The Deceiver

by Priscilla Masters

  Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Recent Titles from Priscilla Masters

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  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

  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

  A Selection of Recent Titles from Priscilla Masters

  The Martha Gunn Mystery Series

  RIVER DEEP

  SLIP KNOT

  FROZEN CHARLOTTE *

  SMOKE ALARM *

  THE DEVIL’S CHAIR *

  RECALLED TO DEATH *

  The Joanna Piercy Mysteries

  WINDING UP THE SERPENT

  CATCH THE FALLEN SPARROW

  A WREATH FOR MY SISTER

  AND NONE SHALL SLEEP

  SCARING CROWS

  EMBROIDERING SHROUDS

  ENDANGERING INNOCENTS

  WINGS OVER THE WATCHER

  GRAVE STONES

  A VELVET SCREAM *

  THE FINAL CURTAIN *

  GUILTY WATERS *

  The Claire Roget Mystery Series

  DANGEROUS MINDS *

  * available from Severn House

  THE DECEIVER

  A Claire Roget Mystery

  Priscilla Masters

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2017 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  This eBook edition first published in 2017 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2018 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD

  Copyright © 2017 by Priscilla Masters.

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

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8752-8 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-866-8 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-929-9 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Chinese measure age from the moment of conception – not birth. Perhaps we measure it nine months too late?

  Obstetricians describe the weeks of pregnancy as 8/40, 10/40 and so on. Right up until 40+2 weeks, when it’s really time the baby made an appearance! Whatever world it is born into.

  ONE

  Tuesday, 16 June, 4 p.m.

  32/40

  Perhaps it was her fault – at least partly for making the wish.

  ‘Flaming June’, she’d been scoffing as she’d peered out of her office window into an afternoon wrapped in a grey blanket of summer rain that blurred the sharp quadrangle which formed the centre of Greatbach Secure Psychiatric Hospital. Outside lines were indistinct, colours damped down, stones softened to cushions of grey, the walls weird shapes rising only to disappear into a fog, the familiar view lacking substance, form or definition. In her imagination, Claire was trying to replace the drizzle with something else. Something sparky and bright, dramatic and sharp. She badly needed some drama to break this monotony. Maybe a holiday? Hmm. She considered the option. Nowhere specific, just not here, not in Stoke-on-Trent, Central England, Land of the Potter, suffering a so-far disappointing summer. Somewhere bright, noisy and colourful, where the sun dazzled and the heat cooked her bones. She wanted to be in the epicentre of an adventure, witnessing a drama. Somewhere, something unpredictable, surrounded by excitement.

  So she scanned the skyline of Hanley with mounting discontent, picking out the square, sixties’ tower blocks, the spire of the church punching the skyline, stumpy bottle kilns stubbornly reminding her of the city’s industrial past which refused to die, even with the challenge of cheap Chinese exports, but which constantly reinvented and revived itself. The city had pluck, she had to admit. But today, even the knowledge that just below her sightline snaked Brindley’s Caldon Canal with its pretty, narrow boats decorated with roses and castles failed to inspire her.

  Why? It wasn’t just the weather.

  She’d just left her afternoon outpatient clinic which had been the usual – streams of outpatients displaying strange behaviour, according to the referrer; the patients themselves invariably lacking the insight to classify their behaviour as abnormal. Most of them were, they claimed, perfectly rational, except …

  It was her job to sort them out, like coloured wool in a workbox. Some aberrant behaviour was deliberate, some accidental, some the consequence of a chemical imbalance, others sequela of past abuse or a perceived slight. And some simply the result of an attention-seeking personality, folk so thirsty for the spotlight to stay on them and never ever move away that they would duck and dive, manoeuvre their position into illumination. This clinic had an even larger barrel load of neurotics, depressives, the anxious, the bipolar – people who capitalized on tragic circumstances, injustice shining through their stories.

  They wanted to be well. They wanted her to heal them. They hadn’t earned this. They hadn’t asked for this. They didn’t want it.

  Take it away, Doctor. It was the subtext of all their sorry tales.

  A demand rather than a request. An expectation. An entitlement.

  That afternoon, she had seen two victims of real trauma – one a refugee from Syria, who had witnessed practically every friend and relation butchered in front of him and been powerless to prevent it. Even the murder of his three-year-old daughter, whose screams would echo in his ears for ever. That inability to have halted those dreadful events was paralysing him slowly. He was gradually withdrawing from life, oozing back into a protective shell. It would be more than a challenge to restore him. Possibly a challenge too far. Claire almost believed it would be cr
uel to return him to such a dreadful place as his real world.

