the passenger seat and then back at the scenic lane which wound its way through the countryside towards the sea, then heaved a sigh.

  It had been a week since Ryan had been discharged from the hospital and four days since they had buried his sister at the family home in Devonshire. Phillips had been in attendance, at Ryan’s invitation, alongside MacKenzie and Gregson. He’d stood a few rows behind his friend inside a pretty little church packed to the rafters with family and friends who had come to pay their last respects to Natalie Finlay-Ryan, and had watched Ryan standing tall, his spine ramrod straight as a priest spoke of healing and forgiveness. He’d watched Ryan’s mother reach out to him, needing to hold her remaining child close, and had seen that spine stiffen through the material of his fine black suit. With quiet admiration, he’d watched his friend shake hands and thank well-wishers, his face shuttered as they subjected him to endless reminisces about his sister, which only served to remind him of the enormity of what had been lost.

  Pain, Phillips thought. So much pain.

  The sun broke through the clouds overhead and cast long, hazy rays of dappled light through the trees lining the roadside but Ryan saw none of it, his thoughts were far away and remote; snatched memories of his sister he tried to capture and hold close to his heart. He saw her as a child playing hide-and-seek, then as a teenager arguing over something trivial. A thousand flashing images of a life only half lived.

  “Penny for them,” Phillips murmured, breaking into his reverie.

  Ryan merely shook his head and turned to stare out of the window at the passing landscape. As they rounded a bend, the island appeared before them, rising up from the sea like an apparition, shrouded in mist. The tide was out, revealing an ancient causeway that allowed safe passage across from the mainland twice a day. It had been the pathway for saints and pilgrims since time immemorial and, though he would not consider himself a religious man, there was a sense of peace in the air; a serenity awaiting him on the little scrap of earth where a community had endured wind and sea for a thousand years after its priory was first built.

  Perhaps he, too, could learn to endure.

  “I can walk from here, Frank,” he said quietly.

  “I can give you a lift across—”

  “I appreciate it,” Ryan cut in. “But I could use the walk.”

  “It’ll do you no good, hiding away from the world, away from your friends—”

  “It’ll just be until the worst is over,” Ryan said. “I need time, Frank. I’ll ask Gregson for a sabbatical; it’s what the psychologist recommended, anyway.”

  Phillips nodded, wishing there was more he could say, more he could do.

  “You’ll call me, if you need me?”

  Ryan paused in the act of reaching for the door and gave his sergeant a hard hug, which was returned.

  “Mind how you go,” Phillips said, with a catch in his voice. “They say, God and the Devil both walk on that island.”

  “There’s only one way to find out.”

  With that, Ryan stepped out of the car and into the crisp morning breeze, lifting his face to the salty wind. He slung a small weekend bag over his shoulder and, with a final wave for Phillips, set off towards the causeway. He paused to toe off his boots and let his feet sink into the sand, enjoying its texture against his skin. A number of wooden stakes had been erected at intervals across the causeway to guide the way for pilgrims and, across the expanse of sand, the island awaited.

  He took the first step, following in the wake of countless others who had sought solace and solitude.

  Phillips watched the tall, lone figure walking across the sand until he was little more than a shadow, a mirage in the rippling light as it glimmered and bounced off the distant waves, and wondered what he might find on the other side.

  Time would tell.

  DCI Ryan will return…

  The Infirmary is the prequel to the DCI Ryan Mysteries series. Readers who are new to the series can follow Ryan’s story chronologically by reading Holy Island, which covers the events immediately after The Infirmary.

  If you have already read the ten existing DCI Ryan books, and would like to be kept up to date with new releases from LJ Ross, please complete an e-mail contact form

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Since my debut novel, Holy Island, was first published in 2015, many people have asked to know a little more about what led DCI Ryan to seek sanctuary on the remote little Northumbrian island. I wrote another nine chronological books and explored the struggle between Ryan and his nemesis, ‘The Hacker’, over the course of those books, but the story of their first psychological duel was never fully told. This is, in part, because the prospect of writing a prequel story is quite daunting: having developed all the characters throughout the series, it is a challenge to step back in time to their fictional world as it would have been in 2014. Was the story important enough to tell? Ideas and storylines have been percolating over the past three years until the timing seemed to be right to reveal the world of DCI Ryan before experience had taught him caution.

  Writing The Infirmary led me to rediscover parts of the city of Newcastle upon Tyne I was already familiar with but also revealed new and exciting discoveries such as the Victoria Tunnel which runs beneath the city from Leazes Park to the west all the way to the river at Ouseburn, to the east. Taking a tour of part of the tunnel (which has served several purposes over the years, including coal transportation and air raid shelter during the World Wars) was an eerie experience and allowed me to imagine all manner of scenes where Ryan might find himself trapped inside. By necessity, the storyline is a darker thriller than some of the books in the DCI Ryan series but is not, I hope, without humanity. As the friendship between Ryan and his co-workers develops, there are flashes of humour and sentiment to offset their daily grind. Likewise, their interactions with the ordinary people they are tasked to serve and protect reveal a fundamental compassion that underpins all they do.

  There are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people in the world and their employment takes many forms. In this fictional story, the antagonist has created an alternate personality in which people believe him to be kind and caring towards those who appear vulnerable. However, The Infirmary is a story about Good versus Evil and, without a truly ‘evil’ baddie, the climax of the story would carry far less weight.

  In some quarters, there is an intellectualised debate raging over whether writers of crime fiction ought to create male characters whose aggression tends to focus on women. To some, this succeeds in painting women as perpetual victims. For my part, the choices I have made in this novel reflect reality: to acknowledge that women are (sadly) often victims of serious crimes such as rape or murder does not overlook the opposite scenario, nor is it intended to be reductive. A victim of crime is not the sum total of their experience; their character is much richer and broader, which is why DCI Ryan fights so hard on these pages to avenge their memory. It is equally true to say that deviant personalities and perpetrators of serious crime can belong to women and, indeed, I have written their characters in other books.

  No doubt, I will explore another female character whose infamy rivals The Hacker in the coming years… Until then, it will suffice to say that The Infirmary is the story of Ryan’s personal journey to becoming the much-loved charac
ter he is now.

  LJ Ross

  January 2019

  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 five 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 eighteen novels, all of which have been top three global bestsellers and fifteen 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 #1 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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  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The Infirmary is the eleventh DCI Ryan novel I have written but its storyline is a prequel to the series. As such, it was an interesting and enjoyable experience to cast my mind back in time to 2014 and to the fictional events preceding the events in Holy Island. It was a creative challenge to write and I hope you have enjoyed reading it, discovering Ryan and Co. as they were before many of the events that subsequently shaped and moulded their characters.