by LJ Ross
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 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.
“There’s nothing to tell. He buggered off to Geneva to live in a bloody great mansion with his Barbie doll, while I was left to bring up his children. He barely even called when Emily was rushed into hospital. When any of them were.”
“Do you think their…illness, would have improved, if he had?”
She gave him a sly look.
“How could it have made a difference? They were suffering from very rare conditions, outside our control.”
Gregory’s lips twisted, but he tried again.
“Did a part of you hope that news of their ‘illness’ might have encouraged your husband to return to the family home?”
“I never thought of it,” she said. “All of my thoughts and prayers were spent trying to save my children.”
He glanced up at the large, white plastic clock hanging on the wall above her head.
It was going to be a long morning.
* * *
An hour after Gregory finished his session with Cathy, he had just finished typing up his notes when a loud siren began to wail.
He threw open the door to his office and ran into the corridor, where the emergency alarm was louder still, echoing around the walls in a cacophony of sound. He took a quick glance in both directions and spotted a red flashing light above the doorway of one of the patients’ rooms. He sprinted towards it, dimly aware of running footsteps following his own as others responded to whatever awaited them beyond the garish red light.
The heels of his shoes skidded against the floor as he reached the open doorway, where he found one of the ward nurses engaged in a mental battle with a patient who had fashioned a rudimentary knife from a sharpened fragment of metal and was presently holding it against her own neck.
Gregory reached for the alarm button and, a moment later, the wailing stopped. In the residual silence, he took a deep breath and fell back on his training.
“Do you mind if I come in?” he asked, holding out his hands, palms outstretched in the universal gesture for peace.
He exchanged a glance with the nurse, who was holding up well. He’d never ascribed to old-school hierarchies within hospital walls; doctors were no better equipped to deal with situations of this kind than an experienced mental health nurse—in fact, the reverse was often true. Life at Southmoor High Security Psychiatric Hospital followed a strict routine, for very good reason. Depending on their level of risk, patients were checked at least every fifteen minutes to try to prevent suicide attempts being made, even by those who had shown no inclination before, or who had previously been judged ‘low risk’.
Especially those.
There were few certainties in the field of mental healthcare, but uncertainty was one of them.
“I’d like you to put the weapon down, Hannah,” he said, calmly. “It’s almost lunchtime, and it’s Thursday. You know what that means.”
As he’d hoped, she looked up, her grip on the knife loosening a fraction.
“Jam roly-poly day,” he smiled. It was a mutual favourite of theirs and, in times of crisis, he needed to find common ground.
Anything to keep her alive.
“Sorry, Doc,” she whispered, and plunged the knife into her throat…
**IMPOSTOR will be released in all formats on 31st October 2019 and is available for e-book pre-order now!**