  Cognitive behavioural therapy, psychotherapy, drugs, ECT. All would be an ineffectual weapon, a pea shooter against an AK-47 or a Kalashnikov. Being aware of a cause is not tantamount to a cure. However much help Sharman El Khaled received, he never would be whole again. And she couldn’t make him so. As she’d faced him in the clinic she’d recognized this. So had he. And that burden was adding to what should have been a bright summer’s afternoon.

  And wasn’t. The rain continued to spatter on the windowpane.

  The other patient who had added to her feeling of despair that afternoon was a twenty-three-year-old man, the victim of a vicious and unprovoked assault in the city centre eighteen months ago. A young man who had been left not only with permanent blindness in his right eye but also a never-ending escalator of flashbacks where the hammer which had robbed him of that eye’s sight was raised over his head to strike again and again and again like some ancient Greek punishment for flirting with the gods. But Tomas Plant hadn’t been flirting with the gods that evening – just the girlfriend of the wrong guy, who had then claimed provocation and been convicted of ABH, received an eight-year sentence and would be out in four. Claire doubted the assault on Tomas Plant would be Steven Hick’s last crime. She knew too much about patterns of behaviour and recognized deep-set character traits. People were people – evil, good, cruel, kind, sadistic, their characters set in stone. They didn’t change but remained in their allotted pigeonhole and would not fly out in spite of the interventions of psychiatrists like herself.

  So, she was asking herself in a moment of self-doubt, what use am I? Do I ever save lives, prevent crime, alter a character?

  Questions. And yet she continued like a wound-up automaton in her day-to-day work, arranging tests, dictating letters which would be typed up by her secretary. When she had corrected Rita’s dubious spelling and juvenile punctuation, some of which could alter the meaning completely, she had to sign them with her still-childish scrawl.

  Claire Roget (Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist)

  So the roundabout went round and round and round. And she clung on because she had nothing to jump off for.

  And then, into the bleakness the call came, as explosive as a rocket firing magnesium stars into a night sky, as demanding as an imminent suicide threat. A harsh bell shattering her thoughts and, behind that, the drama she had been seeking.

  ‘Claire.’

  ‘It’s Charles.’

  She was struggling.

  ‘Charles Tissot.’

  It took Claire a moment to remember who he was. Then she did. A local obstetrician. A colleague and, like her, an alumnus of Birmingham University.

  ‘Claire. Thank God I’ve got hold of you.’ His tone was desperate, hasty. What on earth did he want? Without waiting for a response, he plunged straight back in. ‘Claire, you’ve got to help me.’

  She could not have been more astonished, which raised her voice a pitch or two. ‘Me? Help you? Charles, what on earth’s going on?’

  ‘I don’t know where to start.’ He sounded almost panicky now. ‘Fucking evil, mad, insane woman. A patient.’

  Evil? Mad? Insane? Strong words to describe a patient.

  She thought quickly and took a running jump at a guess. ‘I take it you want my help – an assessment, maybe – as a psychiatrist?’

  ‘I want you to certify her fucking mad.’

  She smothered a smirk at the idea of filling in the Section form with those two words: Fucking mad.

  And still couldn’t quash the surprise at the request from practically the most well-balanced, sure-of-himself, cocky, over-confident, sane man she’d ever known.

  Tissot’s rant continued. ‘Deluded. Insane.’

  Her response was guarded. ‘Well, I will see her if you like.’

  ‘Please.’ He was beginning to simmer down a bit, sound a little more normal. ‘As a forensic psychiatrist,’ he emphasized. Before, interestingly, he backed down an inch. ‘Well, of course, not so much for my sake, Claire. But …’ He stopped, words eluding him for now. ‘For hers. She’s not right in the head. And then,’ he added delicately, ‘there’s my career.’

  That was easier and made much more sense. Charles was the leading local ‘Obs’ and ‘Gobs’ consultant – obstetrics and gynaecology to the uninitiated. In other words, a ladies’ doctor. In more ways than one. One can be a ladies’ man. But a ladies’ doctor?

  She probed. ‘Give me some background. Someone pregnant? A gynae patient?’

  ‘Pregnant. Eight months. Thirty-two weeks. Eight weeks to go. Claire. Claire …’ The desperation was returning to his voice, raising its pitch almost to a squawk. ‘She’s accused me of having sex with her. Of having some sort of bloody intense but clandestine affair. Claims I’m in love with her but we have to keep it under wraps.’ She could almost see his fingers scratch out speech marks. ‘She’s saying that I’m the father of this … child. Mad.’

  She picked up on the one verifiable point. ‘Well, that should be easy to disprove with a DNA paternity test.’

  ‘When she’s delivered. There’s no justification for taking cord blood. So we’ve got a two-month wait for my name to be cleared. But even then it won’t absolutely prove that this whole fantasy love thing never happened. Bitch.’ The last word had been spat out. Claire held the phone a little farther from her ear. ‘She says that we’ve been carrying on – in secret, of course,’ he mocked before the rant continued. ‘None of it’s true. It’s all fantasy. In her sick, perverted little mind. She’s off her trolley. She’s mad. You have to see her, Claire, and certify her. Get her fantastic story discredited. Get her to confess she’s made the whole thing up. She’s nuts.’

  Something in his narrative had stopped her heart. To a male obstetrician there is no worse allegation than having had sex with a patient. Promising careers, talented surgeons, brilliant practitioners – all had been cut short by a whisper of the dreadful words. But wait a minute. What was he expecting from her? What was her role in all this? Obvious: collusion. She was the one who could leap across the gap. Issue certification that the said woman was deluded, advise that this claim was to be ignored, the result of nothing but a kink in a blood vessel or a chemical imbalance in an already damaged brain. If she colluded with that, her opinion would be the one that counted. She was the forensic psychiatrist.

  She hated having to do this, to put words into his mouth, but, ‘So are you telling me that this patient is making the whole thing up?’

  He came back fighting. ‘Of course she is. She asked her GP to refer her to me when she was twenty-eight weeks pregnant, saying she was feeling anxious. She’d had two previous pregnancies but both times the child had died as a result of a cot death and she’d heard I was good. It’s all a setup, Claire. Deliberate. The whole thing is a fantasy.’ He paused for breath before getting right back in there and slipping back into character. Over-confident, cocksure, conceited. ‘She wouldn’t be the first patient to fancy themselves in love with me. Obstetricians are easy prey. All those hormones floating around in bloated bodies, believing their husbands are finding them unattractive and fat.’ Guffaw. ‘Which is probably true. They just thrive on the attention. But bloody hell, Claire. For me this is damned dangerous. Mud sticks, you know.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, Charles.’

  ‘So you have to help me.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘You will see her?’

  She’d meant for her response to be non-committal but his eagerness and panic punctured her resolve. ‘Of course I will, Charles.’

  She could see why he was so worried. But already she was beginning to line up some obvious questions. One doesn’t see an obstetrician until one is already pregnant. So why was he so worried at a patient making this apparently wild claim? But before she could even start with a basic factfinder, he headed her off with, ‘Of course I cannot possibly be the father of this child, and it will be easy to prove it. I did not have s
ex with the woman.’ His Clinton-denial sounded very firm, very definite. Very clear. Very sure. Very like Clinton.

  ‘But …’ And then it came, dragging behind him like a leg iron. ‘There’s a complication.’

  And instead of prompting him, she waited for the story to spill out, like the three-year-old Syrian child’s guts on to the sand.

  ‘Apparently she’s claiming that we had some sort of drunken fumbling in the back of a car at a party last year sometime.’ That was when a nail snagged on nylon, a shift in time as the rainy window receded, its image replaced by something else. A swirling vision of strange and drunken fumbling. It was that one phrase. The back of a car. Something buried deep in her own memory, out of focus now and elusive, that seemed to imprint itself over the present. Something in this memory felt like an electric shock as from a cattle prod. Something was warning her to be vigilant.

  On the other end of the line, his pause was laboured. ‘And her sister’s backing up her mad story.’ This time he sounded exasperated.

  ‘What?’ She was struggling now to fit the facts together. An independent witness? To …? She checked the facts. ‘She’s saying she witnessed it?’

  ‘No.’ It was a careful qualifier. ‘But there is a connection.’ He was sounding glum now. ‘The sister works for one of my colleagues. The alleged … act …’ the disgust in his voice turned the word into a retch, ‘… is supposed to have taken place outside a party.’

  ‘Ah.’ From an impossible story, it was turning into something slightly more feasible.

  ‘I was there.’ The admission came out heavily.

  She inched forward, hopping from ice floe to ice floe. ‘The sister is …?’

  ‘Secretary to Metcalfe. Thoracic surgeon.’ The briefest of pauses before another denial. ‘I don’t even remember her at that party.’

  But he was there. And this changed everything. ‘Have the allegations been made public? Are you suspended?’

  ‘No. She and her sister spoke to me at her antenatal appointment this morning. They don’t intend going to the authorities. Why should they? We’re in love. Heather – the patient – is convinced I’m madly in love with her, that I have divorced my wife so we can be together and is simply waiting for our …’ he shouted the possessive pronoun down the phone, ‘… child to be born before I fall at her feet and beg her to marry me.’